BloggerInsight, founded by Shanghai-based Lucas Englehardt and XUE Ying, was launched in mid November. More and more international companies looking into Chinese market want to hear some honest and valuable opinion from local netizen, but obviously there lacks of channels for this type of communication and the language barrier also sucks. So BloggerInsight was born.
Basically the way BloggerInsight works is that: Companies looking for marketing knowledge in China create campaign on BloggerInsight which help find and connect knowledeable Chinese bloggers and ask them for their personal opinions. BloggerInsight will wrap up these opinion into a formal report with analysis and give it the company. The bloggers who gave valuable opinion will get paid.
The Chinese BBS online culture has gained loads of attention after we wrote this post. You simply can not disregard the voice from BBS if you concerns about Chinese social media. But you should be also very careful about this type of social media because Chinese BBS now can be easily abused. There are many so-called social media agencies out there, you pay them a small amount of money and they can guarantee you thousands of posts up on all sorts of BBS the second day promoting your products or cursing your competitors. So the question hitting me everyday is that How much we can trust Social Media?
Interesting enough, the TNS just released a report discussing which media channels we should trust most. Let’s picked three points here:
- Globally, a roughly equal number highly trust TV news (41%), online news (40%) and newspapers (39%).
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Blogs are almost universally distrusted with only one in ten trusting them globally. Norway, The Netherlands, Germany and Sweden are particularly distrustful at only 5%.
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Here is the most interesting point for me: The Chinese and Koreans were much more trusting of the blog medium at 24% and 22% respectively. In the US 9% of respondents trusted blogs.
Because of #3 above and BloggerInsight connecting to knowledgeable bloggers individually for their insight, BloggerInsight’s business model should work. The key issue might be: How to scale it?