Web culture is not the same everywhere

Pin It
I have said before that the web, while global, really is at its best when it works local. Google (independently) thought along the same lines and have made it their mission to provide targeted, personalized, localized search results. They know that this is what delivers value for the majority of practical searches.
Just because the web is everywhere it does not mean it is the same everywhere or that it is used in quite the same way everywhere. Take social networking for instance. Facebook, with its 500 million plus users, is the undisputed king of the social networks at the moment. But it is having to learn valuable lessons regarding locality and web culture.

What’s in a social network name?

When you change languages, for instance, much of what makes sense in one does not easily translate to the other. Google found that out when it created its social network – Orkut. Created a by a Turkish Google Engineer Orkut has less than 3% of the online population in the USA yet it has almost half the population of Brazil and India making it a powerful social marketing vehicle for those countries.
The name itself probably has a lot to do with its popularity in those countries in the first instance. What sounds like a weird five-letter word to western ears is decidedly less so and the immediate response is translated into large membership numbers.
Facebook is still young as a network. It is just now beginning to learn this lesson by facing its first major, resistant market: Japan.
Japanese culture has different dictates and when it comes to the web these translate in a lot less directness and even less transparency in places than Facebook imposes upon its users. This and the fact that Facebook is thoroughly western in approach have resulted in a very lukewarm uptake of the social network in the home of the rising sun.
The lesson here is a basic one: understand your target audience before you even start to market to them.
Pin It

Find me on: LinkedIn Today Follow Me on Pinterest

HOT!

You may also like

Google+ Growth Forecast to Reach 400m by End of 2012

Ever since Google Plus was launched, in the summer of 2011, Google has, understandably, been a little tight-lipped about its uptake. There were the early release figures of 20 million users within a couple of weeks (Facebook took over two...

30-12-2011 Hits:1249 Google News

Dan Cobley's Physics Guide to Marketing

For those of you who have not heard of him Dan Cobley is Google UK’s marketing director. His talk on marketing and physics drew some interesting parallels which are based on logic and which, when you listen to his explanations,...

01-05-2011 Hits:1107 Video

Why Good Hosting Helps Your SEO

Why Good Hosting Helps Your SEO

I wrote about the importance of good quality hosting and your SEO back in April and now, it appears, the subject has made the news as hundreds of GoDaddy websites  have been hacked.

18-09-2011 Hits:3064 SEO Tips

Google Fresher Search Puts Pressure on Content Creators

Google has made no secret of the fact that search indexing is getting faster and search results fresher. As the online audience, accustomed to virtually real-time updates in Twitter and the level of engagement that G+ and Facebook offer, gravitates...

13-02-2012 Hits:1554 Google News

How to Link your Twitter Account to Facebook and Facebook to your Twitter Account – a Tutorial

How to Link your Twitter Account to Facebook and Facebook to your Twitter Account – a Tutorial

  Over the last few months thousands of daily visitors have been coming to HelpMySEO looking for a way to link their Facebook accounts to Twitter or their Twitter accounts to Facebook. When you work online time is always against you....

22-06-2011 Hits:1750 SEO Tips

Truth Marketing

There is a perception in business, born out of real cases, that marketing and advertising are there to lie. Provided that the product or service being sold is of real value the assumption then is that consumers...

14-04-2011 Hits:1579 WEB View

SEO Blog notes on non-SEO things

The thought that just because I run an SEO Blog I should always blog about SEO is to the expectation that a trapeze artist’s feet should never touch the ground. Ok, I might be stretching the simile a...

14-04-2011 Hits:285 WEB View

Applying Logic to Your Marketing Efforts

Applying Logic to Your Marketing Efforts

We live in a digital world which allows us to do many things at an extremely low-cost. Email marketing, social media marketing, digital promotions, branding and cold-calling, all become clicks and clicks cost peanuts. This means that each of these...

08-09-2011 Hits:1141 SEO Tips

Google's dominance of the web search market continues to grow

When it comes to dominating the search engine world there are two figures that matter and they are both important. One is the number of search queries which each search engine gets and they are growing for ...

14-04-2011 Hits:1238 SEO Tips

Newsletter

Every week you will get an email newsletter with my personal recommendations on social media marketing tips and crucial SEO advice to help your business succeed faster, at a lower cost.

*  Your Email:

Subscribe to HelpMySEO via email email.

David AmerlandI’ve led the discussion on how social media and SEO are changing the processes we use to work and live, online, with the publication of my book ‘The Social Media Mind’. I combine experience in journalism and blue-chip corporate management with a penchant for explaining complex issues in simple terms. Contact me for media interviews, presentations and panel discussions