Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) chair Dana Todd will ring the opening NASDAQ bell on Cyber Monday, December 1. We hope Search Marketing industry would get further role in enterprises’ plans. Congratulations to all SEM professionals!

Technorati Tags: NASDAQ, SEMPO

Google just released the Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide that covers many areas that webmasters might consider to optimize their websites. Again Google insisted on fresh and unique content maintenance.

“Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors discussed here. Users know good content when they see it and will likely want to direct other users to it. This could be through blog posts, social media services, email, forums, or other means. Organic or word-of-mouth buzz is what helps build your site’s reputation with both users and Google, and it rarely comes without quality content.”

Download the guide in pdf at Google Guide.

Technorati Tags: Google

Philipp Justus, PayPal’s senior vice president of global markets just blogged about the expansion of Paypal to new countries such as Mexico, Mexico, Hong Kong and Singapore. Online payment is a critical obstacle to e-commerce and online advertising development in Vietnam. Although there are number of local online payment services but almost could not answer the demand of online customers. With eBay entry of partnership with local auction service Chodientu recently, we can hope Paypal should fully support Vietnamese customers soon.

Technorati Tags: Chodientu, eBay, Paypal

The saga between Nokia, FPT and Recording Industry Association of Vietnam (RIAV) broken out since last month made the Nokia guys a headache. We do not want to talk about who is right or will win the case here but the way Nokia and FPT manage online reputation. When people heard the case, try to search “FPT Nokia music” in Google the top result returned with Techcrunch post. Of course many local online newspapers copied and pasted the news but how Techcrunch cared about a small market such as Vietnam (in Techcrunch view). How Robin Wauters know from inside out of the case since he is not from Vietnam or based in SE Asia?
Nokia uses a league of ad agencies and PR firms worldwide, why they let it happened. Bad news always runs faster than the good one. In addition to blog posts, forum discussion, viral messenger you can find thousands of twittering the Nokia pirated.
It is time now for PR guys to learn the social media marketing rather than stick to traditional media even in a developing country like Vietnam.

Technorati Tags: FPT, music, Nokia, RIAV, TechCrunch

When conducting keyword research on steel market in Vietnam I found out a strangely irrelevant result of sponsored link on Google AdWords. It is a shop selling some fashion clothing and accessories for teens. Of course Google AdWords had removed its position since almost no CTR received. Be careful when setup your PPC campaign or you can lose your reputation.
Click for larger image.

Technorati Tags: AdWords, Keyword, Pay per click

The Google DevFest in Vietnam will be similar with Google giving introductions their APIs like the OpenSocial and App Engine APIs among others, and Social Network giants Friendster and Hi5 talking about their platforms too.

Venue: HCM University of Technology, A5 Building
Date: 4 November 2008, Tuesday
Time: 1pm to 10pm

What’s more, we will be having 5 Google Engineers coming all the way from Mountain View to join in the DevFest and to provide assistance to the developers. Grab this chance to mingle with them!

Here are the short profiles of the Google Engineers coming down:

Jason Costa
Jason has been a Technical Programs Manager at Google since 2005. He’s worked on several products at the company, including Google Analytics, the Google Checkout API, and OpenSocial. Jason likes to help developers find innovative solutions to complex problems, and believes in APIs & the open web. He graduated with a degree in CS from USC, and is currently working from the Google China office in Beijing.

Patrick Chanezon (blog)
Patrick has been a Developer Advocate at Google since 2005. He has built and grown developer ecosystems for OpenSocial, Checkout and AdWords. Previously he has worked on portals, blogs and syndication feeds at Sun Microsystems, AOL and Netscape. He’s the co-founder of the ROME - Atom and RSS utilities in java open source project and the OSSGTP (Open Source Get Together Paris) group.

Pamela Fox
Pamela is the Developer Programs Engineer for the Google Maps API. She graduated from USC with her CS masters, where she helped grow the video games department and dabbled in the 3d animation and linguistics departments. She enjoys helping developers innovate with the Maps API and combine it with many of Google’s other amazing APIs.

Conway Chen
Conway has been at Google since 2005 and is a member of New Business Development. Working together with product, engineering and management teams, he has helped introduce and foster a number of new product initiatives and is currently focused on doing the same within the Greater China and SE Asia region. Prior to his time working in business development, Conway was an attorney focusing on venture capital and private company representation at a leading Silicon Valley law firm.

Bruno Rovagnati - Globant
Bruno is a social networks guru at Globant as well as an expert on cloud computing. He joins us all live all the way from Buenos Aires, Argentina! Bruno has worked extensively with the Google Checkout API, and is an active contributor to Shindig - an open-source reference implementation of the OpenSocial spec. Bruno graduated from Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires.

Technorati Tags: Google, Google Maps, OpenSocial