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Search Engine Marketing Korea
by Ron Arthur
http://www.sofizar.net/search-engine-marketing-kor
The first thing that strikes you when you visit Korea is
the level of broadband usage. It is truly a wired society,
or more Wi-Fi. The average Korean has more bandwidth, is
online longer, and is quite efficient at extracting
information out of the web. You would assume that their
tool of choice would be Google. You would be wrong!
Quick overview of US Search Engine Market:
To Search Engine Marketers operating in North America and
UK, the process of finding information is relatively
straightforward. Go to Google or Yahoo, type in a query,
look at the results. There is a choice between "organic"
and "sponsored" listings( yahoo paid inclusion not
withstanding), and most people pick one of the top few.
Eons ago, web designers in US wanted to show off their
skills and had graphic heavy sites. Unfortunately for
them, their bosses who were more interested in using the
website as a sales tool, soon found that the fancy graphic
sites took so long to load up on Jane's dialup connection
that she just went to the competitor to buy that widget.
The content sites, who wanted to maximize their CPM
revenues also wanted fast loading pages. Fast load, more
page views, more money. "Substance" reigned supreme
over "style". "Minimalism" was the order of the day, and
given the deep emotional scars people carry from the dial
up days, to a large extent it still is an issue. It worked
off to Google's advantage~it is vastly easier for Google
to evaluate the text and tags of a page for relevance to a
query than to see if that cute flash is providing value to
the user.
Korea is different:
You just have to see the Korean mobile games to see what I
am talking about~Craigslist is "out", Hello Kitty is "in".
The average Korean user is a little like a power gamer in
the US. Bring on the bandwidth! Net Caf~ is a booming
business, and well, we all heard the story of a Korean
gamer who dropped dead after playing 50 straight hours of
online games
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4137782.stm ).
Heart failure, stemming from exhaustion, was the official
cause for this 28 year old.
Here in the US, we tend to think of glitz, flash and
overdose of pictorial icons on a website as a glorified
neon billboard. Superficial, been there, done that, not
worth the bandwidth. We also use an alphabet to form words
and to communicate and get information~the pictures and
the "rich interface" is distracting for us. The Asian
culture, on the other hand has traditionally
used "characters" or pictorial representation of whole
words to communicate. As a result, a text only
representation seems inadequate and therefore a sign of
lack of technological prowess. I had a hard time
convincing some of my Korean counterparts that Google is
actually very popular despite it's simplistic look. The
one fact that helped my case was the stock price of Google
and it's market capitalization~120 Billion dollar is well,
120 Trillion Korean "Won". Unarguable!
The Korean Search Engine Market is dominated by naver.com.
Much more so, than even Google dominates the US. To
understand why naver is so successful, let's go into the
details of how things work in Korea and how things differ
from the US market.
When we are looking up something that interests us,
we "google" it. "Googling" , a recently coined verb,
basically means feeding some keywords in a omniscient
benevolent search engine to get some results. Higher
ranking usually means relevance to the query and therefore
exposure.
In Korea, things work in the way Ask Jeeves wanted to
work, but never managed to hack it. And they work well.
Why is Korea a "winner take most" search engine market:
The best way to describe Korean Search Engine users
is "trolling FAQ's". The portals have a knowledge base,
organized by questions. Wikipedia, DMOZ, Usenet and Google
Answers, while great projects, pale in comparison to
the "knowledge iN" of Naver. The system revolves around
asking the portal a question, and there is a high
likelihood of a lot of answers to that questions by people
who cared to write on the subject. The user gets a ranked
list of answers and can either choose to read the answers,
or a list of similar questions. She navigates through the
questions and answers allowing her to refine her search
efficiently.
Naver has the most extensive database of questions, and
therefore, it is logical for people to use it to get their
answers. To get the most exposure, people tend to
contribute there the most. Network Effect--giving naver a
75% share of the "question answer" market.
Downtown Seoul is a small place:
One would think that people who want to promote their
products, thoughts would swamp the system with SPAM
answers. Fortunately, they have some in built safeguards.
All users must be registered to provide answers and their
answers are rated by the community. The best answers rise
to the top, and for widely asked questions it's a more
reliable way to rank than the "back rub" Google algorithm.
Furthermore, the person who is rated high on a few answers
gets a higher "rap rating".
This is a very important point in the Korean culture.
People want to be seen as ethical, wise and helpful. No
one wants to be caught dead, seen as a spammer, self
promoter etc. since everyone knows everyone else.
The "reputation" and "prestige" is important, as it is in
any "web community" including (say) Usenet. Usenet, it
takes a while to gain reputation in a certain group. The
Naver ranking software allows faster and more permanent
feedback on the ranking of the person.
Problems of Naver's model--Monetization and homogeneity:
If you are looking for "organic" listings on naver, you
would be shocked. Hard to find, since there are so
many "sponsored" links. The sponsored listings often
blanket true results which in my opinion takes something
away from the value of the portal. Furthermore, Korea is
much smaller than the English speaking base of Google and
has a much more homogeneous culture. The cacophony and
diversity of opinion in Google's index is sometimes
missing from Naver's iN. These facts lead us to believe
that Google may manage to rise from it's anemic 10% market
share eventually.
Sofizar will be working in partnership with M2Soft, in
order to provide US companies a presence in Korea.
Furthermore, M2Soft will be working with Sofizar to
provide Korean companies a search engine presence in North
America and UK.
For more information about Search Engine Marketing in
Korea visit: http://sofizar.net/search-engine-marketing-
korea.php
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