The Hot Hot Shanghai WAW July Meetup

Metrics and Goal

Web analytics professionals love numbers:

25 pizzas (though they are all 9") were ordered. (+ dozens of pasters and snacks)
69 people from 40+ companies were registered before we closed the form on last Sunday.
80% of the total registered attendees were estimated to show up
35~ seats and room for ~10 people to standup are in the presentation room

But,

100 sets of paper dishware were used up
the conference room can’t fit all the people in and the density is like 3 people in one square meter.

Above are what we had for our first Shanghai WAW meetup on July 15: a really hot meetup cause the air conditioning can’t afford the workload and the room tempreture must be closed to 30 degree Celsius. :)

First Shanghai WAW: Crowd are waiting for presentation to start

Of course, without a goal, these numbers don’t make much sense: our orignial goal was invited 20 people to the first event. So, we are proud to say it is a very successful one, yeah!

User Experiences

The crowd of this meetup reminds me of the scence at CnbloggerCon 06 in Hangzhou where all those passionate bloggers sat and stood around the room - all of who didn’t want to miss the opportunity to meet each other face to face after so long online communication via IM or blogs "flocking to" and almost "flooding" the event.

Dave Zheng (his Chinese blog), chief web analyst from Newegg is our first speaker. During the 50 minutes presentation, the whole audience were surprising quiet. I didn’t make into the talk so I am not really entitled to comment abou it. I do notice that the head of analytics function at Alibaba asked a very technical question which itis a good sign ton me - we have some experts in the group! Another interesting comment from Dave, is a web analyst with 3 years experiences in China can be regarded as "expert" level professionals, and with 5-8 years experiences will be a guru who is very rare in China. This observation is consistent with the current status of web analytics in China.

The greatest part is always networking for me. People spread around the office of CIC Data who sponsored the space. I did a quick sorting of the attendees’ register information. They are from:

E-commerce
Online marketing
Adversiting & Media
Analytics related techonology
Consulting
Web companies from various industries (e.g. travel, health and medical, game, etc)

E-commerce is the biggest segment (~25%) , the the rest are quite evenly spread. Eye-open for me:

- Hospital and health/medical information are getting online, and they are starting to pay attention to search engine marketing and web analytics. In my mind, this is a very traditional industry. But, it is one of big three sectors - education, medical and real estate in our daily living. It makes perfect sense that more and more medical information should be online as more and more people turns to Internet for information. The July 2009 number from CNNIC is that there are 338 million Internet users (94% are broadband users and 155 million surf the net via mobile.) (Sina)

- Manufacturers want to sell online: The global economy recession has affected China’s export, especially the textile industry. I don’t have the official numbers. I learned from the chipchat that there are many manufacturers in Zhejiang province are so desperate to build a website and sell their inventory online, and some of them have learned their lesson that it is not just as easy as "build a website and put the products online" to make money. Another drive for e-commerce (B2C) in China is that online shopping is now a more acceptable behavior. In big picture, 2008, B2C market size: 130 billion RMB (19.4 billion USD) and it is estimated that the number will double in year 2009 to be 230 bllion RMB (34.3 billion USD). (source: Sohu IT). So it is probably why we see the most e-commerce people in the meetup.

- Veteran SEO/SEM bloggers now have their own business: The bloggers who get fame online now dispear from blogoshpere, but are busy at running their online marketing consulting business. One example is Tony Miao from SEMxp now is running a Google Adwords~~Adsense~~ Optimization training session in big cities like Shanghai and Beijng. I think this is a sign of the market of SEO/SEM including Web Analytics is getting mature and growing in China.

Ok, enough of my random experience. ;)

Bounce or Converted?

As any webiste owners who care about conversation, we don’t want you to BOUNCE from our first meetup. We will continue to host the monthly Shanghai WAW event, and we PROMISE you won’t get another HOT meet up next time.

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