China IWOM Blog- Making Sense of the Buzz » Chinese Social Media

Social Media 2.0: Our panel with Jeremiah Owyang on May 27

Sam — Fri, 14 May 2010 11:06:24 +0000

At the risk of cliché, I am starting to use the term Social Media 2.0 to represent the mindset that social media, and more specifically, considerations of social media should move from tactics to strategy & should move from being siloed under a single communications discipline (i.e. PR or Digital or Media etc.) to being housed as a strategic element of corporate planning.

With this in mind, CIC and Wunderman are happy to be hosting a panel that will address these very issues for the China market. As part of the panel, we are truly privileged to have Jeremiah Owyang from Altimeter Group, one of the preeminent analysts that looks at how social media is linking to communications. We will also have Nicolas Zurstrassen, GM of Nike Action Sports, to share about Nike’s experience in China.

Consider this a “Chinese Social Media 201” course…not meant for beginners, but really meant for current practitioners and senior level directors.

We will cover:

Chinese social media landscape (the full picture)
Case studies of companies strategically leveraging social media in China
Nike China case study
How to prepare the organization for social media (from a change management, strategic planning)

More details can be found here. Please do check it out. It will be worth your while.

EXPOSAY: Making sense of World Expo buzz with CIC + Ogilvy PR

Sam — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 04:20:43 +0000

Exposay: Shanghai Expo tickets are the focus of inense buzz in China’s Social Media (Edition_1 201002)

View more documents from CIC .

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:

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

Video: What China marketing leaders have to say about Chinese social media (updated January 25, 2010)

Sam — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 06:46:19 +0000

Since 2008, I have been interviewing China marketing thought leaders about social media since early 2008 for my regular show Interactive China for ITV-Asia. I am fortunate to have a network of such smart, informed people. This article serves as an archive of these interviews and will be updated as we have new ones.

Seth Grossman, Managing Director, Carat China
November 2009 (Link)
Seth talks about social media from the media agency perspective, including the concept of earned, owned and bought media. Seth has been working in the China agency space since the mid 1990’s.

Jake Drake, President of Cohn & Wolfe Asia Pacific
November 2009 (Link)
Jake talks about social media from PR perspective. Jake was involved in Dell US social media strategy as well as their China strategy.

Bryce Whitwam, General Manager, Wunderman Shanghai
November 2009 (Link)
Bryce talks about social media from the perspective of “below the line,” with a particular focus on auto industry.

Magdalena Wszelaki, Regional Vice President – Strategic Planning
AGENDA Shanghai (now Wunderman US)
May 2009 (Link)
Mag talks about social media and the creative agency. Mag was involved in some of the most innovative social media/digital initiatives in China including Pepsi Creative Challenge and Johnson Baby mom ambassadors.

Shawn Cheng, CEO & Founder, HoopChina.com
March 2009 (Link)
Shawn talks about the power of social media from the perspective of one of the most dynamic, creative online communities in China.

Gang Lu, Co-founder, OpenWeb.Asia Workgroup
January 2009 (Link)
Gang Lu is one of the most prominent “web 2.0” thinkers in China, having both a Chinese and Western perspective.

Tangos Chen, Vice President, China Growth Capital
November 2008 (Link)
Tangos is, along with Gang Lu, one of the prominent “web 2.0” thinkers in China, having worked both from within the industry and as a VC.

Adam Schokora, Manager, China, Edelman Digital (now NeoCha.com)
July 2008 (Link)
Adam talks about social media from a PR perspective. Adam, fluent in Chinese language and essentially bicultural, has a particular knowledge of youth culture in China.

T.R. Harrington, Co-Founder and CEO, Darwin Marketing
July 2008 (Link)
T.R. was one of the first people in China to offer SEO/SEM service and here offers one of the most informed perspectives on social media.

Jan Van den Bergh, Chairman, i-merge China (now Holoba.com)
May 2008 (Link)
Jan was involved in digital from the mid 1990’s. He brings a historical and global perspective to digital and social into the conversation.

Yann Lombard-Platet, Managing Director, Nurun China
March 2008 (Link)
Yann built some of the first corporate websites ever in China in the late 1990’s and talks about Chinese social media as one of the most experienced China digital people in China.

CIC launches new ‘Youth Report’

Patrick — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 07:59:40 +0000

In recent years, as the 80’s generation has started to enter the work force and the 90’s generation has started to enter and graduate from University, marketers have begun to try to better understand the unique culture and characteristics of the Chinese youth.

Having grown up with the Internet, today the Chinese youth generation are some of the web’s savviest users and it’s estimated that 63.7% (215.3 Million) of Chinese netizens are part of this Youth Generation (i.e. born in the 80’s, 90’s or 00’s), with this number only set to grow in the short term.

In order to address marketers’ needs to understand this first generation of Chinese ‘net natives’, CIC has created its very own syndicated Youth Report which analyzes the Internet Word of Mouth (IWOM) of the Chinese Youth Generation and includes topics such as what are the youth generation talking about, where are they are talking and how are they expressing themselves.

This report based on our patent pending technology which mined and categorizes 1,137,481 youth comments taken from blog, BBS and SNS sites from January – June 2009 and combined with our analysts experience in tracking youth trends via IWOM buzz since 2004, gives the reader insights into youth related topics such as brands, sports, music, online novels, fashion, SNS, gaming and movies.

Finally as an added bonus we have decided to include a video that two of our staff- Joe and Kevin (both who were born in the 80’s) created to highlight the creativity and the values of the Chinese Youth generation. Hope you enjoy it!

For more information about CIC’s Youth Report please check out our Press Release and our Youth Report Teaser on slideshare, and if you have any other questions or queries please do get in contact patrick.searle AT cicdata.com

CIC collaborates with Roland Berger on their new ‘Chinese Consumer Report’

Sam — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 02:40:23 +0000

I’m very excited to announce that we have contributed a chapter to Roland Berger’s just launched: “think: act, STUDY – Chinese Consumer Report 2009”. You can download the white paper directly here.

In this report Roland Berger using their unique RB Profiler tool, analyzed data gathered from over 12,000 interviews and then proceeded to identify eight consumer archetypes for China: the traditionalist, the modern performer, the minimalist, the hedonist, the conformist, the progressive maximalist, the traditional maximalist and the self-centered type.

In our chapter, CIC utilizes our proprietary automobile IWOM data set to provide a basic outline of the IWOM landscape around automobiles. You can also find contributions from Beijing Benz Daimler-Chrysler (BBDC) President and CEO Günter Butschek and L’Oreal China CEO Paolo Gasparrini.

I will be sharing more thoughts on this in an upcoming post.