Chinalytics Longmarch Blog

As a nice follow up to my post on online metrics in the world of user generate content, I had the chance to have lunch with Sam Flemming of CIC / IWOM fame. While I have been somewhat critical of CIC’s reports, I do admire Sam as a visionary and Chinese internet pioneer. CIC almost single-handedly popularized Social Media marketing and measurement (they call it Internet Word of Mouth or IWOM) in China, a market that
has not even started to measure online activity on company websites effectively.
Most of our discussion focussed on how to integrate social media measurement, an area where CIC has patent pending technology, with web analytics data, CIC’s positioning towards agencies, using social media effectively and the Chinese Social Media environment in general. But one thing after the other (or Step by Step, as NKOTB said, yes I still can sing that song)

Chinese Social Media environment

• China has a very vibrant social media scene that is driven by BBS culture
• Social networks are growing out of successful BBS’ and this history makes them unique and uniquely different form popular western networks
• These networks are populated mainly by young netizens, high school and university students
• The discussions hosted on these networks cover a wide range of topics, many of them relevant to major consumer brands
• Currently there is no equivalent content rich network for business users (while there are LinkedIn clones they do not feature discussions), although companies like Alibaba and Xing are moving into this space

CIC’s positioning towards agencies

• Sam sees online agencies as partners for CIC and has positioned the company as a compliment. They will measure social media conversation and consult clients on a IWOM strategy, but it will not execute or manage IWOM campaigns or seed posts.
• In reality both agencies and clients don’t see this distinction as clearly and advertisers do position CIC and agencies as competitors. More communication is needed to create a win-win situation. Our  discussion was good step into this direction.

Effective usage of social media

• Once marketers understand that their brand is talked about online and how this influences their brand equity, their natural response is asking “how can I influence the ongoing discussion”. While this is a valid question, the easy answer (seed your own posts or hire a 3rd party vendor to control the debate) raises serious ethical issues and will, in the long run, destroy the trust and effectiveness of internet word of mouth. Especially multinationals should be aware of the risk to their reputation that comes along with faking posts.
• Sam believes that this traditional media approach (just shout larger than everyone else to make your message heard) is too simplistic and recommends advertisers to listen first then be understood. (Wise words if you ask me) Understanding the discussion going on online can inform advertising campaigns, since it works like a giant focus groups (free of charge). In a next step advertisers are also able to get almost real time feedback about users take aways from ongoing marketing efforts, and can adjust their campaigns to better resonate with their audience.
• IWOM tracking can also be an early warning system. Brands can learn about problems with their products, communication or distribution by listening to the unfiltered voice of the customer
• For brands to participate in the discussion (note the difference to ‘control the discussion’) Sam recommends a more sincere approach that centers around ‘real people’ sharing their personal opinion in a casual language.
  He notes the example of Dell, a company that effectively used the ‘personal’ blog of senior managers to enter into an open discussion with users that previously voiced their frustration on sites like Dell
  Hell. An interesting question will be how to translate such blog based effort into the BBS culture in China (Any ideas? Let me know in the comment section). I do strongly agree with Sam that in the
  long run only sincere and real participation will be rewarded. But China being China, many a company will look for quick fixes that will in the end harm their brand.

Integration of social media measurement & web analytics data

• To enable a better integration of IWOM data into regular web analytics reports, along the lines of Dennis Mortensen’s Online Business Media Quadrant Model, I highlighted some challenges of CIC’s current offering to Sam

1. Timeline: My main gripe with CIC’s “CIC data” report is timing. It usually covers a 1 month time frame, while ad campaigns usually start sometime in the middle of the month and end 4,6,8 or 12 weeks later.
   Aligning these timelines is almost impossible. In addition CIC’s report arrive with 2 weeks+ time delay after the month is over (most of this, I am sure, due to the insight mining that takes place), that is too long for kind of near time reporting I am looking for. Sam assured me that their “CIC Alert” product provides more flexibility in terms of timing (daily, weekly or monthly) and can be adjusted to follow the campaign duration. This type of reporting would integrate with Web Analytics efforts more effectively. To take that one step further we talked about access.
2. Access: Currently CIC delivers its reports in PDF formats by email. I would love to have a web interface, much like my web analytics tools, or IResearch’s IUserTracker (link in Chinese). That way I could download the quantitative info (number of posts, share of positive, negative, neutral) whenever I need it (I can wait for the qualitative insights by PDF), manage the keywords I would like to have tracked (product names, campaign names, competitors etc.), organize them into campaigns, specify the timeline I want to analyze and then export all this data to an Excel spreadsheet and compare and correlate to my other online data. Doesn’t that sounds like a nice little IWOM vision

• While I am not at liberty to share more details, I can say that Sam was certainly listening intently and I am curious what they have in the works. Stay tuned. I certainly will.

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Catching up with my analytics reading, I saw this interesting post from Dennis Mortensen explaining his Online Business Media Quadrant Model.  His basic assumption is that in a world where user generated content becomes more important, measuring only what happens in the controlled environment of your site (with tools like Google Analytics and Omniture) gives us only half the picture (or one quarter, if you don’t measure UGC on your site). He recommends a more holistic approach by looking at

• Controlled On site Content
• Controlled Off site Content (User Generated)
• Uncontrolled On site Content (Syndicated content – PR)
• Uncontrolled Off site Content (User Generated)

What a nice summary of some of the work we have been doing recently A couple of thoughts on this (not yet well structured)

1. In China, but I assume in other countries as well, marketers still
   have a strong urge to control as much of the conversation as possible.
   This old reflex limits the reach of their message. Web 2.0 is a reality
   in China and marketers need to move away from a shouting mentality towards
   communication mentality, that emphases listening to the “voice of the
   customer”.
2. Separating online marketing and PR becomes increasingly difficult, especially when looking at user generated content (or IWOM to use another term). Marketers need to find ways to tear down the organizational barriers that prevent better integration especially on the analytics side. Otherwise their understanding will be limited to one or two quarters of Dennis’ quadrant.
3. Measuring user generated content (quantity, quality, key messages) is a new challenge for most advertisers in China. With the amount of conversation going on in the millions of blogs & BBS’s in China, manual tracking and counting is not scalable. While Sam Flemming’s CIC owns the conversation an IWOM tracking in China, looking at other alternatives might pay off, especially regarding integration with current analytics efforts.
4. Measuring off-site content provides a new challenge to advertisers as well. While some of the large advertisers in China just get comfortable with Web Analytics on their own site, some of our client already move away from viewing their site and their banner campaigns as the main medium for communication. They increasingly communicate with 3rd party vendors (e.g. video, sharing sites, business communities) to engage their audiences more effectively. While that makes a lot of sense from a marketing perspective, analytics team need to find solution for tracking the effectiveness of these cooperation. A low trust environment like China adds its own challenges (tip: never trust your vendors numbers). The best solution we have found thus far is forcing vendors to integrate our tracking codes on the pages / experiences they create for our clients. While this opens a whole different can of worms (explaining the differences between “our” numbers and “their” numbers anyone?) it seems like the best available solution.
5. Making your own content “mobile” will significantly increase your reach. Many brands in China have experimented with viral videos, hosted both on their mini-sites and video sharing sites and our numbers show a huge boost reach. Who says video’s are the only “mobile” / “viral” content brands can create? Think about making your downloads available on third party sites, your mini-games and your widgets and you will be rewarded with an explosion in reach. At least as long as you can measure it. Users seem to be more willing to engage in advertisers content when they are in the “mood” to watch, play or download.

These seem to be rich days for those of us fishing for nuggets of insight on how to improve our reporting. In addition Monday’s post about simplifying key insight slides here is one more morsel the reporting wonks out there.
Eric Schaffer writes about researchers vs. practitioners. and Stephane Hamel adds some Web Analytics perspective. My key take away comes from Stephane’s post "Clients are looking for solutions". On the first glance this sounds very obvious. When looking at most web analytics reports you will find that they highlight the problems, while the solutions are buried somewhere at the end of the PPT. We present (our 40 to 50 slides), have some discussions on the way and when we come to the solutions part everyone is tired or alternatively on the way to the next meeting.
So here is the challenge for you and for me.

• Put the solutions to key problems front and center. That means on slide 1 or 2 and  as the last slide (to facilitate discussion).





• Prioritize the key solutions with most leverage





• Spend enough time during the presentation talking about the solution (after the client is persuaded that they have a problem)





• Limit the slides talking about problems (I guess 10 -15 is a good rule of thumb), but make your points clear. More detailed slides can go into the appendix to support your point when necessary





• Get agreements on actions and take down action items (with person responsible and time line)





• Follow up on the action items and include progress in future reports.

Best,
Florian

While I will not start running naked around town , I felt like something large moved in my brain after reading Gary Angels post on reporting today. While the first 5 graphs look like ordinary web analytics report, the like of us produce daily. It was the last graph that hit me like the proverbial apple. This is how want my reports to look like…
I have been thinking about how to simply reporting almost constantly after normal reports started to exceed 40 slides on a regular basis. This seems to be the golden path.
<out torturing Excel>
P.S.: Gary seems to be the only blogger that uses Omniture for his blog tracking. Now if somebody would please give me a machine gun… there is a fly on my wall.