Over the years we’ve helped many clients (predominantly electronics ones but not exclusively) to build brand awareness in China through traditional media relations, but like most of the Western world Chinese social media has proved something of a challenge to incorporate meaningfully into campaigns.

As pretty much everybody knows, the first challenge is that all the main Western social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc., and the likes of Google and YouTube are completely irrelevant in China, where it’s all about Sina Weibo, Tencent Weibo and search engines like Baidu.

But perhaps more important is the second challenge, namely getting reliable analytics with none of the traditional tools, like Hootsuite, Tweetdeck etc., able to track Chinese social media reliably, or at all.

Whilst many of the Chinese social media sites themselves do provide analytics options for their premium customers these tools are in Chinese and not Western-friendly. Sina Weibo did briefly moot BuzzEquity – its free tool for Chinese media analytics in English – but this quickly disappeared.

But thanks to Val Kaplan and his China Marketing Tips blog I’ve been made aware of a new service called Soshio. This is Val’s overview of its main capabilities and features.

After years following all the self-indulgent guff on the LinkedIn B2B Technology Marketing Community, at last something genuinely interesting and useful. Hurrah!

photo credit: jonrussell