Just back from London. I’ve been so busy recently I just haven’t had a chance to really talk much about the dashboard we launched on June 1.  With the launch, we have essentially begun to put some of the powerful technology our analysts have been using for years into the hands of our clients.  I wanted to share a bit about why we are really excited about this launch.

The world’s largest focus group…at your fingertips

More than just a simple “buzz clipping” or online reputation tracking platform, IWOM master (IWM) is strategic intelligence for brand communications (see here and here). With IWM technology, essentially you have the world’s largest focus group at your finger tips with over 1 billion indexed consumer comments written by over 36 million consumers going back to 2004.

Of course you can look at all of the standard things like buzz volume, buzz sentiment, buzz source etc, as well as some of our proprietary indexes of influence and community measurement specifically for China such as Passion, Creativity and Interactivity which help you understand not only discussion levels around brands and topics, but also engagement levels.

A new tool, but not a new service

IWOM Master is a new tool, but CIC has been providing IWOM/social media research and consulting services since 2004.

• The First: We coined the term Internet Word of Mouth and have been writing about IWOM on our blogs (CN, EN and Tech) since 2005. See some highlights here.
• Experience: We have long term retainer relationships with cutting edge clients like Nike, Pepsi and many others across multiple industries
• Expertise: We have developed our own approach and have plenty of case studies

Of course, you can sign up to use the dashboard on your own. But, for some, having a tool is not enough. If you prefer, we can work with you to help you understand how to convert the intelligence into insight and action, something we have been doing for 5 years.

Patent pending “IWOM-ized” technology infused with China experience

The IWOM master is not a ‘search engine” or a “key word monitoring” tool. It is a sophisticated social media analytics tool which makes use of CIC’s patent pending semantic search and text mining technology, as well as our data storage technology. This means we can ‘slice and dice’ CIC’s exclusive categorized archive of over 1 billion online consumer comments with over 1.5 billion pre-identified mentions of 300,000 brand, product and attribute mentions which take into account net slang and all relevant English and Chinese name iterations.

What this means is there is no need for keyword selection programming; just use our drop down menus—all of the key words are already included. For example, on our sample IWM, if you select “SVW” (Shanghai Volkswagen) from the list of 115 auto manufacturers we track , you will see the number of messages mentioning not only SVW, Shanghai Volkswagen, 上海大众, and all other iterations of SVW, but also mentions of the 10 models by SVW in China (as well as all of the model iterations).

Our engineers have also developed visualization technology for the unique Chinese IWOM landscape. The network diagram below comes from analysis of over 10 million automobile messages; it shows manufacturer brands (and their many models) that are mentioned near each other within the same message.

3rd party, objective, comprehensive and professional measurement and analytics

CIC is an independent China IWOM research and consulting firm. Since CIC does not do marketing execution or ‘buzz marketing’ of any kind, CIC can offer a ’3rd party’ perspective void of the inherent conflict of interest that comes with marketing agencies which try to both “influence” and “measure” the buzz they create. In China, we see this as especially important.

More than just a dashboard—an information center
In addition to hosting the dashboard, clients will be able to find and search the archives of the deliverables for all of the CIC services they subscribe to, including CIC data customized reports, CIC Watch and IWOM watch trend reports. Stay tuned…there is much more coming soon