CR-Nielsen, the Nielsen’s joint venture in China and partner of ChinaRank, launched BuzzMetrics service in China on 11th August.

“The fastest growing and most trusted media globally, as well as in China – are those that consumers create themselves, otherwise known as Consumer-Generated Media. In this age of rapid communications, it’s critical to listen to what your consumers are saying.

Nielsen has introduced its BuzzMetrics pioneering tool into China to help marketers passively observe unprompted consumer interactions and observations being made on a massive scale across the Internet. Marketers can tap into these insights to challenge assumptions and truths, and gain more truthful, unvarnished consumer intelligence to guide marketing strategies, from product design, through to customer segmentation and positioning.”

New York-based BuzzMetrics had been majority owned by Nielsen since February 2006, when the company bought 58% of BuzzMetrics’s shares. And it was finally fully acquired by the Nielsen in May 2007.

Nielsen BuzzMetrics leads the industry in helping companies protect and promote brands through the measurement and analysis of consumer-generated media (CGM). It is recognized as an industry leader in the The Forrester Wave: Listening Platforms, Q1 2009.

In US, Nielsen BuzzMetrics services deliver trusted brand metrics, meaningful consumer insights and real-time market intelligence to help clients apply the power of consumer-generated media (CGM) to their businesses:

• Brand Monitoring: customizable dashboard provides easy access to key brand health metrics and consumer commentary. Real-time fast-moving reputation threats alerts.
• Buzz Monitoring: “world’s largest focus group”, learn what makes consumers tick, what drives natural buzz and what makes brands succeed or fail.
• Brand Connections & Customer Relations: best-practices consulting for engaging successfully in online conversations, analyst identification of intervention opportunities and seamless tracking of customer responses for easy conversation management.
• Consumer-Generated Media (CGM) Measurement: understand influential individuals, groups and publishers in your market.

On CR-Nielsen’s website, I cannot find any information about the Chinese BuzzMetrics products yet. I believe it’s still in an early stage for Nielsen guys to localize their services in such a complicated Chinese digital landscape.

“Chinese text mining is much more difficult than English”, said Paul Wang, Tech R&D Head in CIC. “The Chinese language itself poses another challenge. Unlike western alphabet-based languages, the Chinese language does not have words, but pictographs (characters), moreover there are no boundaries between them. We have to first sort out and segment apart the words. Without this procedure, meanings are easily lost. What makes the situation even more difficult is the use of slang by Chinese netizens”, he had explained the reason in a blog post.

Chinese language is the main barrier for oversea social media research & monitoring agencies to enter the China market in past few years. However, I received some evidences in early this year which show that oversea vendors including Nielsen BuzzMetrics, TNS Cymfony, and Radian6 had begun to cover China region for multinational brands’ global solution.

Currently, local social media (a.k.a Internet Word of Mouth) research & monitoring vendors/services in Mainland China include CIC, Topwom, Evermotion, Brandtology, SinoTechGroup’s SinoBuzz, and Ogilvy China’s Obuzz.