From ChinaTechNews (link):
Millions of dollars spent to build a brand in China can evaporate when bad rumors are posted online. Sam Flemming is the founder of CIC data, a company devoted to searching, filing, and reporting on the trends happening online. He helps companies track millions of online messages in blogs, forums, and news articles.
……
Unlike the west, there aren’t a comparatively large number of “A-List” bloggers that have potential to generate a lot of income through advertising, at least not yet–with definite exceptions like Keso and celebrity bloggers like XuJingLei.We have clients in a number of industries, including software, mobile phone, beverage, sports apparel and many others. One example: for a mobile phone client, we collect well over half a million BBS messages monthly about the mobile phone industry written by over 100,000 individuals. Every message is categorized according to 18 brands, 1700+ models, 10 categories, 150 subcategories represented by around 5000 key terms.
Also, data mining conversational data of any time, especially Chinese, is a challenge. For Chinese, here are no “off the shelf” tools that can do a good job of analyzing Chinese language conversations, especially with some of the crazy, creative language used on Chinese BBS (for example, Super Girl phenomena has created a whole new vocabulary).
