By Lisa Li

Being a start-up means a frenetic lifestyle. Always excited about ideas we want to go for and only hate time and energy is limited. We should apologize for not blogging for a while. Will certainly keep this blog running and running cos we cannot afford losing the great conversation we have with our friends here.

The past two months actually mean a lot to us.

1. We have launched Youthology Monthly – a paid-subscription which aims to bring to life ‘the pulse of youth and youth marketing’ and understand the underlying meanings and implications of the trends/ happenings.

There are mainly two sections for each report:

• youth pulse – what marketers need to know about the latest observation of Chinese youth.
• brand pulse – what’s going on with the brands that target Chinese youth, especially the innovative initiatives

Each Youthology Monthly try to cover:

• ‘Sketch’ - what’s hot, what’s in, what’s changing
• ‘Feature/Topics’ - what are the underlying meanings of youth culture that we see, what are driving forces of the changes, what are the implications to marketers (as always it attempts to decode youth culture from the spheres of macro, community, and individual)

In the reports we want to

• bring to life the youth’s world with real-life photos, quotes, and often time video clips (voxpops)
• and give ‘experts’ perspective with interviews (we adopt our framework of looking at youth community and aim to cover the story of ‘mass’, and ‘edgy youth’, and ‘experts’)

And in the end there’s an optional ‘client confidential’ section that is tailor-made to client’s categories and brands.

We were glad to receive good feedbacks from the earliest subscribers/prospects. Pls contact me (lisa.li[at]chinayouthology.com) if you want to know more about it.

2. We were very lucky to have 36 (as his online nickname) on board as youth community manager. 36 started his e-magazine TOODAY 3 years ago. It’s a self-funded venture he has been working on in leisure time. With an group of young amateur writers gathered online, TOODAY has published more than 30 issues and become an influential online community. We were completely caught by his genuine intuition about Internet culture and community management and his dedication on getting things done. 36 is taking on the initiative of building a co-researcher community for China Youthology. Without an ambition (and any interest) of building a ‘panel’ of big ‘size’, what we want to do is to build a really neat geeky community with hand-picked young people who are as passionate as ourselves in finding the truth of youth culture. The community, although started only half month ago, has already started to contribute to our research learnings.

3. Foundation research has of course been our major focus as always. We have got lots of interesting learnings on various topics.

Macro/ context level, following our campus tour to more than 30 universities in 4 cities in May, we did some research on Chinese education system (from preliminary school to middle school to university) and how it has shaped the values of teens and youth. And we are continuing to research on what the changes in education (for example the new generation of teachers) may tell us about youth in 5 years.

We also want to talk about the reactions towards Internet Censorship. Far more than an ‘objection’, we have started to see hints of underlying movements in youth’ values.

Internet-wise, we have failed to finalize the SNS report until now partly because of our hectic schedule and partly because the SNS scene especially marketing on SNS has been changing so fast. Will anyway share on our blog our un-finished draft very soon.

We have conducted more fundamental research on youth & mobile tech and youth & sports. Will share with you the sports one soon.

4. Ups and downs with our new office. We have rented a great cute courtyard to be our new office, invited a good friend of us for the interior design and started renovating nearly two months ago but went into some ridiculous lawsuit with the landlord. Until now I still cannot tell when we are able to move in. Hope our lawyer rocks. Fingers crossed.

Filed under: China Youthology News, 36, China youth culture, education, Lisa Li, SNS, Sports, tech, TOODAY, Youthology Monthly