CIC’s IWOM Watch is our regular net culture and “marketing 2.0″ trend watch which provides a qualitative overview of the latest trends from the web that would be of interest to marketers. Every half year, we offer a free review report that outlines the highlights from the previous six months.
Below are some of the major stories that emerged between July and December, 2008. Download the report for all stories.
The ‘R’evolutionary Web 2.0 Olympics
The importance of the Internet in experiencing the Olympics to Chinese netizens is underscored by DCCI which reported that Olympic related page views reached 24.7 billion. More than just reading about the Olympics online, netizens made the 2008 Beijing Olympics the most ‘Web 2.0’ in the Games’ history by becoming not only spectators, but also commentators through a variety of channels which serve host to the massively active Chinese Internet Community.
Chinese Social Networking Emerges
Chinese local social networking sites grew quickly this year. SNSes like 51 and Xiaonei retained prominence while Kaixin001 came out of nowhere to attract white collar workers attention. 2008 is the year that SNS was truly established as a main channel of the Internet Community where netizens come together to utilize applications to socialize and entertainment (i.e. gaming) (often at the same time). SNS combine the community aspect of BBS with the personal expression aspect of blogging, allowing netizens with “real name” identities to more efficiently connect, share, and play with other netizens.
IWOM + Commerce = Social Commerce
Offline shops in the tourist town of Xitang utilize C2C platform Taobao in a variety of ways to promote and sell products
Growth of C2C e-commerce continued to surge in 2008, with Q3 seeing a 16% increase over the same period in 2007. Leading C2C platform, Taobao generates more revenue than Wal-Mart and Carrefour in China combined. Such statistics demonstrate a large and growing social commerce market where sellers build credibility, authority and a solid reputation as well as relationships with consumers within the Internet Community. Even offline retailers are finding opportunities to leverage IWOM to build their market and reputation.
The full report is available for download on our website here (Chinese version available here) or on Slideshare below.
You can get a sense of the development of IWOM over time by downloading previous IWOM watch 6 month review reports here, with quite a few other white papers are available as well.
