Since the day I joined SEMPO, I’ve believed in the cause and the role it has in the industry. I was a founding member of SEMPO Japan, which is the first regional group within SEMPO. After I helped establishing SEMPO India and SEMPO Singapore, I was appointed as a chairman of SEMPO Asia in 2007. In 2009, after establishing SEMPO Greater China, we grew to SEMPO APAC, and our activities now reach to Australia and New Zealand.

The great news is that new Board of Directors include members from 7 different countries. I trust that this new BoDs will bring SEMPO to the next stage of truly global organization.

Last week, I was in Japan for business, and was able to attend the first SEMPO Japan meet up of the year in Tokyo. SEMPO gave great presentations about Search, Social Media, and Mobile market, which were very well received and appreciated by the attendees.

SEMPO APAC has a monthly webinar designed for the search marketing practitioners in Asia Pacific region. While the live webinar is provided in English, the Chinese version of the slides are also available for download for the participants from China.

The groups in other regions such as UK, Canada, Scandinavia, and Spain are organizing wonderful activities, too. In US, members in cities such as New York, Boston, Atlanta and San Francisco also have exciting events coming up this year. SEMPO is not only for agencies but also great for in-house people. In fact, SEMPO’s In-House Committee is one of the biggest and most active groups we have.

I hope that you’ll check out SEMPO to see if you find anything you are interested in. If you have any questions or comments for SEMPO, let us know. (info@sempo.org)

On July 7th, Google Japan posted a logo using Marc Chagall’s art.

He was born on July 7, 1887.

User generated content is great, but it’s also true that the benefits of Web2.0 can also become issues and problems to the site owners and users. Beside the obvious issues such as:

• too much information makes it difficult to find what you are looking for,
• many conflicting information (not sure what to believe),
• difficult to manage and to control new content,

I think it’s a bigger problem in Japan because of their tendency to:

• believe what they read, especially on the popular sites and the authoritative sites,
• believe that many user generated content are monitored and trustworthy,
• believe that it’s secure and safe,

and sadly, the anonymity side of these application brings the worst of some people, which leads to problems like this bomb threat on Wikipedia, and hate messages on blogs and rapidly growing unofficial school sites.

Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) has “Web2.0 study group”. I’ve read their meeting minutes. The discussion has been focused on how to implement Web 2.0 application rather than the issues and the problems with them. MIC also has the Online Information Security site, which talks about the virus, spam mails, online shopping, security, privacy, phishing, etc., but nothing about the user generated content.

I value and believe in the freedom of speech, but I’m also concerned about these problems, which will only increase in near future, and won’t go away. Is it a site owner’s responsibility to monitor and manage the content? Maybe to the certain level, but if they over do it, it would kill what great about these applications.

Last year, Cabinet Office Government of Japan (CAO) conducted a survey about the Internet Security Awareness. It shows that 45% of people has concern about the safety of Internet, mainly about the scams and the security issues. I thought it was interesting that the online security issues related to dating sites and community sites were limited to children under 18 on that survey. More than 70% of people think that the site owner is responsible to monitor and manage the content.

The Internet penetration rate in Japan is very high (70%). However, especially in a country side and for older generations, it can still be a little intimidating. To help these people using Internet, I saw places like City Hall, Legal Affairs Bureau and Tax Agency set up several PCs in the office for people to file paper works online with the assistance of office staffs.

I also realized that something never change. E-mail may replaced written letters in many cases, but in occasions like weddings and funerals, it’s still very important to many people to follow the traditional manners. The problem is that younger generations have no idea of how to go about it, and that’s when Internet comes in handy. In fact, those how-to websites in the special occasions and forums are very popular in Japan. You don’t want to give only 5,000yen, when you are expected to give 10,000yen, and make sure that a ribbon on the package points the right way. People are going to talk, and you know how quickly those talks would spread!

One day at a restaurant, I saw a discount info on a table. In US, it’s too late for that day, and hope to remember to access the site to print out a coupon for the next time. But in Japan, you can scan the QR code on the discount ad on a table with your cell phone, and show what comes up at the register to receive the discount. In many occasions, I was reminded how Japanese businesses were willing to make things easier for customers. To be successful in Japanese market, improving the usability of your website is definitely one of the key points.

At larger SESs (London, New York, etc.), this session is usually broken up in 2 sessions, one for Asia-Pacific and the other for the rest of the world. Asia-Pacific session is great for people interested in this area of market. We give lots of statistics, points to keep in mind in doing business in these markets, etc.

I try to update my presentation for each conference. It’s quite a challenge to create a good presentation with good amount of information, which is not boring at the same time. I think that some of the information, which are very much “ordinary” to me as I’ve been doing this work for more than 10 years, can be very valuable to others who are new to the business in Japanese market. So I try to go back to the basic and review the whole Japanese SEO/SEM processes and the Japan market, and include them to the presentation as well.

Right now, I’m challenging myself to reduce the number of slides, and considering to add some interesting “stories” to the presentation. Or… should I stick to the fact???

With Internet technology, the size of the company or the location of the office no longer limit your market to your local area or just in US. In fact, at SES Chicago, they had 2 “Search Around The World” sessions, one for Asia-Pacific and the other for Europe and Latin America. All sessions, including my presentation, are well covered in many blogs.

I’m an active member of SEMPO. We had a round table Q&A session with engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) in the evening of the 1st day. SEMPO members met engines to ask any questions that they may have in a relaxed / casual setting. I heard many good feedback from the attendees. We’d like to bring it to other conferences and events where SEMPO goes.

As you may know, we use 4 different character sets (Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji and Roma-ji) to write. Many words can be written using any of these character sets and all 4 sets can be used in one sentence. There are 50K+ Kanji characters, and children learn about 2K of them by the 9th grade. When I type in Japanese using PC, I enter words phonetically using alphabet, and select Kanji character I like to use from the choices that the software gives me. Over the years, I leaned many Kanji characters that I didn’t learn at school from doing this process. On the other hand, when I hand-write, I can’t remember how to write some of the Kanji characters that I learned in school. When I have this problem, I open note pad on my PC and type a word to show the character. I know… really embarrassing.

I just read an article about the research done by the Agency for Cultural Affairs of Japan about the Japanese language skill of Japanese living in Japan. It shows that many of the survey participants, who often use PC to write, are experiencing the same changes that I am experiencing. 60.6% of them said that they look up printed dictionary, 35.5% said that they use Kanji dictionary software on mobile phone, and 21.3% said that they type it on PC, when they can’t remember the character when hand-writing.

What’s interesting is that most of them said that they use more Kanji when they write using software on PC, word processor, etc. compared to when they hand-write. This could mean that more words in Kanji character are used as the search words…