BloggerInsight provides intelligent Chinese crowd sourcing

Written on 20th November 2008                                                                                                              3 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

The problem with crowd sourcing is the overabundance of opinions, suggestions and remarks you’ll get from the community. How to sort these out? And how can you decide which ones can be taken seriously? A possible solution for this selection problem is to add an expert layer.

BloggerInsight has done just so. The service connects Chinese expert bloggers with high tech companies which want to enter the Chinese market. According do BloggerInsight, there’s little reliable market research and that which does exist is expensive and generic. By asking bloggers for their opinion, companies might get better information on how to enter the tough market.

BloggerInsight CEO Lucas Englehardt wants to redefine market intelligence. In the press release he says, “By connecting clients and expert bloggers, BloggerInsight hopes to fundamentally alter the economics of information and lower the barriers to success.”

Then he adds a rather interesting point: “In doing so, BloggerInsight hopes to reward new media for its independent voice”. Of course BloggerInsight just wants to make money, but a new way of monetizing blogging can be an interesting side effect. Most bloggers are experts on their field of interest and their opinion is worth a lot of money.

Bloggers roundtable during China2.0

In the US and Europe, many bloggers act like consultants in their free time – or the other way around. In the hard Chinese market though, an intermediary like BloggerInsight might be necessary. Only if it was just for breaking the language barrier.

BloggerInsight is the portfolio company of Web2Asia, one of the three parties which organized the China 2.0 tour I participated in last week. Read an interesting interview I had with co-founder Markus Fuhrmann here.