IWOM Roundtable Take Aways (Mosaiced)

Written by Luyi Chen on April 13, 2007
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CIC DataYesterday I was at CIC’s first Internet Word of Mouth (IWOM) Roundtable. The panel discussion is supposed to be off-the-record. So I am following the rule here.

The first take away is actually the rule itself. Why should a discussion of Internet buzz be off-the-record? Fons didn’t get it (in the comment of the post), neither did I. I was wondering why I was invited.

Now I have got a little bit. IWOM is easy to aware, but difficult to drive. You will suppose you have known the majority part of IWOM after listening to a presentation on the topic by CIC, for example, but that doesn’t mean you can be a good branding manager. Why? You don’t have enough experience to deal with real case.

While some well-known cases have been documented in MBA text books, the real problem a branding manager meets is much more complicated, and usually they are not in the context like the cases in text book.

So here’s why roundtable like this is important. PR managers come to share real experience which you won’t hear about in other places. Be frankly, not all PR strategy is available to be open to the public, otherwise it will just raise more problem.

The Recent Google-Sogou IME debate is such a case. No one think Google’s PR not aware of IWOM. Why did they act in a not so smart way? There must be a story here. I would suggest Sam to invite former Google China PR manager Cui Jing to participate in the next roundtable if possible. That must be instructive enough to other people dealing with branding management.

I believe Sam’s talk on IWOM is bloggable. This was not the first time he evangelizes IWOM, and he always can make a complex problem simple. All you have to know about IWOM is in three words: Listen, Know and Participate. CWR was cited in the participation part. We are honored. We suddenly realize that we are kinda acting as an amplifier to make things known by another language world.

At last, am I allowed to poke fun at our speakers? Here’s the background of all the panelists. Gary as the only representative from web 2.0 company must be living too long in another world to the rest of the panelists. Geek is not influential in everywhere. Martin Alintuck, of Edelman China, is the influencer of the panel. Sitting in a good place, the middle of the roundtable and with a penetrating voice, he frequently stepped into the conversation to leave some smart comments. Annabella Yang is another kind of influencer. She sat in the farthest corner, not easily discoverable. But sometimes, she stepped in to ask some questions making all the PR professionals lose their jaws. One of the question she asked was “What’s the meaning of PR we are talking about?” Daisy Zhang just occasionally joined the discussion, but she was the rule maker there. The cases talked about in the panel is probably selected by herself. She only have to mention some points other panelists missed to cover, but already noted down in her own heart.

If you are still interested in the discussion of the panel, you can refer to this post, which covers some of the topics.

2 Responses to “IWOM Roundtable Take Aways (Mosaiced)”

  1. China » Blog Archive » Jacquelin, Huang lead in China on April 13th, 2007 3:56 pm

    [...] I would suggest Sam to invite former Google China PR manager Cui Jing to participate in the next roundtable if possible. That must be instructive enough to other people dealing with branding management. … – more – [...]

  2. Sam on April 18th, 2007 9:19 am

    Luyi,

    Thanks for attending. We were very glad to see you there because we appreciate you and Tangos posts and views on on IWOM (for example, see “related posts” in this article as well as the Google case you mentioned and we referred to). We think your blog is a great service to those interested in the overall Web 2.0 landscape, of which IWOM is a part.

    FYI, we will be posting the case studies on SeeISee later this week.

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