By: Lisa Li, Zafka Zhang

CYW on Beijing Olympic are a series of reports understanding what’s going on in the minds and life of Chinese youth before, during, and after the Beijing Olympic.

Web 2.0 has largely shifted the look of marketing in Chinese youth market since year 2006. And I have ever since been wondering how it would change the consumer research and when…

A bit to my surprise, the youth today have started to ‘conduct research’ on their own initiatives. And there are suddenly a lot of them (the polling application in SNS has gained its popularity only in the recent several months). Check out the ‘polling of today’ on Xiaonei (the ‘Facebook’ of China) – the hottest polling can easily receive thousands of responses. Although the hottest topics of polling are always about love and relationship, there are still a lot of valuable information for marketers and market researchers.

The polling about Liu Xiang’s giving up the game today has already obtained more than 10k of responses.

(screen shot around 9pm today)

• 54% think ‘being an athlete is really a tough job – a lot of injuries and aches; he should rest well to get recovered soon so that he can continue his career’
• 25% agree that ‘he has taken too much pressure… I kind of sympathize him.’

(Maybe those who use Liu Xiang as spokesperson don’t have to worry too much about their investment if they target the polling respondents.)

See some other interesting polling about Beijing Olympic below… (red numbers are the bases)

Give a score to the opening ceremony... (screen shot around 11am today)

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What have I got from this Olympic? (screen shot around 11am toay)

What have I got from this Olympic?

• 24% deep love of my homeland
• 16% our people are more closely united (watch the games all at the same time)
• 12% I love watching the games
• 11% I’m more passionate about sports now (I want to participate in some sports myself)

How do you view athletes who did not gain medals? (screen shot around 11am today)

How do you view athletes who did not gain medals?

• 31% they are all ‘heroes’ to me regardless whether they are medal owners
• 18% not only golden medal winners, those who won silver and brown are also highly adorable
• 18% the sole spirits of Olympic is ‘participation’; medals are not the more important

Since iWOM started to gain attention from the marketers, much research has been done on the discourse on BBS (or forums). We believe the flourish of content (blog, polling, discussion) on SNS – Xiaonei as a dominant one and Kaixin as a competitive new player – will provide access to more valuable information.

Our comparative analysis of discourses about Beijing Olympic on SNS vs BBS has found that comments on SNS tend to be more rational and sophisticated while discourse on BBS can more easily go extreme and ‘mob-like’. Why? No. 1, the profile of current SNS users tends to be better-educated (university students and white collars), and No. 2, SNS are real name based (identity-based), people tend to maintain an online identity on SNS in consistency with their offline identify. Someone’s words on SNS are more likely to be in line with the person in real life, and hence potentially more insightful for marketers.

Filed under: Beijing Olympic, Internet & Web2.0, So What?, Sports, What's Up?, Chinese SNS, Chinese youth, iWOM, Kaixin, Liu Xiang, market research, online polling, Xiaonei