To read the original article and see the graph in more detail please go 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.

Related links:

• IWOM watch April: 2009 SH Auto Show, netizens attend the event from home
• Online group car purchase: a real story
• CIC IWOM whitepaper on auto industry: Whats Driving Auto Buzz

As brands start to realized the importance of having a strong Internet presence which they can then use to effectively communicate with their customers, we are seeing the emergence of better and better digital campaigns. Bring it on!

Below is a screen shot of the index for the full IWOM watch report:

For related articles, please see below:

More Thoughts on China Digital and Social Media

Media mag discusses astroturfing in China

The end of the (advertising) world as we know it…and I feel fine

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

I recently interviewed Magdalena Wszelaki, Regional Vice President for Agenda for my Interactive China series on iTV Asia. I’ve known Mag since 2005 when she first arrived in China to work on what came to be award winning campaigns for Pepsi Creative Challenge. She’s been the driver of many a cool campaign/platform since then, including great stuff with Johnson Baby. In the interview, I pick her brain on the development of IWOM in China since that time as well as ideas for the future.

To watch the full interview, please see here.

Other ITV Asia Interviews:

“Interactive China” Videos on ITV-Asia

iTV Asia interview with T.R. Harrington: Where Search and IWOM Overlaps

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Following the launch of the first Internet Word of Mouth (IWOM) analytics dashboard in China- IWOM master on June1, 2009, CIC is pleased to announce the release of our latest IWOM White Paper: “Making Sense of IWOM”: The Role of Internet Word of Mouth in Purchase Decisions. The white paper can be downloaded here.

The white paper is based on comprehensive qualitative and quantitative offline research conducted by CIC in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Chengdu and reveals how netizens’ recommendations and opinions play a very important role in affecting the consumer purchase decision making process.

HIGHLIGHTS:

• Do consumers pay attention to IWOM? - 81.2% of netizens search IWOM when making purchase decisions. IWOM is most influential within the mobile phone, consumer electronics, cosmetics and baby care categories with at least 50% of respondents seeking out IWOM when buying.

• Why do consumers pay attention to IWOM? - primary motivation is to reduce the purchase decision risk (71.5% of all respondents)

• How does IWOM influences consumers’ attitude toward brands? - Positive IWOM has a 50% chance to convert a bad impression to a good one.

• How does IWOM affect purchase decisions? - Reviewing the purchase decision process, we found that IWOM has a remarkable affect on “awareness” and final “purchase decision” with 56.3% of respondents getting to know the brand through IWOM and 58.7% of respondents making their purchase decisions based on IWOM.

For more information, please click here for a free download or click here to check full reports on slideshare. You can also visit iwommaster.com (Back Story Page) or our blog seeisee.com (IWOM Research Column) to find our previous White Papers and related Blog articles, for better understanding Chinese Internet communities and the fast development in China. You’ll also find our find our newly launched dashboard there. More on this later as well…

In this issue, we also look at how Chinese courts have started to make use of the Human Flesh Search Engine, the popularity of online novels, “Zhang Ke” (tracking accounts/spending) and Ford’s Movie Carnival on Douban.

Below is a screen shot of the index for the full IWOM watch report:

For related articles, please see below:

Group Purchase Mentions Double in 2nd Half of 2008: IWOM as More than Just Chatter

Online group car purchase: a real story

How IWOM is Redefining the Relationship between Brands and Consumers

More info is here: http://www.chinaherald.net/2009/05/global-china-chat-on-social-networks.html

I have written and talked about group purchase a number of times over the last few years, including here and here.  I shared a case study of a group purchase made by one of my team members here. What’s interesting now is that group purchase discussions are becoming more prominent.

Is this because of the economic situation? Maybe, maybe not, but it is clearly a phenomena that manufacturers and their dealers are having to learn to deal with.  A sort of riot at a Ford dealership in December over a group purchase deal gone bad suggests that at least some dealers could improve in the communications department. Further to this point, I write:

Auto makers must develop a deeper understanding of the trends in order to determine if group purchases should be seen as a threat or an opportunity–and if it is the latter, they must learn how to profit from it.

The key takeway is that IWOM is more than just chatter; as the group purchase phenomena illustrates, it is a force that is reshaping the relationship between brands and consumers. IWOM can both influence purchase decision and how the purchase is made. The group purchase example demonstrates that for IWOM, it is important to not only listen to the talk, but understand what’s happening behind it.

What’s your impression of the balance between traditional (TV, print) branding now in China compared to digital, in terms of the spend and influence?

In terms of spend, compared to the West, the gap in China between traditional and digital is even greater than in the West. General estimates put digital spend in 2008 at 7% of overall media spend. Part of the reason is that the 298 million people online only account for 23% of the Chinese population and may not offer the greatest reach to Tier 3 and beyond cities.

However, for those that are indeed online, it is a primary media. Numerous studies have suggested that Chinese netizens spend upwards of twice the amount of time online as they do watching TV. Compared to traditional media, digital is so much more varied, exciting and open. It serves the primary platform for consumers to find information, be entertained and socialize: 81.5% of netizens get their news online and the Premier Wen Jia Bao enages netizens in online chats (and also has a Facebook fan page); net stars are in movies based on net novels and World of Warcraft characters appear on Coke cans; QQ, China’s leading social internet platform, is bigger than than Facebook.

What is the balance between fixed line internet and mobile - is mobile a better vehicle for a brand connecting with people ?

China has the most mobile phones in the world now and has more people accessing internet via mobile phone than fixed line. However, with the computer essentially replacing the TV as a primary media device (young people will buy a computer for their new apartment before they would buy a TV), we see that the computer offers a better, more engaging platform (though we may be biased).

Could you venture a “regional” opinion i.e how China compares with other regional countries?

China more bloggers (162 million) (see full stats here) and more places online to be social than any other market in the world. China’s penetration rate is a relatively low 22.6%, but social participation rate is very high. Forrester’s China technographics study, for example, shows that Chinese “creators” account for 40% of netizen population compared to just 13% in the US.

In terms of the region, Japan and Korea are as exciting as China in terms of social media, with extremely high penetration rates as well as high participation rates.

Is the idea of community getting much traction there? Do Chinese people get involved in online communities beyond the BBS?

Overall, social networking sites like Xiaonei and Kaixin are growing rapidly as a place for netizens to play and share with their network. However, BBS is still very much the heart of social media in China and have been a “mainstream” Internet activity since the very beginning of the Internet here. They serve as the nation’s online “water cooler” with anonymous discussions that touch on most any topic beyond the racy and political ones. For example, just within the automobile category, every month we track over 6 million messages written by 300,000+ user names. Within these forums, there can be a very powerful sense of community, with forums regularly organizing offline meet ups (called fubai) and online activities such as “homework.” For a full overview of the social media landscape, see here and PPT deck here.

Are brands able to use the bulletin boards or is it very much consumer power?

While BBS are pretty much the domain of consumers, brands do try (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) to participate. Not surprisingly, brands and/or their agencies will try astroturfing, but it is largely ineffective, and overall not welcome within the communities. See here and here for discussions on this topic.

Smarter brands will listen to the talk online, know or understand the online culture, and then choose the most appropriate way to participate. For example, in the popular PCauto community, brands can officially answer questions posed by netizens in designated, branded “expert centers.” Most important to realize here is that the information provided is what is actually wanted and needed by netizens. It is real, two-way communication, NOT seeded marketing messages that only serve the interest of the brand.

Some brands have successfully built their own BBS communities after studying best practices from existing communities. For example, Lancôme’s “Rosebeauty” is now a top 10 women’s/fashion BBS.

Have you any examples of brands getting it wrong online or off - ie getting adverse reaction from bulletin boards.

Last year Lenovo got flack for what was an obviously fake viral campaign that raised the ire of netizens. The classic case study, however, is 2007’s Dell Hell (China version) where dissatisfied netizens attempted to launch a class action lawsuit. It should be noted that Dell in China, as it has in other markets, has since turned things around considerably in the “conversation marketing” department with its own Chinese blog, Chinese Twitter account and Jiwai.de account (a Twitter clone).

Are there any indigenous brands that are succeeding with digital?

Local sports apparel brands like Lining and Anta consistently make splashes with clever, buzz making efforts. Anta, for example, launched a line of shoes named after the net nickname of NBA player Louis Scola (see slide 6 here). Meizu, the company behind various so called “IPOD killers” also has a very active fan community, both in English and Chinese.

Any global brands?

Johnson Baby has done award winning work with its Mom Ambassadors campaign while Intel has developed interesting engagements with its “I-fans” (see here). Pepsi, with its Pepsi Creative Challenge open source marketing campaigns in the last 3 years as well as Coke, with its I-Coke platform, are also impressive.