Motoko’s weblog

I visited Beijing back in June during the SEMPO Asia Tour, and was amazed – again – by the contrast of modern vs. traditional, Asian vs. Western, and cheap vs. luxury this city had. Just like New York doesn’t really represent the average city in America, and the life in Tokyo can be very much different from the life in Okinawa, I am aware that Beijing certainly isn’t a typical city in China. Although Chinese economy has grown tremendously in the past 10 years, “Made in China” still represents “cheap” in both “inexpensive” and “low quality” products to many of us. And you can certainly go cheap in Beijing by going to shopping malls like Pearl Market and Silk Market. But, most people I saw at these markets were either tourists or older local people. Where do young and successful women go shopping in Beijing?

Beijing is one of the biggest metropolitan cities in the world after all, they do have many high-end Western brand shops such as Louis Vuitton, Nike, Clinique, etc., it’s like walking down the 5th Ave in Manhattan. The crazy thing was that after adding taxes, duties, shipping, etc. etc. the price of most items were at least twice as much as what we’d pay for it in US! China Daily reported that China’s online shopping jumped 128.5% in 2008 to more than US$17 billion. An article Continue Reading »

Baidu.com announced the release of analytics tool, “Baidu Statistics”. This is the first analytics tool to be offered in Chinese search engine industry.

With “Baidu Statistics”, you can track and analyze the site user behaviors on site, which data can be very useful to improve the marketing activities online. The function includes, traffic analyzer, source analyzer, conversion analyzer and site analyzer, and it gives 20+ reports with graphs. The tool also work with the advertising campaigns Continue Reading »

I had a pleasure of interviewing Dr. Mathew McDougall of Sino Tech Group in Beijing about the state of search market in China. Being a Westerner living in China, he has a great insight about how the business works in China and how the foreighn companies hit & miss trying to tap into the market there.

Q1. How long have you worked in the search marketing industry?   What’s the biggest changes you’ve seen over the years related to the industry?

I have worked in the technology industry for 18 years, specially in Search for about  the last 8 of those. The landscape in this time has seen a lot of consolidation of company’s, the cleaning up of black hat practices (in some mature markets) and the evolving of Search into a legitimate digital channel by marketers (and agency’s) Continue Reading »

Since SES Chicago 2007, I had a pleasure of doing “Search Around The World” session with some of the best search engine marketers such as Mr. TR Harrington of Darwinmarketing. And, I was delighted when I had a chance to interview him about fast growing Chinese market.

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. Continue Reading »