Looking to expand its user base and searching for brand awareness opportunities, Facebook is hiring a Growth Manager.

The opening is posted on FB´s website and it is a 6-12 months engagement, so we cannot say if they will have a full staff soon. But it is a start.

They are also hiring in Russia and India, thus BRIC is a priority now.

Early Bird Tickets for the Summit are now on sale. Other sessions include Mobile Search in Europe, Non-Latin IDNs and International Twitter Strategies.

Of course, governmental organisations both sides of the Atlantic are working hard to promote exports – I’ve personally spoken to and advised many of them. However, some support – and promotion of – international SEO is required with some urgency. I, therefore, felt a letter to Gordon Brown and Barack Obama would be just the ticket to highlight the need. Here’s my letter:

Dear Barack and Gordon,

The global economic crisis – the worst since the second world war – places us all in exceptional times calling for exceptional steps. Both of you have said so in recent days. Clearly, growth in the US and UK economies is now, more than ever, linked to success in export markets. Both nations are great exporters – but sometimes the way that we, the British and the Americans, communicate with our potential customers in other markets can be rather ‘clumsy’. Let’s be honest, both nations are not particularly gifted at working in languages other than English.

Both of you are also well aware of the impact of digital marketing on present day business life – Barack you have used this tool very effectively to promote yourself during the presidential election. You are also aware of the growth of the use of the internet in corners of the world in the so-called BRIC economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China – all of them economies which are performing relatively well despite the global economy.

Global Internet Economy Grows

The success of search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yandex and Baidu is enabling internet-connected people to look well beyond the borders of their own nations to buy products and services or to compare other nations products and services and then to develop their own and compete. This easy access to the global village means there is an imperative to move forwards quickly with the development of the British and American approach to globalisation because the competition is actually growing every day.

Given that this threat is also an opportunity – there is no real option. British and American goods and services have to be marketed online and we have to act now to deliver the necessary economic growth. It is not acceptable for Governments to say, “If you’re having a hard time at home, you’d better export.” Although both governments do have very professional export support organisations, they cannot be expected to change the way they do things without either neglecting a service they already deliver today or falling behind the pace of other nations.

It Is ‘English’ That Puts Us At Risk

The English language is the US and UK’s big advantage in that everyone translates their website into English so if you’re English-speaking you can navigate around much of the internet-world and source products and services all over. In other words, English-speakers make good BUYERS. But that’s the rub! “If you want me to buy, speak my language!”. The big benefit of the English-language puts the UK and US at risk when it comes to export and to reaching the wider global market.

SEO or search engine optimisation – is a very effective and relatively low cost way for businesses to reach out to customers and, by localising and adapting websites effectively, this can enable businesses of every size from the smallest to the very largest to expand their export markets. Both the American and UK Governments should invest some of their export and trade subsidies specifically into ‘international seo’ or website localisation. This action would inevitably promote products and services very quickly.

Avoid The Risk-Averse Reaction

Promoting international SEO and website localisation would also help to counteract the risk averse reaction which potential new exporters have towards looking for new markets. Businesses in difficult tend to revert to their comfort zone and take fewer risks. This can be commercial suicide if your ‘comfort zone’ happens to be a part of the economy which is not doing well. It would also be relatively simple for government bodies to monitor the outcomes potentially even looking at international traffic generated to the websites.

I do need to declare a personal interest: my company delivers international SEO services and I would stand to gain from this. Nonetheless, my view that adopting a more aggressive national stance to use web site marketing and international SEO still stands. Britain and America need to expand their markets overseas in the most dynamic way possible. This is it.

regards, Andy

The session will look at the current trends in mobile search marketing across Europe and offer tips and suggestions on how marketers should react to them and exploit the opportunities available through mobile.

The International Search Summit will take place on 13th May at the Barbican in London. Tickets are now on sale at the Early Bird Price. The Summit focuses on international and multilingual search marketing.

There is a great synergy between the two events, as they both focus on the challenges and solutions to globalization and localization. The International Search Summit agenda is yet to be announced however it will cover the key topics of international search, offering advice and insight into how to successfully run a multilingual search marketing campaign.

More details will be released in the coming weeks, when tickets go on sale.

The SEO category is featuring an international SEO post for the first time - The Top 10 Pitfalls of International SEO by Andy Atkins-Krüger has made the final.

Voting is open until 29th January - visit www.semmys.org to choose your favourites.

The United States had the largest search market globally with 22.7 billion searches or about 17% of the total number of searches. China was second on the list with 13.3 billion searches and Japan with 9.2 billion, was third. Search in Russia grew dramatically by 92 percent to increase to 3.3 billion searches.

“The global search market continues to grow at an extraordinary rate, with both highly developed and emerging markets contributing to the strong growth worldwide,” said Jack Flanagan, comScore executive vice president. “Search is clearly becoming a more ubiquitous behavior among Internet users that drives navigation not only directly from search engines but also within sites and across networks. If you equate the advancement of search with the ability of humans to cultivate information, then the world is rapidly becoming a more knowledgeable ecosystem.”

They also cited attempts by the Chinese government to tighten censorship. Google said it was prepared to pull out if it was not permitted to run its local service without further censoring. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called on China “for an explanation” of Google’s allegations. “The ability to operate with confidence in cyberspace is critical in a modern society and economy,” Mrs. Clinton said.

In June 2004 Google bought a 2.4% stake in Baidu, China’s biggest search engine, Baidu. Then, in April 2005, it paid a cyber-squatter for the google.cn domain name. Google entered the China market in 2005 and set up a China research and development center in July 2005. They launched google.com.cn in January of 2006. On their blog they state ‘At the time we made clear that “we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.”

Google appointed Kai-Fu Lee, a Microsoft corporate vice-president, as Google China president and head of the new center which led to a lawsuit. Microsoft settled out of court with Google in December 2005. Terms of the agreement were not released. Dr Lee left Google in September of last year.

The impressive global figures for Facebook aren’t broken down into country specific data, which would give a more accurate picture of how great a threat it poses in different markets and where it needs to improve its localised offering. In a post on Search Engine Land, Andy Atkins-Krüger looks in more detail at Facebook’s chances of real success on a global scale.

Also during the interview, he commented that the smartphone market would have a huge shift, especially in the application related market, when the non-business users become a big part of smartphone user base.

The speakers and the agenda are yet to be confirmed, but the event will once again focus on issues and trends in international seo, ppc and social media which affect search marketers as they carry out online activity across the globe.

This will be the fifth International Search Summit to be held in London - details on past events including speakers, topics and testimonials are available at www.internationalsearchsummit.com.

Tickets are now available at the Super Early Bird Price of just £75.

More details on the May event will be released in January.

Indeed, 79% of them declared owning one, with 20% never letting it go, even when going to the bathroom (about 8%). Moreover, about 23% use it to go on the internet, and this percentage goes up to 41% for the ones having between 12 to 24 years old. However, only about 4%  use their mobile phone to watch TV, but they are most than 62%who use them to take pictures and 31% to make videos.

Finally 36% of the French people believe that their mobile phones are dangerous for their health, 25% doubt about it, and about 25% more think that it hasn’t been enough time to assess what long-terms effects there might be.

Traditionally, web search results pages have actually changed relatively slowly. Then universal search came along, now real search has made that speed almost instant. When corporate marketers realise that “tweets” criticising their brand name can actually appear above their normal first position rank in the web results, we can expect them to want to react and to take some sort of action.

Of course, “real time search”, like other developments before it such as “universal search” has not yet been rolled out to languages other than English - thankfully. You have to expect that it will change its format significantly before the rest of the world receives it which is a good thing.

The big issue is that real time is currently presenting results which I’m guessing people are not actually searching for on Google. For once, you could argue that rather than not filtering spam, Google is actually creating spam links by fetching link results which have little to to with the original intention of the user.

If it stays like this, then a lot of clever people will be rushing offer reputation management solutions to their clients which aim to prevent their competitors and non-fans from littering their brand related pages with comments and utterings that are uncomplimentary.

So for instance, a page about ‘villas’ - could either be villas for sale, to rent, to visit, a guidebook about villas or even just an address list. So for me, semantic web techniques would need to figure out those differences by being really really clever.

That’s right Andy - you’re actually spot on - except for the figuring out part. The bit that’s been confusing me is that we’re not going to let search engines figure it out - well we’re not going to leave to them to guess would be a more correct statement - we’re going to tell them what the meaning of the page is by adding to the coding. Simple as that.

Congratulations to Sean Golliher, Jamie Taylor, Martin Hepp, Jay Myers and Nick Cox for putting together one of the most illuminating panels I’ve seen at SES or any conference for some considerable time. Well planned, well prepared, gripping to the end despite the relatively dry and potentially dull subject. The panel was anything but dull.

As I explained to Sean Golliher after the session, a lot of the discussion during the panel was about the use of vocabularies that describe data to enable machines to better use and position the data for retrieval at query time. But the semantic web industry needs to put its own act in order because it has been using confusing languages or vocabulary itself. What are RDFa, Microformats or Semantic web for instance. The concept is actually simple; the industry has undersold itself to potential users by using too many vocabularies and confusing terms and making it sound like you only had a small chance of understanding what it was all about unless you had a PHD and lived in academia.

According to Sean, this will be corrected by the adoption of the term HTML5. I’m not sure about that because that’s yet another way of describing the same thing. Our of all the descriptions and terms used in the session the one that turned my light on was “rich meta data”. Yes metatags are coming back and are going to be even more interesting than they were before.

Yahoo already supports a lot of the different ‘vocabularies’ of the rich meta data to present events, movies, products and many other categories. Google and Bing are both followers on this topic. The concept is one of labelling. The idea is that each element that needs to be found on the web will have labels that are chosen from a popular vocabulary - such as GoodRelations, Martin Hepp’s creation. And by labelling with rich meta data what that content is, the search engines will be better able to exploit it.

The vocabularies are open source - and in theory, according Nick Cox - search engines will work with all varieties. My takeaway was that that won’t in fact be the case. I see search engine’s choosing the popular vocabularies - such as GoodRelations - so there will be winners and users. However, it would be theoretically possible for a new ‘vocabularly’ to come along and gain sufficient traction to achieve the popularity.

What does this mean for SEO? We all need to start adding ‘rich meta data’ to describe what we are showing on our web pages. Events need to be ‘tagged’ as events, products need to be ‘tagged’ as products and so on. Then the search engines will now what to do. BestBuy.com is reporting a 30% improvement in organic visitors to its site as a result of introducing rich meta data.

Another takeaway? There is a BIG job for SEOs to do in terms of helping clients achieve this in order to help the search engines. If they achieve this, maybe the search engines will give SEOs more credit!

The idea is that whilst agencies like WebCertain, typically generate most of their business from large global players who already have a presence in many global markets and a website in 20+ languages, there is an relatively unexplored opportunity for many small and medium businesses to dramatically re-shape and expand their business by tapping into markets overseas.

Search Engines provided many of the tools you need to start exporting. They enable relatively quick and easy systems to check what levels of demand might be present in which markets for your product or service. They provide advertising and promotional mechanisms which enable potential customers to come across your product or service. And sites such as Ebay, Amazon or Alibaba presents methods whereby you can establish direct contact and makes sales.

Of course, there are still challenges for exporters to deliver their product successfully to customers overseas - one of which is logistics. If your product is small and isn’t likely to generate returns - such as in the fashion industry where customers want to try things on and may want to send them back - then you can use postal systems to deliver your product. If what you’re selling is software, information or tickets - then you won’t even have these distribution problems. But if what you’re selling is multi-million dollar 30-storey high cranes which need 3 ships and a man with a flag to transport them - then your logistics are going to be tougher, though in this last case, you’d still need to find your customer cost-effectively, probably visit and the sales value of the product is likely to make the transport cost less of an issue.

Actually getting paid is more difficult. This is particularly the case for small ticket items - but for these you can often use website mechanisms to take payments - but you do have to choose the right ones. Again, if it’s a multi-million pound project, you’ll happily send a man on a bike with a bucket with which to carry the cash - so the problem goes away.

The panel is moderated by long time international search marketing expert, Bill Hunt. Speakers include Jim Matheson of Success Factors, Japanese specialist Motoko Hunt of AJPR, Guillaume Bouchard of NVI and obviously me.

In the meantime, I’d like to invite everyone who’s interested in export and can make it to Chicago next week to join the session. If you haven’t done so already - the booking form is at:

http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/chicago/registration-details.html

For more information about this first book in Icelandic on Internet Marketing click here

This change will dramatically increase the number of available of domains containing trademark terms, and businesses will have to react quickly to ensure they protect those terms online. It is also likely that they will have to spend significantly to do, as prices for the new domains will be higher than they are at present. Trademark owners will have a sunrise period which will enable them to buy their trademarked domains before they are made available to all, however requirements such as holding the registered trademark in that specific country are likely to be applied.

This is a major step in the globalisation of the web and is expected to encourage more and more people to join the online community. However, it could cause a few headaches for marketers and trademark owners.

Read more at Search Engine Land 

• The internet community is changing - major changes are under way
• forces driving the global economy have shifted
• must focus on international - moving into new markets

The web is the most effective media to open new markets.

The translation industry hasn’t changed over the past 20 years. Traditional workflows related to multilingual translation takes between 5 and 7 days. This is slow and costly so a viable avenue is a Machine Translation (MT) with a human review. Body content can be MT with a human touch: Computer assisted translated. This is a controversial issue but the scale of what is beginning is such to require this kind of assistance.

• There are a number of economies that have survied difficult times - for example chile, argentina
• high tech cities
• a push to support globalisation

Things Latin Americans like ..

• transactional - people who like to do online banking
• communicators - countries that are using the internet as a means of communicating
• Social - Mexico one of the top users
• self improvement - used to search for jobs - here Peru is a leader
• new Web - Chile

there is a very high penetration for different uses - 25% people are using twitter a lot and updating their status online.
Ecommerce: they are buying books and computer accessories CD/DVDs Travel related, the Ecommerce is estimated to be USD 30 billion by 2010
Most companies are not doing SEO - there is a lack of content SMBs find SEO very expensive and cannot see how they will benefit from it

Paid search has a very low CPC - there is a good conversion rate.
The differences in language will tend to be greater for consumer goods - less likely in industry where the vocabulary will be more “standard”
People don’t search using accents.



 Bas van den Beld - Searchcowboys.com

The Dutch use Google - 94%

Localization is the primary factor.

• 17 million people - high density
• Kingdom
• Democracy
• 70% speaks English
• 60% German
• Dutch are very much online 85% are online, mostly youngsters starting from age 4 are online at least once a week
• 5 million use broadband - they watch TV online
• 80% have a mobile phone - getting very important in Holland

Dutch differ amongst each other - poldermodel

• everybody gets a bit of his opinion
• very international focus - it’s historical
• very proud to be dutch
• they like trading
• they like a good deal
• like their privacy

how does this translate to online and search ?

• like to read international websites
• facebook is not the biggest SM site - Hyves is the place to be (now)
• like to comment a lot - website must have interactivity
• they like bargains - they have a dutch version of Ebay and it’s very big MARKTPLAATS.nl has a similar thing to adwords just for this portal
• they don’t like cookies ! Privacy is a big issue they clean cookies once a week
• snooping sites are very popular - they like to peek into other peoples houses

How do they behave online ?

• many small search engines (verticals) 5-6% are using them
• 2nd biggest site is startpagina (3,5%) an opportunity, a must for the dutch market
• 35 out of 100 brands are on Social media, mostly on twitter, Hyves Facebook and blogs - they are there for the campaign and then disappear

KIDS

• 1/3 of 8 year olds has an account on Hyves with more than 50 friends
• MSN most used Social Media  tool
• watch less TV use more online tools
• they are not using much twitter