We are pretty psyched about the new “ExpoSay” white paper we released with Ogilvy Public Relations yesterday which covers all the buzz around the upcoming World Expo 2010 Shanghai. The first of a monthly series. this report found 128,854 Expo-related comments taken from 13,994 blogs, BBS, news and SNS sites in the Chinese Internet space for the month December. The hottest discussed topics included tickets, sponsors, pavilions, countries and cities.

One thing I like about this report is that we look at not only the quantity of buzz, but also the quality, i.e. not only “how much” but also “how” people are talking and “who” is talking. The focus of the talk is on tickets, and we see that netizens are so proud of their tickets that they show them off online with pictures (called “shai,” see here for more on this phenomena).  The tickets are desired to the extent that even the Shanghai Jing’an district government is using tickets as an incentive for people to tour historic communist sites (irony alert!).

We think including such a qualitative analysis important because looking more broadly, Chinese netizens not only talk a lot online, but are very creative and active within their conversations. As this Forrester study indicates, Chinese netizens are twice as creative as Americans within social media. As we always say, Chinese social media is much more developed than western social media, and I think our white paper, with its qualitative analysis, helps demonstrate this. Ultimately, what we are hoping to show with this report is how social media serves as a primary media of self expression in China and how it is woven into the fabric of the everyday experience of brands/events (and how companies can be a part of that).

Here are the links:

• English report_Edition 1
• English press release
• Chinese report_Edition 1
• Chinese press release

Be sure to check out the Ogilvy/Michael Darragh run blog covering everything about the Expo through Worldexpoblog