Google Country Manager reveals plans for South African market

	The Conference Venue auditorium - packed to capacity.
	Stafford Masie explains Google's three-spoke model of users, publishers and advertisers.

Internet marketing specialists, Intoweb Marketing recently hosted a successful event on Search Engine Marketing at The Innovation Hub's Conference Venue. Supported by Google South Africa, the event featured a keynote address by Stafford Masie, Country Manager for Google SA.

According to Intoweb Managing Director, Johann Nortjé, the event was overwhelmingly well attended. "The auditorium was packed! We had over 300 people there and still had to turn away about 300 more because we simply didn't have enough space". He says there was massive interest from all over the country, with people from as far afield as Botswana in attendance. This impressive turn out bears testament to Google's incredible success and popularity worldwide.

Intoweb's Sales Director, Geoff Crewe-Brown, kicked the proceedings off with a brief introduction of the company and then handed the reigns to Masie, whose presentation covered a number of topics, including Search Engine Optimisation and the application and benefits of Google Adwords - two of Intoweb's primary service offerings.

Masie also detailed a few aspects of Google SA's immediate plans for the local market, the main focus of which is to improve search quality in the country. "Our aim is for the Google spider to catch every single piece of web real estate in South Africa", he said. A key element of this will entail interfacing with a number of Search Engine Optimisation companies and doing more to educate people about the Google search engine, how to utilise it, and why search is so valuable.

Google SA will be looking at localising aspects around the rest of Google such as You Tube and Google Maps. A lot of work is also going into the building of human capacity and the necessary online capabilities to provide optimal search quality to South Africa. Masie's presentation also touched briefly on broadband issues in the country. "I think that in the next 24 months, the situation is definitely going to get better and Google will lend a hand in every platform that we can participate in to demonstrate the value of broadband", he said.

With the use of mobile phones in South Africa and the rest of the world at its highest levels ever, Masie stressed that the mobile market is a particular area of interest for Google. He said that this would be especially important in light of the fact that 78% of all cellphone users in South Africa do not own a PC and over 85% of them will never own one in their lifetime. These figures could probably also be a contributing factor to another statistic which states that South Africa is the third largest country in the world in terms of the volume of mobile Google searches.

Masie's presentation continued with a discussion of the variety of elements of Google that are in place to enhance their fundamental objective, which is to "organise all of the world's information and make it universally accessible" - from Google Enterprise and Adwords, to You Tube, Adsense and Google Co-op. All of these elements take their place within Google's three-spoke model which connects users, advertisers and publishers.

As specialists in Google tools and platforms, Nortjé says that Intoweb was very fortunate to have secured Masie as a speaker. "Google South Africa has not even fully launched yet. They are still busy recruiting people and setting themselves up, so we were extremely lucky to have gotten Stafford Masie to contribute some of his time", he says. According to him, the power of the internet is revolutionising the way people and companies are marketing themselves. "Google provide this wonderful platform, but they cannot market you. That's where we come in - it is important to have companies like Intoweb Marketing who can help people to market themselves effectively on the internet", he said.

The event also included the presentation of three of Intoweb's customer success stories. Each of these companies managed to increase their business by up to 300% through rankings on the internet. "One client owns a Chefs' school. For the first time ever, he had courses fully booked until well into the middle of the year. Through the use of internet advertising, another client was able to reach a huge global audience and now ships his product all across the world; while the third success story was about a Client who managed to make a R10 000 return on his R250 investment within a day", says Nortjé.

According to him, the South African market has clearly woken up to the idea of the benefits of internet marketing. "The objective for us with this event was to get people excited about the internet, and help them understand that this is big. It can make or break you because your competitors are already gearing themselves for this revolution. At the same time we wanted to send the message that one needs to do it right. We are very happy that Google SA came on board to help demonstrate that", he concludes.

For more information on Intoweb, email info@intowebmarketing.com, or call +27 12 844 0438