Here are the key findings:
Offline drives online. Online drives offline. The impact of product launches and the World Cup demonstrates the opportunity for brands to proactively engage and measure online buzz.
518,028 online conversations were tracked, with references to 89 large technology brands, which were contained within 736 influential channels from April to June 2010. This represents one major technology brand mentioned every 15 seconds, compared to one brand mention every 42 seconds found in the DBI 10.2.
The major consumer electronics brands in China, Samsung, Sony, Nokia, Cannon and Asus, continue to rank on the list of the top 10 most talked about technology brands amongst the online channels, as they expand their drive in the social media field.
Canon made DBI's top 10 'buzziest' channels list for the first time with 15,098 online conversations, and Google, which dominated previous DBI results, dropped to sixth place on the top 10 'buzziest' channels list.
The volume of online buzz for technology brands increased sharply this quarter, partly due to technology brands' online marketing campaigns around the 2010 FIFA World Cup, which helped drive a record amount of social media traffic. Both consumer electronics and telecommunication carriers including China Mobile and China Unicom launched new products and services around the World Cup through online news portals and video sharing channels.
Samsung worked with three major news portals including Sina, Sohu and Tom.com to launch social ads and initiate online competitions. China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom partnered with phone makers on intensive online marketing of new phone models and services that enabled consumers to watch The World Cup on their mobile phones.
The social networking phenomenon continues.
Social networking websites, especially Sina, Weibo and Kaixin001, have become important channels for IT/ technology brands to effectively reach and engage consumers. So far, 56 per cent of all the surveyed IT/ technology brands have launched their own local Sina Weibo brands.
While Twitter dominates in other regional markets in Asia Pacific, Sina Weibo is building a social media phenomenon in China which is reshaping the way technology brands contact and engage consumers. Sina Weibo not only provides a platform to directly listen to and engage consumers, it also dwarfed other channels at promoting events and generating conversations. Sina Weibo generated 31,019 tweets that mentioned Nokia, compared with a total of 16,760 online conversations generated by other channels.
BlackBerry's official Sina Weibo account has gained more than 7,000 fans since its launch on 16 June this year.
