The Mobile Marketing Association announced the results of its Annual Global Mobile Attitude and Usage Study conducted in 2008. The markets surveyed in the Asia Pacific segment of the study include: Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Singapore and South [...]]]> The Mobile Marketing Association announced the results of its Annual Global Mobile Attitude and Usage Study conducted in 2008. The markets surveyed in the Asia Pacific segment of the study include: Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Singapore and South Korea. It shows the strong market opportunity for mobile marketers in APAC region.

The study’s key findings for the selected Asia Pacific markets include:

* Overall, heavy penetration and reliance on mobile phones combine with strong feature and mobile web usage in these regions to indicate strong market opportunity for mobile marketers.
o In total, the top five mobile phone features used are non-voice in nature and include camera, games, text messaging, saving images to a photo library and MP3 player.
o Strong use of text messaging and mobile web (61% and 36% overall respectively) indicates mobile phone users in these regions are willing to view their mobile devices as full scale communication devices not restricted to voice services.

* Over one-third report using mobile web and one-in-five use it on a weekly basis.
o Common applications include news, browsing the internet, accessing mobile specific sites, and visiting sites related to music, weather and entertainment.

* Overall receptiveness and interest in opting-in to mobile marketing efforts is fairly strong; nearly half (48%) are moderately/highly interested in mobile marketing and more than half are somewhat/highly likely to opt-in to mobile marketing efforts.
o Applications that garner the greatest interest include mobile coupon, status alerts regarding current accounts or products owned and alerts for special sales and discounts.

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Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) announced its launch of SEMPO APAC Committee.

SEMPO APAC plans and organizes SEMPO activities in the Asia-Pacific region to educate the market, grow membership and awareness of the Online & Search Marketing Industry, as [...]]]> Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) announced its launch of SEMPO APAC Committee.

SEMPO APAC plans and organizes SEMPO activities in the Asia-Pacific region to educate the market, grow membership and awareness of the Online & Search Marketing Industry, as well as to provide support to working groups under SEMPO APAC. Currently the committee has volunteers from China, Japan, Hong Kong, India, Singapore, Jakarta, Australia and the US. Committee representatives are highly regarded industry professionals in each market, and are frequent speakers at local industry events.

SEMPO APAC’s recent activities include a series of webinars, seminars, networking meetings, an Asia tour with SEMPO leadership conducted in Beijing, Mumbai, and Singapore, as well as market surveys carried out in India, Japan, and Singapore.

“Our development in Asia-Pacific has been inspiring. The teams that have come together to form Working Groups are passionate and continue to drive growth. We are pleased to see the APAC team focus on the broader region to include Australia and surrounding markets. With 41% of the Internet Users in Asia-Pacific, SEMPO will continue to make a commitment in the region. We are thrilled with the Asia-Pacific talent that continues to take leadership roles in SEMPO.” Sara Holoubek, president of SEMPO Board of Directors said. ”

For more information visit http://www.sempo.org/public_groups/apac/ or write to Motoko Hunt (Chair of SEMPO APAC & Multilingual Search editor) apac-chair “at” sempo.org

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At least two major new features are arriving in Google’s webmaster tools console according to information from the SES San Jose conference and the official Google webmaster tools blog.

The latter has announced support for the Internationalizing Domain Names [...]]]> At least two major new features are arriving in Google’s webmaster tools console according to information from the SES San Jose conference and the official Google webmaster tools blog.

The latter has announced support for the Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) and a series of further enhancements are expected. IDNA enables webmasters to use domain names which exist outside the original 26 characters used for the English-language – but not for too many other languages since many have odd accented characters. Additionally, this brings greater support for asiatic and arabic character sets.

The other new development which is currently being looked at, according to a senior Google source, is the addition of a tool within webmaster tools whereby you can specify the country your site relates to. The countries will be listed in a drop down list – and you’ll almost certainly only be able to choose once country per site.

For a long time it has been a problem if you site was a .com site with no history of activity in a country for Google to pick out the right ‘bucket’ in which to list your site. For some this was an embarrasment – for others a major business hurdle. Matters were worse for those .coms hosted in a country other than the one they were targeting – perhaps for business political or content management system reasons. The result was you might be targeting France with a site hosted in Norway – but not end up appearing in the ‘Pages Francophones’ of Google.fr – even if the language of the site was French.

The simplest way of solving this problem has always been to have local country domains in which case – contrary to what one SES panelist advised in San Jose, the hosting location becomes irrelevant. For many, this isn’t practical – hence the reason why some have chosen to host locally to get around the problem.

These two developments combined will help international SEO specialists manage their projects with less frustration!

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Media research firm Zenithoptimedia reports that 8 countries will dedicate more than 10% of their budgets to online marketing by 2008. Two countries will already cross that barrier this year – the UK adn Sweden – interestingly not [...]]]> Media research firm Zenithoptimedia reports that 8 countries will dedicate more than 10% of their budgets to online marketing by 2008. Two countries will already cross that barrier this year – the UK adn Sweden – interestingly not the US.

The 8 countries are:-

In 2008 it is estimated that 17.2% of marketing spend in the UK will dedicated to online and online will be ahead of cinema and outdoor forms of advertising and not far behind radio. Smaller advertisers in particular are to benefit from the affordability and targeting capabilities of the internet (which means ’search’ to you and me!!)

Internet advertising expenditure is to rise globally by 84% between 2005 and 2008.

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