Recently we held our 5th anniversary event at Kathleen’s 5 here in Shanghai. For the event, we hosted an IWOM panel and invited our agency partners and brands to hear the latest ideas around IWOM shared not only by CIC, but also by our clients Pepsi and Lancôme. You may remember we held our first IWOM panel in 2007. The IWOM panel is a part of our overall IWOM roundtable format where we do our best to provide thought leadership regarding everything IWOM.

EVENT SUMMARY

At the event, I shared some of the latest IWOM trends (taken from our IWOM summit, which I will share another post just as I did here in 20072008). We were fortunate enough to have our clients, Pepsi Interactive Director Jason Jiang and Lancôme Deputy Brand Manager Guilhem Souche share how their respective brands find their voice online. Jason, who has also been involved in digital/social strategy at Nike and Lining, presented Pepsi’s Battle of the Bands use of twitter like approach to lower the barrier of participation (i.e. get the ‘90’ talking from the 1-9-90 principle). Guilhem shared the amazing success of Lancôme’s Rosebeauty brand community, the number 2 cosmetic community in China in terms of buzz. Denis, our technology general manager, also shared key elements of “IWOM-ized” technology.

SHARED LEARNING FROM THE IWOM PANEL: IWOM in China-Where have we been? Where are we going?

In addition to the above, I shared some of my thoughts regarding of the development of IWOM in China since 2004. Inspired by Jeremiah Owyang, the analysis is below:

• 2004-2006: What is IWOM? Clients and agencies required intensive education on exactly what is IWOM. We answered questions such as what is a blog? What is a BBS? Who are the Backdorm Boys and Furongjiejie? To help with this, we launched our blog in 2005 and from 2007 we began to issue white papers, which we continue to do (see all of them here).
• 2007: Why does IWOM matter? 2003 saw the Toyota Prado crisis, 2004 saw the Teflon crisis, 2005 saw the “Sudan Red” crisis, and 2006 saw the SKII Chromium crisis and Dell Processor Gate. By the time the Starbucks in Forbidden city crisis hit in 2007, enough crisis had started or at least amplified via IWOM that companies finally began to realize that the “voice of the consumer” was a voice that could not be ignored.
• 2008: What does IWOM mean for my business? From 2008, we were a couple years into several retainers and we were beginning to see a push to towards more sophisticated analytics and measurements. We developed a number of metrics that continue to be used as KPI’s for many of our clients. We launched a white paper on Chinese IWOM metrics in 2008 here.
• 2009: How do I do IWOM right? The trend we spotted in 2007 for a rise in ‘social media manager’ headcounts in the US continues in 2009. We see this reflected in China as well with a number of our clients having headcounts dedicated to social media as well as agency partners having social media teams. While there is still too much focus on ‘creating buzz for buzz’ sake,’ we see this codification of roles a positive one.
• 2010-: How do I integrate IWOM across the organization? Jeremiah points to Forrester’s study on how companies in the US are utilizing a ‘hub and spoke’ model within the organize to ensure it won’t be siloed. We see the very early stages of this happening in China.

After I spoke, Daisy elaborated on this topic sharing case studies around our recently updated L-K-P principle (Listen-Know-Participate) represented below (see original launched in 2007 here).

In the end, just as IWOM is changing the relationship between brands and consumers (see our white paper here on the topic), IWOM is changing the communication organization.