(Nasdaq: BIDU), the leading Chinese language Internet search provider, today issued this press release in response to recent CCTV reports.

The Chinese search engine has been providing customers with targeted marketing solutions via Baidu’s pay-for-performance (”P4P”) paid search platform which enables its customers to reach users who search for information related to their products or services.

Customers may use Baidu’s automated online tools to create text-based descriptions of their web pages and bid on keywords that trigger the display of their links and web page information.

China Central Television (”CCTV”), the largest state-owned television network in China, reported in its program “News in 30 Minutes” on November 15 and 16 that Baidu had been including websites of medical companies that do not hold proper licenses in its paid search listings for some popular medical terms, while excluding certain websites which did not buy keywords.

Shortly after the CCTV program was broadcast, Baidu initiated dialogue with CCTV regarding this matter. At the same time, Baidu removed paid search listings of certain customers, particularly medical and pharmaceutical customers without licenses on file with Baidu.

Baidu will allow these customers to resume access to Baidu’s P4P paid search platform once their relevant licenses are provided to and reviewed by Baidu. These customers account for approximately 10-15% of Baidu’s total revenues. Baidu believes this immediate measure is the most prudent way to protect the interests of Baidu’s users.

Currently, it is difficult to estimate how many removed customers will provide relevant licenses to Baidu and when they will do so. Baidu will work closely with customers to ensure those customers with proper licenses will be able to access Baidu’s services again quickly. While Baidu is currently uncertain about the near term financial impact of this prudent measure, Baidu does not believe it would have significant impact on Baidu’s results in the long term.

On November 17, 2008, Baidu issued a public statement in China, acknowledging that there could be cases where certain companies take advantage of Baidu’s paid search platform for questionable purposes. Baidu is committed to social responsibility and will continue to improve its sales and operational systems commensurate with its status as the leading Chinese language Internet search provider.

Separately, Baidu would like to affirm that Baidu has never excluded websites of any customers because they did not pay for keywords, and Baidu does not tolerate such practices.

Baidu is committed to playing a leading role in shaping the standards for China’s Internet industry. Baidu strives to further strengthen its operational systems and infrastructure. With a more mature operation, Baidu will grow even better able to serve increasing numbers of small and medium- sized enterprises (”SMEs”), the backbone of the Chinese economy.

Q: How did you become involved in the search industry?
I founded a marketing consultancy in 1981. In 1993, I became involved with companies building the first corporate sites on the web. Soon after Rand joined the company and we offered corporate websites to our clients. When the dot-com crash hit, clients had no capital expenditure budgets, but they still had operating capital. So I created a rev-share agreement and worked with companies who showed potential, were doing poorly online and built high-converting websites. We subbed out the SEO work to four companies without success. That’s when Rand turned his attention to search and learned it himself. In a short time, our clients were ranking well and they - and we - were making money. Rand started the SEOmoz.org blog as a way to share information and learn from others in 2004. In 2005, it was evident that our future lay in search, rather than marketing or web development. We re-branded and opened SEOmoz in Nov 2005. The rest is history.

Q: How can you use search to benefit smaller clients?
All of our earliest clients were small and midsized firms. Focusing on local/regional search, utilizing the long tail, and taking advantage of emerging technologies with relatively inexpensive ad opportunities such as social media and mobile ads can stretch a small budget for optimal success.

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?
It’s not more difficult to keep up, but it is more time consuming to get on the track now. Many of the top folks in search began their work/practice several years ago. Things were relatively simple (and spammy then. However, there is an ever-increasing volume of work on the subject of SEO. If you’re just starting now, it will take some time to ‘catch up’. I expect universities will soon offer degrees with a specialty in search marketing.

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?
Early on, I worked more closely with the SEOs in SEOmoz. Later, I focused more on running the business. So my story is an old one.

We put a lot of effort into optimizing a hard money bridge lender. We made some mistakes, cleaned up the mess, and moved on. While the mistakes weren’t any fun (they stalled profitability at a time when we really needed them), we did learn a lot.

Finally, the site began ranking very well for some very competitive key terms. But our client still wasn’t closing deals. By calling into the client’s office myself, I discovered that the marketing and sales process inside the client’s office wasn’t functioning well.

The client was  willing to work with me and allowed me to run the phone number on the website through my office. I answered the phones as their receptionist for about three months. By perfecting the phone and response process, I demonstrated to the client that the website was generating solid, effective leads and that they could close a lot more attractive deals if they improved their in-house processes. Turning around a tough project and unequivocally demonstrating how to be successful to the client was fun, as well as very profitable for all concerned.

Q: How important is it to be “visible” in the industry these days?
That depends on the role you wish to have. Public speaking or even ‘visibility’ isn’t for everyone. I would say however, if you want to run your own SEO/SEM consultancy or agency, you’d do well to have someone in your company be a consistent and positive public face. Speaking, teaching, answering questions for news media, putting business related videos online, doing pro-bono work for larger organizations in the public eye can all increase the trust factor with a potential client. If you are targeting a specific market, say residential builders, you can provide a search marketing column for their newsletters if public speaking isn’t your thing. The more places you can point a client to in which you are seen as the expert in the field, the better. These are just a few of many ways to get the word out about your skills.

Q: How does link building fit into social media? Does PPC fit in at all with what you do?
I don’t think of social media marketing as strictly a way to garner links as they are generally no-followed or of low value these days. Social media marketing is very useful for direct target marketing to groups of people who are likely to be interested in your specific website/offer. SEOmoz doesn’t focus on PPC work, but in his keynote speech at SMX Singapore, social media expert Harrison Gevirtz pointed out that social media ads are still relatively inexpensive and an excellent way to tightly target and stretch an ad budget.

Q: Have you used any “questionable” techniques in search marketing?
These days, SEOmoz is focused on providing the best possible tools to search marketers. But we do serve some clients as we always want to keep our hand in the game in order to provide current, relevant information to our has a well-earned reputation for being strictly white-hat. It’s not so much a matter of whether a tactic is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. Rather, the pragmatic question is asked, “Will this jeopardize the client’s current rankings or ability to rank better in the future?”. We serve clients who need to be in the SERPs for the next 100+ years. Therefore, we don’t have the leisure to play loose with whatever rules the private search companies want to impose on those who wish to be listed in their indexes.

Q: What industry trend leaves you cold and why?
Fear. I know it’s not exclusive to the search industry. But the wringing of hands and fear of shrinking budgets, etc. leaves me cold. You and I have spoken about this a few times in the past weeks already and we have both commented on a thread on the same subject. So, at the risk of being repetitiously redundant (sorry I couldn’t resist): This is a great time to be in search! Companies are slashing their ad and marketing budgets. Rather than simply hacking bodies, ad and marketing departments are pulling money from expensive print, TV, radio, direct mail, etc. and putting it online. The first boon goes to PPC. As soon as the number of bidders and bid prices increases, the next boon will be seen in SEO. Things move fast and marketing department heads aren’t stupid. We are seeing this money flowing into SEO/SEM right now. And I predict that when this is all over, that money will stay online where it is more targeted and the tracking metrics are so precise.

Q: What is the best part of your workday and why?
Opening the SEOmoz blog to see what’s new. I start there and go on to other sites, but it is always a thrill for me to see the new blog post at SEOmoz. I guess I still haven’t lost the excitement of seeing a goal accomplished. It was a lot of hard work to make SEOmoz a strong company on whom so many people depend for reliable, valuable tools, knowledge, industry information, marketplace and more. Just seeing the activity on the site and the constant updating of the blog, improvement of the tools, additions of partner offerings in the resources’ discount store, etc. makes all the hard years worthwhile. Like gazing at a beautiful child of one’s own, seeing SEOmoz active and in use daily is still the best part of my day.

Q: What advice would you give to young women trying to make a name for themselves in Search Marketing right now?
SEOmoz recently held an Advanced Tactics in SEO seminar. After a lunch break, I passed the men’s washroom which had a line outside the door. The women’s washroom had one other person in it. We laughed. Where else would you find the women’s room empty while the men’s room had a line out the door but at a Search event?

While there are relatively few women in the field of Search, be it marketing, analytics, tool dev, or otherwise, there is also relatively little gender bias. If you know your stuff and are willing to put in the hard hours, there is an exciting career to be had either as an independent marketer (ask Jill Whalen, Kim Krause Berg, Motoko Hunt, et al) or as an corporate specialist (see: Vanessa Fox, Natala Menezes, et al) .

The time is right! Jump in with both feet.

Thanks Gillian for your time.

I have spend the past few hours looking at the data as it relates to Social Marketing sites and there is some interesting trends. For convienece, I have used the Hitwise tables (found on the Hitwise site) in this post so you can get a sense of the trends.

According to Hitwise who looked at visits in August 2008 among a custom category of 56 of the leading social networking websites stated that MySpace.com received 67.54 percent of the market share.  The market share of U.S. visits to the social networking custom category decreased 2 percent in August 2008 to 6.40 percent of all U.S. visits compared to July 2008. Visits to the category decreased 17 percent year-over-year.

Among the top 10 social networking websites, Facebook ranked second by market share of U.S. visits with 20.56 percent, followed by myYearbook, which received 1.65 percent. MyYearbook experienced the largest gain in market share in August 2008 among the top five visited websites, increasing 256 percent compared to August 2007. Tagged and Facebook followed, increasing 147 and 50 percent, respectively.

Top Paid and Organic Traffic to Social Networking

In August 2008, the top search term driving paid clicks to Social Networking websites was ‘classmates.com’ with .03 percent of all search traffic. The paid clicks from Classmates-related terms in the top 30 accounted for .06 percent of all search traffic. Organic clicks off of the term ‘myspace’ drove 14.96 percent of all search traffic. Among the top 30 organic terms, organic clicks on MySpace-related terms accounted for 25.96 percent of all search traffic to the category.

MySpace Tops among Average Time Spent

In August 2008, the average time spent among all social networking websites was 19 minutes and 56 seconds, representing an increase of 14 percent compared to August 2007. Among the top five most visited social networking websites, MySpace led with users spending an average of 30 minutes and 32 seconds on the website. Facebook experienced the largest growth in average time spent, increasing 23 percent in August 2008 to 19 minutes and 30 seconds from 15 and 50 seconds in August 2007.

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.

Further, today Google reported that their revenue grew 31% to $5.5 billion, compared with the same quarter last year. Google’s income would have been $1.56 billion, or $4.92 a share, excluding certain items.

Google.com grew 34% to 2.7 billion, driven by steady traffic growth. AdSense rose 15% to 1.7 billion. Global aggregate paid clicks climbed 18%, compared with the prior year’s quarter.

Seems PPC is alive and well.

“sinotechian:  Matt is in transit in Singapore… watched the debate on YouTube.. you got to love technology”.
So following my little twit, I got a response from my SEO buddy, David Temple (semscholar ) in Singapore who sent me a twitter message back. “lets catch up”.

Cool I thought. We have not seen each other and be great to meet.
The following day I posted “sinotechian   heading to the pool… laptop in hand and needing to do my slides for the Singapore SMX event next week…”
We then used twitter a number of times to agree on a Sunday meeting at 6.30pm for dinner. All seemed so 21st Centry.
On the Sunday, David wrote “semscholar   waiting in lobby at grand hyatt   from mobile web”
I rushed to the Hyatt to get there for our meeting time of 6.30pm
Unfortunately, neither of us took each other’s mobile numbers. We both waited in the Hyatt Hotel lobby for about 45 mins. I was a little surprised not to see David in the lobby and that he was late however, after a long wait I finally gave up the sitting around and felt he must have got held up. I head back to my hotel room and read my twits

“semscholar   not in bali sorry i thought you were in Singapore”
I replied.
sinotechian   :O sorry throught you were in Bali… lets see each next week in Singapore…

So two of the great minds of Digital Marketing (and active users of social media tools) have managed to successful set up a meeting at the Hyatt. It was just a shame that we waited at the Hyatt in different countries.

Turner appoints SinoTech Group to develop kids’ online games on Cartoon Network websites and manage advertising sales inventory in Greater China

Kids will now have even more gaming choices on Cartoon Network websites.  To strengthen its presence in the fast-growing interactive gaming market for kids, Turner Entertainment Networks Asia, Inc (TENA) has appointed the SinoTech Group (SinoTech), a full service interactive agency based in China, to develop and distribute online games on Cartoon Network websites in North Asia.  The appointment of SinoTech also marks the Network’s first-ever deal with a China-based company to address the advertiser demand in the kids’ online media market.  The SinoTech Group will be the exclusive interactive advertising sales representative for online media inventory around online games they create specifically for Cartoon Network’s websites, and will focus on recruiting new advertisers from the China market.

“The partnership with SinoTech Group opens up the Greater China market for our business, and allows marketers targeting kids to conduct brand marketing within a leading kids’ branded entertainment website,” said Benjamin Grubbs, Regional Director for Interactive, TENA.  “Online games have been a key driver of Cartoon Network’s online success, with seven of the top 10 most-visited web pages on the Cartoon Network site being related to gaming. Coupled with the increasing penetration of high-speed broadband access in the region and SinoTech’s innovative game development strategy, we are confident that Cartoon Network will further increase its web traffic to become the leading online game websites for kids.”

“We’re immensely excited to work with Turner on a deal with such potential,” said Dr. Mathew McDougall, Chief Executive Officer and Executive Chairman of SinoTech Group. “Along with SinoTech Group’s own cartoon characters, we will be working on highly recognizable brands like The Powerpuff Girls, BEN 10, and others to develop new games.”

The first slate of online games is already in development and will launch on the Cartoon Network Asia and Cartoon Network Taiwan websites before the end of the year. The games will either feature Cartoon Network’s original characters, or involve content or characters developed by SinoTech.

This is the inaugural Southeast Asian iMedia Agency Summit that will allow us to have the opportunity to rub shoulders with other interactive agency leaders and explore, challenge and build the future of online interactive and digital media, and marketing in the region. The role of the agency in the ever-evolving interactive media space is changing. The notion of iMedia Summits are not new and have been running since 2001. Borne out of the U.S., iMedia has invited agency senior management to these exclusive summits, and within these few days, usually in an intimate resort setting, the senior level executives get to re-examine strategies for their clients and their own businesses, gain a fresh vision of industry trends, and network with peers, senior personnel from publishers and technology service providers.

I am very much looking forward to catching up with a few of my  friends, Gareth Mulryan, David Temple, Cameron Yuil, Robbie Hills to name a few…. also looking forward to meeting new people working in the area of digital advertising.

Cheers

Matt

Positives:

• China is of the largest markets in the world, with the most online users of any country (~250 million and counting)
• Increasing use of search engines by Chinese internet users
• Comparatively inexpensive options for search marketers in relation to other markets in the world
• Relative lack of sophisticated competition; relative ease of capturing top positions in both organic and paid search result listings

Negatives:

• Relative complexity of Chinese language (and multiple dialects) requires sophisticated knowledge and/or strong partnership with local marketing experts
• Lack of transparency on the part of market leader Baidu requires good relationships with company reps or agencies with good connections
• Lack of maturity in E-commerce poses challenges for direct-response or retail oriented search marketers

In the presentation by Dr McDougall, he spoke about companies now establishing search marketing campaigns in China and increasing looking to expand their budgets and the number of keywords being managed. He used a case study to highlight how one consumer electronics brand is now doing campaigns that have tens of thousands of keywords and there for needs tools and technologies to establish, bid, manage and monitor results/campaigns.

Overall, a great indication that search marketing is alive and well in China. If anyone else was at the event then would be interested in your views and comments.