Please visit the post “Interview with Motoko Hunt about Search Around the World & SES Chicago 2008“.

Yesterday, I did Bruce Clay’s SEM Synergy interview, and talked about Search Market in Japan. It will be broadcasted on Webmaster Radio on Wednesday, November 5 at 12:00pm. MP3 file can be downloaded after the show.

It is graet to see that more people are interested in Asian market now. Asia is already the largest market online, and at the same time, it is still growing at very quickly. I can see why US and European businesses are interested in the region especially China, India and Japan. The Asian culture seems to be so much different from Western cultures, perhaps it can be intimidating at the beginning. The good news is that you have an access to market specialists at events such as SES Chicago and on Internet (lots of blogs specialized in different markets). I hope to do my part in successfully bringing non-Asian businesses to Japan and other parts of Asia through search marketing.

**********     **********     **********

Interview: Motoko Hunt (Founder, Japanese Search Marketing Strategist)

One of the more enjoyable things we get to do on the ‘Digital Marketing Inner Circle” is interview interesting people I meet and get to know by being involved with the industry. This interview is with Motoko Hunt, Founder and Japanese Search Marketing Strategist. Born and raised in Japan, Motoko is now the chair of SEMPO Asia and has been the co-chair of SEMPO Japan since 2005.  She’s been active in this industry for at least ten years and seen a lot of changes happen.  Over the years she has found her niche in Japanese Search Marketing, including SEO and Paid campaign. I was fortunate to be able to take of her time and posed a number of questions to her.

Q: How did you become involved in the search industry?

Back in mid 90’s, I used to localize US companies websites and handing their online marketing such as site registrations, banner ads and press releases targeting Japanese market. As the market shifted and technology advanced, I started to focus on the SEO/SEM, and established AJPR in 1998.

Q: How can you use search to benefit smaller clients?

Apart from the budget size and maybe the manpower, the great thing about the search marketing is that it’s a fair game to everyone regardless of the company size. The search marketing can expand their market reach (from local to nationwide or even worldwide), improve the communication with their existing and potential clients, and help business owners to make an efficient and smarter decisions on investment. I believe that the search is the most effective marketing tool for your money, if you execute it right.

Q: Do you think it’s more difficult to keep up with industry trends in search marketing than it was a year ago? Why or why not?

I don’t think it’s more difficult, but I think that the type of the changes in trends are different in recent years compared to what we experienced in past. Up until a few years ago, the trends were mostly about the engines and the search. Now, integration of the different marketing outlets (web, search, social media, press releases, off line ads, etc) became more important than ever. It’s not just about SEO or Paid campaigns anymore. It’s like, “Ok, we have some experiences with the search marketing, and know how it can benefit us. Now it’s the time to coordinate it with other marketing outlets to create a campaign that will really benefit the business.”

Q: Tell us about a successful search marketing campaign that you’ve run…what made it work? What made it fun? How did it benefit the client?

One of the success stories of my clients is that they increased the conversion rate from the website by 130% within 6 months after the campaign started. We optimized the site to rank within top 3 in both Yahoo Japan and Google Japan with 95% of their target keywords, improved the landing page content and the internal linking. The fun part was being able to show the great results in ranking, increasing number of accesses to the site from search, and the conversion rate to the client to make them happy and to feel that they made the right choice to invest in the search marketing.

Q: How important is it to be “visible” in the industry these days?

Very important even if you are only targeting the local market. Various survey results show that most people search the web to obtain the information about the services or products that they plan to purchase. More visible you are in search, better chance you have to interact with the potential customers to influence their buying decision. Even in the markets where people still transact off-line, they do research online. I think visibility in the industry is very important.  Many potential customers tend to gravitate to “industry experts” they see at the various conferences.  Even more important is to have your thought leadership represented with blogs and articles.

Q: How does link building fit into social media? Does PPC fit in at all with what you do?

I don’t like using social media as a link building platform to improve your PR. When people use it to build links, it often leads to link spam, and destroy the user experience. If the users don’t like what they experienced there, they won’t come back, and it would defeats the whole purpose of “social media”. The links to your site/pages in social media really become valuable when the links are put on the page content such as blog body from a relevant site, and not in the comment section. The paid campaign could bring some successes through both keyword match and the content match on social media sites. Be selective with which social media sites to run your content match campaign.

Q: Have you used any “questionable” techniques in search marketing?

Nope. I don’t chase the algorithm, either.

Q: What industry trend leaves you cold and why?

Not a particular trend, but when a new trend comes in town, many people stop what they were doing and start to chase that new trend. It frustrates me. New trend simply means there is one more thing that you may need to consider. Those companies have successful website and the paid campaign know the importance of covering the basics and of having a solid project goal.

Q: What is the best part of your workday and why?

End of the day? LOL. One of the best part of my workday is to reporting the improved results to the clients. SEO and SEM are continuous efforts as the market changes and your competitors always improving their sites and campaigns, it’s very important to be able to bring the continuous improvements to all aspects of the success measurements such as ranking, conversion rates, and saving client’s money.

Q: What advice would you give to young women trying to make a name for themselves in SEO right now?

I’ll give the same advice that I give to my son and daughter. Whatever you decide to do, work hard and study hard to become very good at what you do. There’s no short cut. Networking definitely helps especially in this industry, but if you don’t have the knowledge and the skills, you won’t go much far. Believe in yourself, motivate yourself and push yourself. You are your best cheerleader!  A blog is often a great way to start making a name for yourself.  If your ideas resonate with people they will follow you and the more you are followed the greater your exposure.

Since Google entered in Korean market in 2005, their search market share has been kept small at 5% level. Not even Google has been able to take the market share from Korea’s number 1 search site, Naver.

Google has R&D Center in Japan and China, both of which markets they were able to gain the market share in recent years. Now, Google ranks at #2 in both Japan and China. Being able to provide the services that work in each market through R&D Center rather than to push the same model used in US looks like the key to their success in Asian market.

Not getting good search results was the top reason for using multiple search engines. About 25% said that what they want to search makes difference in which engines to use. Instead of looking at the page 2, they go to next search engine to search the same keyword phrase. (People looking for shopping and entertainment related information tend to use Yahoo, maybe? I know that B to B businesses usually do better with Google Japan.)

This results mean that if you are targeting Japan market, you need to do well (both SEO and PPC) with both Yahoo Japan and Google Japan, and not just one of them. It also shows that people are reading the search results closely instead of clicking what comes up at #1 or #2 automatically. Check your page description in search results for your target keywords to make sure it has a good description of the page.

This is Yahoo’s logo cheering for Japanese team. Japan’s Matsuda won bronze medal in the 200-meter butterfly.

This is Google Japan’s logo on top page today. Google.com has a logo with monkey on rings. It looks that they are using animals from Chinese Astrology.

  1. What is the focus of your presentation at SES San Jose?

There are so many interesting things happening internationally that the challenge for the speakers on this panel is choosing a select few!

I think there are a few key topics to this presentation: namely what is happening online in China, some of the key companies and trends, and how is search different in China, discussing some of the unique differences about Chinese search vs. other markets.

While some aspects of Search are generally universal, each market and particularly the Asian markets like China, Japan (as I learned from Motoko) and Korea have both language and cultural differences that Search expresses in unique ways as compared to the West.

2. Should Western companies consider doing SNS and/or mobile integration projects?

As search at some level is a reflection of what online users are saying and doing, one of the early topics of my presentation focuses on Social Media in China and the incredible story of TenCent, a Chinese company that that leveraged instant messenger (IM) as the core focus of its strategy to become…

…a leading portal,
…the leading blog site,
…the leading casual games site,
…and one of the few existing Chinese companies with the potential to become a future player in Search.

What is particularly interesting for Western companies is that not many of them even found a way to monetize IM yet TenCent ($524M ‘07) is much further down the road to success than a comparable social network like Facebook (roughly $37M ’07) at this point.

Tapping into social trends and understanding culture is not easy.  If your company is considering this, be prepared to face some really strong, well-financed and savvy local competitors.  There are still opportunities but in many ways China is ahead of (and different from) the West on this trend.

3. What do you hope that attendees will go home with from the session?

I hope that the audience will learn a few things about China’s online market, primarily the key differences and opportunities that we see from a search perspective and even how those business opportunities reach beyond search.  Mobile search and web surfing in China are interesting but not there yet.

4. You’ve been on the panel of Search Around the World session at some of the SESs in past. Have you noticed any differences in audience’s interests in China/Asia over time or by region?

The only thing that is consistent in China at this point is change ;).

The leaders in terms of market share within a vertical (i.e. Portals) are relatively unchanged; however, what we are seeing overall is a growing shift in dollars from display to search (37% in ’07 to 51% predicted by ’10) and a likewise shift in dollars from traditional to digital media.

The latter shift in the market is primarily driven by larger advertising agencies, both global giants and large, local players.  Based on publicly announced digital advertising target growth rates in China, if agencies come close to their targets it should have a material impact on the entire online advertising value chain in the next couple years.

5. What are some of the typical mistakes that Western companies make when trying to enter Chinese market?

Many of the Western failures we’ve witnessed in China are the result of applying strategies that led to market success in the West would naturally lead to success in China.

The Chinese are not impressed that you are #1 in Germany or the U.S.  If you build a big size company in mainland China, they are relatively impressed; however, buying the present China local market leader is no guarantee for future business success in China.

As Yahoo and eBay China learned through their respective acquisition strategies.  Being #1 and staying #1 in a rapidly developing market is no easy task and it needs to be managed locally, not from the international headquarters.

6. What are the challenges that Western companies would face in doing SEO/SEM in Chinese market?  - Any advice to people or companies considering to do business with China?

The China is a market is developing too fast to be managed internationally.  That strategy has often failed in recent years.

Like Japan, China is not a market you can easily enter with just a few meetings, a handshake or an acquisition and then centralize decision making back to the company’s headquarters abroad.

If the Chinese are not sure if you are going to be in China long term, they will not believe it is worth investing the time to develop a relationship with you.  Relationships are developed more carefully in China and other Asian cultures relative to the West.

Instead, we recommend Western companies try to identify potential local partners who have a history of success, understand the unique ways that business is done locally, and have enough international business practices and shared culture that they can communicate effectively with you.

Working with a local partner(s) that has strong local knowledge and with whom you share a trusted intermediary is highly advisable.  You will need to trust your local Chinese partners to make decisions.  Given the speed of the market, the decision making process needs to be pushed out to the local decision makers.

7. What is your view of Search market in China in 2 years?

What I like about Search in China is that a number of key growth drivers appear likely to remain strong in the years ahead.

Access to new desirable content (i.e. latest peer to peer product recommendations) should be a key driver.  Related to my earlier comments on Chinese users habits of publishing more relative to other markets, new content will be a key driver for search as more content needs both organization and visibility.

The last and probably pretty obvious driver is the sheer number of online users potential (1.3B) and relatively small penetration (<20%, 230M) means that on the back of just new online users, unless we witness.

One key factor is the growth just within the online user population with more than 70% of those users able to access with broadband.  Broadband enables both more rich experiences but just as importantly for regular search users a broadband connection will also provide faster access to content that search users seek.

The increased user base, significant growth in websites and web pages, high search adoption and activity among user base.

8. I know that you live in China now, but what did bring you to there at first?

First was curiosity.  I’d read a few books in high school by author James Clavell, whose stories focused on different parts of Asia.  I always thought the culture and societies of the East were most interesting.

Second was opportunity.  After University, one of my roommates moved directly to Beijing in ’93.  I went to visit him the following summer in ’94.  I saw Shanghai when there was only the Pearl Tower in Pudong, a far cry from today’s skyscraper filled skyline of China’s and the world’s leading financial institutions.

9. What do you miss most about things back home?

For Hearts and Minds, People first.  Technology simply cannot replace being in someones presence that is of great importance be it family or friend.

For Body, Cheese steaks, Soft Pretzels and Burritos.   Food is home on many different levels.

10. What are you looking forward most from SES San Jose?

Primarily I really look forward to being surrounded by some really talented and passionate people who like to share knowledge.

As a close second to that, I ALWAYS look forward to whether Kevin Ryan will comment on my ‘shooting’ glasses if he gets a chance to introduce me.

I’d like to thank TR for sharing very interesting insights about Chinese market. I think many issues he pointed out are very informative to not only SEO/SEM businesses, but also to anyone who consider doing business with China.

See you in San Jose, TR!

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

He was born on July 7, 1887.

These are all good points, and not just for Japanese people, but I think all of us have experienced the same frustrations at some point in time. I see issues like #2 (heavy image files), #4 (PDF file), “#10 (contact info) and #20 (English menus) all the time when I review localized corporate websites.

1. The site content has not been updated for months
People are looking for fresh content. There’s no excuses for corporate websites for not updating the site regularly. What year is the copyright on your site?

2. Using image files that are too big/heavy
Keep in mind that when you are in Japan, it takes longer to download the sites hosted outside Japan. Even though many of them are on broadband, I still hear people complaining about timing out when download pages and especially the files.

3. Websites with “under construction” pages
The site/page shouldn’t go live until it’s completed!

4. PDF file opens/downloads when click the link
It is very annoying, when you are expecting to go to another page, but file starts to download instead. I’ve seen some “localized” websites using this function, avoiding to deal with pages with double byte characters, I guess, but chances are, they cancel the download and leave the site. By the way, handling Japanese characters is not complicated at all.

5. Everything is in Flash (especially on index page)
All flash index page with no “skip intro” or any text links to other pages are like traps, and out of the question! Many non-Japanese corporate sites forget to localize flash content into Japanese.

6. Pop Up windows
Some pop-ups actually improve the usability, but don’t over do it.

7. Keep clicking the links, but can never get to the information looking for
It’s like the never ending automated phone greeting, isn’t it? You click a link hoping to see the information page, but next page has more links for you to select. In some cases, the link brings you back to the page you’ve been already, or want you to e-mail them for information. I bet some of the site owners never actually used their sites.

8. No pages with product/service list
I guess they are not in business to sell their products or services. :))

9. Site suddenly makes noise or plays music without warning
We don’t need websites to work as an alarm clock. People in Japan have desks right next to each other without partitions in many offices in Japan. Loud beeping sound from the website when your boss is on an important call could mean a pay-cut or another unpaid overtime.

10. No contact information
It speaks loudly how important the customers are to the corporate, doesn’t it? If you are afraid of SPAM, at least set up a contact form.

11. Can’t identify what the site is about
I don’t think that the site owner knows it, either. LOL
Poorly translated sites often have this problem. Don’t trust the translators. Don’t let your friend who speaks in Japanese translate the content. Being Japanese or able to speak in Japanese doesn’t mean that he/she is a good writer/editor.

12. No product/service information on site
The era of website functioning as a corporate brochure ended long ago!

13. Site changes the browser size
Don’t control my browser. I can adjust the size IF I want to.

14. No on-site search
Especially with a large site, where it’s difficult to find the information, the on-site search is very important. If you set up a on-site search, be sure to check some of the search results to make sure that the pages you want people to see shows up in the results. By the way, don’t think that it’s easy to find the information on your site. People don’t know how your site is set up as well as you do.

15. Map of office location is not clear
They pretend that they want people to visit the office, but not really?

16. Using harsh colors (bright yellow, red, etc.)
The soft/comfort colors are “IN” in Japan now. Change the color scheme for Japanese site.

17. Small text
I saw a guy using magnifying glass to read message on his Blackberry. Hope I’ll never have to put a magnifying glass on my PC monitor. It’s just sad… Hate getting old. lol
Many Japanese websites now offer buttons to change the text size on their site.

18. Official corporate blogs with too many inside jokes and stories
Official corporate blogs are not office cafeteria, and should stick with the topics suitable for public audience.

19. No right click
Another example of site owners worrying too much about protecting themselves and forgetting about the usability. Remember, the right click has more functions than to grab images.

20. Site menus in English
If you are serious about going after the Japanese market, show 100% commitment. Things like English menus only tell the visitors that you are not serious about their business. I hope I won’t see another site with contents on image files (translated text on image files) either… but chances are I will find them.

As said, all the issues are reasonable and would’ve been prevented if they create the sites with users in mind. Once the people come to your site, the usability of the site could make or brake the success of your web business.

The mobile Internet and mobile search started back in the ’90s in Japan when Japan’s NTT DoCoMo created “i-Mode” service, which was to provide a mobile Internet browser and the connection to view mobile websites from DoCoMo’s cell phone. The mobile Internet market has grown rapidly in Japan since then, and now the stats show that there are more access to Internet from mobile than from PC in Japan. Many Japanese conduct all of their Internet activities from mobile!

Currently, the mobile Internet service is available from multiple service providers. The tricky part is that there are 3 major standards for mobile web (i-mode, ez-web and Vodafone), and a site made for i-mode may not show up correctly in other browsers. It is possible to create one mobile web site that can be seen correctly on all three browsers, so do consult with the professionals when you are ready to create one.

Once you have a mobile site, you’d want to be found by mobile users, right? What you may want to note is that each service provider has a set of “official mobile sites” including an official search engine. As I mentioned above Softbank owns Yahoo Japan, therefore, Yahoo is the official search engine for iPhone in Japan. Google is the official search engine for KDDI’s “au”. The mobile users can also access to “non-official” mobile sites, which means that iPhone users can also use Google’s mobile search. However, it’s most likely that Yahoo would be their primary search engine. In order to improve the search rankings, you can optimize your mobile site. Since mobile search engines have different algorithms, the way you optimize the mobile sites is different from what you do with PC web sites.

The paid ad placements are also available through Google and Yahoo/Overture. The type of keywords, and number of keywords used with mobile search can be quite different from what you see with PC version of search engines so you should always conduct the mobile keyword research to create a list of words. You need to create a different set of ads, too, not just because mobile ads tend to have smaller ad space, but also because the search intent of mobile users are usually different from that of PC search users.

Don’t take a mobile search project as a twin-sister of your existing web search project. It’s a different animal, and should be taken seriously.

But we rarely see them on Social Networking Sites or blogs. Where do they go and what are they doing on Internet?

NetRatings research shows that “finance” related sites and “news” related sites are very popular among 50+ people in Japan. They also like to visit travel related sites. I’m sure that this trend will change as younger generations who are all over SNS sites grows into the 50s and beyond, but for now, if you are after 50+ market, check out the finance, investments, news and travel sites to see how you can reach them.

According to Seed Planning’s report, the mobile advertising will become 100 billion yen (US$1 billion) market in 2008 in Japan from 81.5 billion yen in 2007. The number includes all of the advertising activities on mobile platform such as banner ads, affiliate ads, search paid ads and mailing ads. If it continues to grow at the same pace, the mobile advertising market will reach 250 billion yen by 2011.

The similar advertising is available for both PC version of the web and mobile version of the web. However, what works on PC market doesn’t always work the best with mobile market. For example, the report shows that the e-mail ads work better with mobile market than PC market. To run a successful advertising against mobile market, the advertisers must be flexible in selecting what style of advertising works the best for them instead of just re-cycling the same information and the practices they used in PC market.

What makes Imakore different from other bookmarking services is the function lets users to write and to read the comments right on the bookmarked page. With the tool bar, you can see how many Imakore users are on the same page at the same time, and read other users comments as well as leave the comments on the “particular area of the page” where you want to comment. It’s like a bookmarking version of Pop-up video. It’s definitely a fun way to bookmark pages and to socialize with other users.

Many people use the social bookmarking services in both US and Japan, but I sometimes wonder what percentage of bookmarked sites are actually shared with other users. I mean, it seems that most of the users bookmark their favorite sites but don’t care to see the sites bookmarked by others. There are only a few bookmarking sites appear in the search results. I think that Imakore found a way to make it easier to share the bookmarks.

Sure, there’s a concern about what people may comment. You don’t want to see bunch of “Woo, this is funny!” or “OMG, it’s crazy” kind of comments over and over. But when you come across with a site with some clever comments that make you laugh or go “hmmmmm”, it’d show the value and I can see that people may be hooked on this type of service.

By the way, what made me laugh when I first landed this website was their demo on the top page. It shows someone searching “Yahoo” in Google to go to Yahoo site. LOL!

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.

goo Research and Internet.com’s survey results show that people started to lose interests in SNS sites about 10 months ago. Since mixi opened in February 2004, has the SNS market in Japan peaked out already? If so, what do SNS sites need to do to survive or even to increase active users?

With my experience, it was fun to be invited and to invite friends to join these sites at the beginning. Till then, I was visiting lots of websites owned by my friends to communicate by posting comments on their BBSs. It was getting to be a lot of work, and was definitely time consuming. When mixi opened in 2004, we invited each other to join so that we can all communicate at one place. It was great. Then we started to join other SNS sites. I’m now registered at 20+ social media sites. Trying to check in and update these sites is like 2003 all over again. Since there aren’t much differences among these SNS sites, you just need 1 or 2 sites where most of your friends and contacts are. And, I’m sure that’s what many SNS users in Japan are thinking. If you are not mixi, differentiating your services from others is the key to success or survival in next 12 months. That fact that many Japanese are now looking into “specialized SNS sites” (i.e., music only, local area specific, or age specific) backs up my point. Sure, these sites may never become as big as mixi or Gree, but they would probably have more active user rate.

The new Google Japan’s top page has 4 tabs below the search box. Each tab has several links with icon to some of their popular pages and tools such as Gmail, YouTube, Image search, Blog search and Calender. According to Google, the change was made in response to many feed backs from the users complaining the difficulty of finding tools and pages within Google. (Like Google.com, there were links to these tools and pages on the left top corner of the page, but not visible enough for Japanese users, I guess…)

I think this is a huge change for Google, not because of the layout change, but because it can be translated as their first step into a portal site. In fact, their tools such as Google map and Google earth, and YouTube acquisition have helped them becoming the #2 property in Japan for the first time in history last year. While most of the people still come to Google to search, other tools and services are definitely driving the access to the site.

Still, I’m a bit sad to see this change…

Many of them said that they e-mail/text in a tub, and also listen to the music with cell phone. Though not many said that they browse web sites at this time, I’m sure it will catch up especially since many of them are already checking e-mails. All they need is to receive some e-mails from friends about some interesting sites. They may soon searching a product they just saw on TV commercials before they came to take a bath. It’s a known fact that people are most likely to be on Internet after 10pm at home in Japan, but this mobile Internet trend is already changing that data.

Anyway, being water resistant got to be one of the must-have features of cell phone in Japan.

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.

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.

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.

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 (more…)

Late last year, Japanese government put out a statement requesting all the mobile service providers to use a filtering system to stop children under 18 to access certain sites*. And, in early December, Japanese Telecommunications Carriers Association and (more…)

Yahoo Japan entered the new year with their new home page, which has a stronger feel of the portal site than a search site. In fact, they got rid of the category list (more…)

According to the survey, BBS (bulletin board services), Net auction and surprisingly the Video sharing lost some popularity in 2007 from the previous year. (more…)

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, (more…)

(Sorry for not posting any new articles here for a while. November has been a really crazy month.)

More information about SES Tokyo 2008.

The longer answer to the question is…

Currently, there are 2 domain extensions available for Japan, “.xx.jp (such as .co.jp for companies and .ac.jp for schools)” and “.jp”. In order to obtain “.xx.jp” (more…)

NetRatings’ reported last year that more than 2 million Japanese were using YouTube (more…)

More and more people are accessing Internet from their cell phones. In June 2006, research by Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication showed that there were more mobile Internet users (approx. 69.23mil) than PC Internet users (more…)

• Is site (pages) in Japanese?
• Is site (pages) indexed by Google and Yahoo Japan?

While site/pages being indexed by the search engines is important, (more…)