On 22 October 2009, Edelman APAC launched the first ever quarterly Digital Brand Index (DBI) derived from Brandtology data. The DBI is the first research project to compare online conversation and digital engagement across eight markets (China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Australia) in Asia Pacific. The study is based on 800,000 online mentions of 233 major technology brands, contained within 4,348 influential channels monitored between July and September 2009.

Key findings in China Digital Brand Index:

• 173,533 online conversations pertaining to 67 large technology brands, contained within 779 influential channels monitored between July and September 2009.
• Nokia and Samsung topped the rankings by way of volume of conversations. The top ten most mentioned technology brands are as below.
  1. Nokia | 19,907 mentions
  2. Samsung | 14,598 mentions
  3. Google | 11,910 mentions
  4. Microsoft | 9,632 mentions
  5. Sony | 7,526 mentions
  6. HTC | 7,247 mentions
  7. Oracle | 6,512 mentions
  8. Sony Ericsson | 6,228 mentions
  9. Dell | 5,834 mentions
  10. MSN | 5,514 mentions
• With 3.0 brand mentions for every person, Sony Ericsson, led Oracle (2.8) in terms individual engagement across the 67 brands researched.
• While a number of examples of brands engaging with bloggers were found over the three month research period, no proactive examples of engagement with forums or news sites, which constitute 98.34% of all conversations monitored could be found.

For more details and market-by-market fact sheet downloads, link here.

For more insights and implications from DBI, link here to a blog post by John Kerr, Edelman Digital Asia Pacific head.

To better understand the methodology of this research, link here. (I think this is very essential)