Motoko’s weblog

When I was speaking at SES London, I started to lose my voice after 5 min. or so in. Yes, it’s just my luck. I apologize to people came to the session, I didn’t sound good at all. While I was speaking, I couldn’t help myself but calling “riiiiicolaaaaa” in my head. Now, that’s the power of advertising and marketing, isn’t it? The search is great, and it’s going to be even better, but in my opinion, it will never replace TV ads. Through the search, the businesses can only connect to people if and when they happen to search what you offer. On the other hand, TV ads push what they want you to know, again and again. Then I was thinking, what would be the closest thing on Internet to TV ads… Perhaps it’s the banner ads, but we all know that many banner ads are ignored, people skip right over the ads and read what they want to read on the page. It’s like when people skip TV commercials and surf channels. Those paid ads can be effective, then again, it only works when someone is searching for it. What works really well and similar to TV commercials maybe those “word-of-mouth” marketing and ads. It’s what they talk about on blogs and what’s on videos that your friends send you. You may not be searching for it, but it comes to your way from your friends and your favorite bloggers in the form of text (blog), images and videos. The thing is that while you may not always buy things you see on TV, you are more likely to try something that your friends recommend.

According to Yano Financial, “Kuchikomi blog” (word-of-mouth blog) advertising market in Japan grew to more than 3 billion yen market in 2007 from 0.9 billion yen market in 2006. Their another survey shows that more than 80% of net users have actively taken the advise/information they got through “word-of-mouth” on the net. Almost 50% of female in 30s responded that they talk to other people about their experiences and opinions about the products and the services that they purchased. In 2008, success of ad campaign may be up to how well you incorporate word-of-mouth campaign into your cross marketing strategies.

It’s been 3 weeks since Baidu officially opened its services in Japan after 10months of beta phase. While the news has been picked up by some search industry media, I haven’t heard any user side feedbacks. None of my friends in Japan have tried the search at Baidu, yet. So, the question is… “Will Baidu gain market share in Japan?

During the bata phase, Baidu’s robot crawled Japanese websites like crazy. It was so crazy that many site owners set a tag to avoid Baidu robot from crawling their sites. Since its official opening, they decreased the frequency of robot crawling, and some owners may already switched to let it crawl the site, but still Baidu’s index volume is probably far less than that of Yahoo Japan and Google Japan, which may be translated as “Baidu’s search results may be completely different from what you get from Yahoo or Google”.

Now, there are other reasons why Baidu may give you a different search results, i.e.; links doesn’t help much, but what’s most interesting to me is that their engine was developed in a double-byte character country, China, and according to Baidu Japan’s executive, they’ve refined the engine so that it understands the relevance between the search words and the page content, and that’s not necessarily by picking up the keyword in content. Both Google and Yahoo have been working on this, too, at their Japan lab, but not much more than picking up the keywords on page. I’m curious to see how well Baidu’s engine can grasp the content and ranks the pages accordingly.

In Japan, we used to have several search engines including some Japan’s original engines, and there was a time when all of them were doing well. However, after we lost engines such as Netscape, AltaVista and Lycos, and engines like goo and infoseek decided to go with Google, Japan’s search market has been dominated by Yahoo and Google for years. It’s also the fact that the algorithm of Yahoo and Google has become very similar, and as a result, you get exactly same or similar search results no matter which search engines you use. It can’t be good for the users.

I think that Baidu is on a right track by trying to give different search results to the search users. If their search results are different from what you get from Yahoo and Google, “and” the results are highly relevant to what you are looking for, I think that they have a good chance of gaining a market share in Japan.

2 weeks after Google released its Google Social Graph API, Yahoo Japan opened “Yahoo Profile” service. The service integrates their Social Networking Service, Yahoo Days’ profile pages and Open ID user profiles. On Yahoo Profile page, you’ll see friends list, and feeds in addition to profile information. It looks much like SNS’s member top page.

Yahoo Days members aren’t as active as other popular SNSs in Japan such as mixi and Grree, and if and how many users they can maintain and hopefully gain in up coming months are Continue Reading »