Past articles can be found here.

On August 23^rd, Hong Kong tourists on a tour bus were taken hostage by former police officer. The buzz around the incident showed increasing trend throughout the crisis, with netizens criticizing the overall handling of the incident by police as well as the safety and security of the Philippines.

The buzz contains many criticisms, vulgarities, and expression of hatred from Chinese netizens, especially in response to photos uncovered by netizens that showed Pilipino’s, inlcuidng the police, taking photos at the scene of the disaster.

Buzz around Chinese tourists and business people cancelling their Philippines trips due to the negative comments and safety warnings as well was mirrored by reports travel agents and call centers being flooded with calls.

The lesson here is that a negative story can not only be reported by netizens in social media, it can be amplified and even contributed to by netizens.

Seeing the importance of how netizens are using the social media in sharing news and crises that can affect certain industry, businesses must integrate a comprehensive strategy to defend its reputation and image against any unforeseen situations by hearing more about their customers.

Past articles can be found here.

Chinese Valentine’s Day is also known as the Double Seven Festival as it falls on the 7th day of the 7th lunar month on the Chinese calender.

The 16th was the buzz peak for the holiday and it is interesting to see that buzz on this day was dominated by BBS. Of the 3,371 total mentions of Valentine’s Day, 68 per cent were found on BBS versus blogs, microblogs, news, social networking and video site channels.

Analysis of buzz content saw that much talk was driven by romantic and colourful posts on BBS, with a number of retailers leveraging this channel. Examples include retailers selling apparent Louis Vuitton and Apple products, small retailers selling cosmetics and other gifts, and restaurants promoting couple meals. KFC leveraged the ‘copy and paste’ BBS phenomenon around the news of a man proposing to a woman at a KFC restaurant to promote its Valentine’s meal special.

While microblogs, SNS and blogs are relatively new social media channels compared to BBS, we see that BBS still has an important role to play within the social media landscape. According to Interfax China, registered BBS user accounts surpassed three billion with 80 per cent of Chinese sites running their own BBS. BBS has a massive reach that cannot be ignored.

Past articles can be found here.

On 9 August, news outlets in China reported an issue with Nasdaq listed Chinese infant milk formula brand Synutra.

The reports pointed to parents blaming Synutra for their daughters’ abnormal sexual development. The news reported that extremely high level of hormone estradiol was found in the girls after consuming Synutra product. Total mentions of the crisis on social media and news channels peaked at 257 on 10 August with the announcement of a fourth affected infant.

Compared to the buzz around the catastrophic Sanlu melamine crisis of 2008, which saw tens of thousands affected infants including deaths, the Synutra issue’s buzz volume was minimal and short in length. This is perhaps due to the much smaller impact coupled with a lack of released evidence in putting the company at fault.

Analysis of the buzz content saw that much talk around the crisis was comparing international brands to local brands. Such discussions reflect the research done by CIC’s IMF research team who has seen an overall increase in discussions on international brands since the Sanlu crisis. In fact, ‘country of origin’ (domestic or imported) and ‘trust’ are the most discussed themes covered in the research.

From the buzz analysis, it appears that while this particular issue was not a huge problem, it is yet another chink in the armor for local brands trying to rebuild their credibility in the wake of the Sanlu crisis.

ChinaJoy is the event for anyone interested in the massive Chinese gaming world, from consumers to industry professionals.

Prior to and during the event, the biggest online buzz driver turned out to be the ‘show girls.’ Like their counterparts at the Beijing Auto Show, game promoters made extensive use of sexy women dressed in miniskirts to promote hardware and software brands at the event.

On 28 July, 14 per cent of all comments tracked through CIC’s IWOMdiscover tracking platform were guessing what type of girl will be promoting the IT products. This was fueled by a listing of many of the girls’ Sina Weibo accounts.

The trend scales up on the second day of the event after participants actually saw and shared their experiences. 25 per cent of comments started to sing the beautiful event promoters’ praises. Indeed, the tracking of the buzz around ChinaJoy seems to support the age old adage that sex sells.

In this IWOM Watch, we look at the “69 Jihad” incident that broke out on the Chinese Internet and triggered hundreds of thousands Internet users collectively scheduling attacks (spamming and tarnishing) on well-known forums and websites relating to Korean celebrities. The slogan of 69 Jihad, “NC don’t die, Jihad never ends” (NC: mentally ill, brain damaged), has become a piece of history in the Chinese Internet.

Next, we have monitored one article written by a student for this year China’s college entrance exams causing a high volume of buzz among the netizens. Meanwhile, we have uncovered some interesting interactive events happened during the World Cup; and a PR war took place between 360 Safety Guard and Kingsoft Antivirus using microblog channels. Finally, we examine how Carlsberg’s viral videos are designed to expressing its brand as “having fun” to its stakeholders.

Here are some excerpts from the IWOM Watch report.

Sample article: World Cup online events

During this summer, the 2010 World Cup event inspires some online marketers to create interesting interactive programs on the internet. Sina microblog launched a campaign “Choose your favorite team and promote its national flag on your micro-blog” has drawn more than 2,455,639 participants.

Another topic with loads of buzz is about the North Korean player Zheng Dashi who becomes famous by being a ”North Korean Wayne Rooney”. His popularity increases widely after he has given a strong impression to the netizens by weeping while playing Korea national song. In addition, a rumor about North Korea soccer players being sent to work in coal mining after losing in a world cup game further circulates the images of Zheng Dashi across the Chinese Internet.

To get a complete version of our IWOM Watch or register for a long-term subscription, express your interest at info@cicdata.com.

IWOM Watch table of contents screenshot:

Below are some snippet translations of this past week’s IWOM mark.

Check more summaries on IWOM mark in CN version

[1] Jiepang.com boosted Nike’s BTL activities

The initial release ceremony of Nike AIR FORCE 1 FOAMPOSITE & WBF (AKA ‘More Than 1’) will be held at Beijing Dongdan sports complex on August 6^th & 7^th. Every netizen signing up via Jiepang.com will not just gain an AIR FORCE 1 pin, they have ample of chances to win fabulous prizes.

This is the first time we are seeing an international sport brand tying with local LBS website in China. In this joint effort, they believe in promoting the development of China’s LBS ingeniously and innovatively.

[2] VANCL advertisements were parodied ad infinitum by average netizens with a great deal of ‘mutations’ of the original campaign

Popular blogger like Han Han and other stars endorsed the ground-breaking advertisement designed by VANCL. As such, it attracted many netizens to actively buzzing with interesting and creative ideas.

In these ‘mutations’, many celebrities and cartoon characters were ‘PS’ed as endorsers with funny and interesting texts. Netizens also launched an ATL campaign called ‘Universal Prody on VANCL’ on Douban, which registered almost ten thousand participants and uploaded two thousand mimicking versions.

[3] SNDA launched its open beta version of uvan.com

The open beta version of uvan.com, a social network in tourism under SNDA Group commences today. At present, the network provides LBS services with weibo functions – a concept similar to the combination of ‘foursquare + twitter’.

[4] Qunar.com launched a campaign called ‘Recruiting 100 famous bloggers as hotel experiencers’

Travel and leisure search network, Qunar.com launched another campaign called ‘recruiting 100 famous IT bloggers as hotel experiencers’ on IT World Network TechWeb after its successful campaign of ‘recruiting 10 thousand-salary hotel experiencers’, inviting many IT bloggers to involve in commenting on various hotels.

[5] Promotion of the updated IWOMdiscover

CIC launched and promoted its updated IWOMdiscover through Sina weibo. In this campaign, every user disseminating the product information gets a chance of winning 500-yuan IWOMmaster ID that allows user to customize the online tracking topics. Thus, the promotion was circulated 300 times by enthusiastic netizens.

According to CIC’s IWOMdiscover social media tracking tool, we see an increasing buzz trend since the release date, a trend fitting for a movie breeding success, with a peak on July 28, the actual anniversary of the earthquake.

When the movie was released, Feng simply stated “I hope that audiences will be moved.” From our data, it seems that this is indeed the case with 30% of the comments for those watching the movie explicitly stating some form of emotion like ‘crying’ or ‘moved’ or ‘emotional’.

This is not the first time we have seen Chinese netizens go use social media to express such emotion. In the aftermath of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, we saw netizens express emotion in millions and millions of messages demonstrating the Internet in China is more than just a media, but in fact a community and engaged netizens can play a significant role in sharing and even shaping the news.

Below are some snippet translations of this past week’s IWOM mark.

Check more summaries on IWOM mark in CN version

[1] CIC collaborated with Roland Berger on the release of the Chinese Consumer Report 2010, providing trends and insights into Chinese consumer and online behavior

EN version and CN version &  last year’s paper here.

[3] Follow China Joy “show girls” on Weibo

The 8th China Digital Entertainment Expo & Conference (aka ChinaJoy) will be held in Shanghai from July 29^th to August 1^st. Usually it’s the hot promotional girls who get the most buzz, and this phenomena will be facilitated by each one having a Weibo account this year. Here’s a list of them for your following pleasure.

[4] ‘Tencent Empire’s Domain’

China Computerworld published the cover story with the title of ‘Tencent: the mother f**ker”, criticizing Tencent for its cut-throat competition. This article was supported by netizens and geeks, with map of ‘Tencent Empire’s Empire” created by certain a netizen to show the many domains Tencent has been involved in.

[5] Google – wenda is available

One year after Google China’s termination of cooperation with Tianya BBS, Google – wenda beta (http://www.google.com.hk/wenda/) is available now.

[6] Sina weibo officially launched open platform

Through Sina weibo open platform (open.t.sina.com.cn), websites and applications can enable users to publish weibo messages with weibo accounts, which not only reduced the registration barriers but also made it possible that users can share pictures, videos and other cool things onto their weibo with direct setting function. At present, the applied cases of the open platform include website cooperation, desktop client and mobile client.

We are proud once again to be a part of Roland Berger China’s Chinese Consumer Report. Just like last year, this year’s report provides an in depth view of the Chinese consumer, with a particular focus on how the Internet both a part of and impacting the consumer landscape.

This year’s paper EN version and CN version &  last year’s paper here.

Why does it make sense for a leading management consultancy like Roland Berger work with CIC, the leading China social media research and consulting firm? Because social media is changing not only changing communications, it is changing business.

From my intro:

There is much hype in the West about how the Internet, and in particular, Internet Word of Mouth (IWOM), has the potential to transform the relationship between brands and consumers. In China, where there are more people online, more people talking online, more places to talk and those who are talking are more engaged than any other market, this hyped potential is in fact a reality and has been for some time now. Chinese consumers use native social media channels like Xcar BBS (bulletin board service) community, Sina microblog and social networking site Kaixin to share opinions and experiences about brands by the millions. On automobile BBS sites alone, over 13 million consumer comments are published every month by 500,000 consumers. More than just talk, consumers are even organizing themselves for group purchasing discounts and online/offline protests against poor customer service. Many such phenomena impacting the brand/consumer relationship that are just beginning to happen in the West have been happening in China for years.

IWOM’s transformation of the relationship between brands and consumers means that it has relevance across the entire organization, including advertising, PR, marketing, sales, human resources, and customer service. The fact that it impacts so many areas of the organization means that it should not be “siloed” in any one of them. We already see IWOM putting pressure on such traditional functions as customer service and PR, where the scale and pressure of IWOM is making it difficult for brands to develop an effective strategy or even structure to respond. While we think it absolutely essential that brands use firms like CIC to listen to IWOM, we also believe that listening is not enough. Brands need to fully understand the implications that this listening has on their organizations. We believe that the Roland Berger – CIC partnership can help businesses not only listen to the buzz, but ultimately leverage the buzz for unique competitive advantage that enables them to thrive in this increasingly complex environment.

There are many angles of analysis in the report, but my favorite one is the “Value for Money”  or “Price Performance Ratio” (性价比) tracking within the automotive industry. This is a key, and perhaps unique, primary factor in purchase decision in China. If you read Chinese social media, you will often find these terms in product comparison discussion. From our analysis below, we can see that there was a noticeable increase from Q4 2008, which is about the time that the financial crisis was perceived by consumers to be hitting China.

Quarterly Buzz Volume Trends on “Value for Money” term in Automotive Industry (2008-2009)

Finally, value for money is another important component of brand. While price in itself is not the foremost factor, customers still want to get the most out of their purchase. This is evident in auto purchases, as value is the second criterion after brand attractiveness (see Figure C.1.7). On the web, it is even more evident that people care heavily about value for money, as many bloggers and forum users evaluate and compare products based on their performance vs. the price. In the automobile industry, mentions of “value for money” increased 60% from 2008 to 2009.

Hope you like the report.

For more CIC white papers (both Chinese and English), you can go to our Slideshare here and here.

This week, we have Bawang making waves with its use of Weibo as a crisis comm channel.

For more on social media and crisis in China, check out our archives here.

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For the last couple of weeks, famous local Chinese shampoo brand Bawang has been embroiled in a crisis around the chemical cancer causing ingredient, and its alleged use in the shampoo at unsafe levels. Beginning on July 14, Hong Kong and mainland China media reported extensively about the issue.

Any issue that involves chemicals in products that you put in or on your body are especially buzz worthy in China and have been for many years as a quick review of some of the biggest internet driven crisis in China’s history shows:

• Teflon and cancer in 2004
• KFC chicken wings and sudan red coloring and cancer in 2005
• SKI-II and chromium in 2006
• Sanlu infant milk formula and melamine in 2008

Bawang has the added ‘benefit’ of having Jackie Chan and Faye Wang strongly associated with the brand, appearing on ads and packaging. Questions of their responsibilities further fueled discussion.

What’s most interesting in this particular crisis is the role of microblogs, in particular Sina Weibo, the ‘Twitter’ of China.

Within hours of the crisis hitting the Chinese web, Bawang set up an official Weibo account which it used as its primary crisis communications channel.

The importance of Weibo as the key viral component of the crisis, as well as Bawang’s use of Weibo can be seen in the fact that Weibo accounted for over half of the mentions, according to CIC’s IWOMdiscover tracking tool.

Whether Weibo is actually an effective choice as a crisis communications tool is questionable, but clearly the influence of Weibo is there and brands will need to consider how to track and utilise in the ever evolving Chinese social media landscape.