(Sources from: CNNIC, Statistical Survey Report on the Internet Development in China (January 2008), available: http://www.cnnic.cn/uploadfiles/pdf/2008/2/29/104126.pdf )
According to 18th Statistical Survey Report on the Internet Development in China (July 2006), 43.2% net citizens often use BBS and engage in different kinds of discussion groups, which mean more than 90 million people in China, play active roles in BBS. As can be seen the statistics below, BBS users are even larger than the users of IM (42.7%), which enables BBS to be the communication platform following after emails.
(Sources from CNNIC, available: http://www.cnnic.cn/download/2006/18threport-en.pdf)
It seems that BBS still plays an important role in Chinese internet life. Actually, the influence of BBS also reflects on net citizens’ life in real world. A report on the Internet mentioned that a growing number of people begin reading comments on the different kinds of forums when they are interested in a certain product or service. A new word-of-mouth era comes!
Since BBS is a topic-centric communication platform, people can easily google topics what they are interested in and engage in the discussion. There are hundreds of thousands of people take part in any kinds of topics you can or cannot image. People share their opinions and experiences of certain products and services; they complained about low quality products and awful services they experienced.
Internet expends word-of-mouth influence. Not only marketing people have to pay attention on word-of-mouth strategy, practitioners really need to think about it. There are a lot of work need PR people to do: How to locate those opinion leaders online? How to maintain the mutual relations with those people? How to engage in the discussion? How to monitor related topics?
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