Archive for December, 2007

When my foreign friends come to Russia, they always tell me, that they feel their self like “Alice in a Wonderland”. Everything is unknown and you have to start from the very beginning to understand where you are.

The same situation is with RuNet (Russian Internet). Russian Geeks speak their own language and launch new start-ups. they are familiar to their eupean collegues, but the rest of the country is different. From this article you will learn nuts and bolts of Russian WebMarketing. Two eMarketing professionals gave their comments and opinions to this post.

Artem Moshkov coordinates all of SPBNET production and operations since 2003. SPBNET Company was established in 2003 by a group of professional managers and IT-specialists from the largest telecommunication and IT companies in Russia. SPBNET is a web development company with a variety of services.

Dmitry Filev is the Head of Usability department at Rambler (Russian Search Engine). Dmitry is an acknowledged usability expert and a member of the Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) . He promotes the serie of internet-marketing conferences in Russia and Ukraine.

So let’s start. If you want to work in RuNet, you have to know that:

- there are 26,8 mln internet users in Russia (fom.ru)

It’s a lot. But not enough. The statistic highlights the gap between three biggest Russian cities and the rest of the country.

- 43% of russian users prefer Yandex as a search engine (SpyLog).

According to Alexa  Google takes only the third place in Top 500 Russia. Yandex - the first, Rambler - the second. Russian search engines give out more relevant search results in russian and win over the interface developed for local users and their needs.

Dmitry: Google is for Geeks. He is usable only for IT-people. We like its simple design, new technical features. I think the majority of Russian Internet users prefer something more colorful, not so effective, but showy.

- russians have their own linkedin (moikrug.ru), facebook (vkontakte.ru), diggit (news2.ru) and youtube (rutube.ru)

Yes, we are not Chine but we make copies, not fakes. we also want to watch online videos and learn more about our colleagues and family members. It’s not our fault, that you don’t know Russian. For example, vkontakte has already 3 million users and every day it becomes about 40 thousand users more.

- you (or your project) have to speak russian, because the bulk of the population does not speak any other language.

 Dmitry: Language is the main characteristic property. Russia oriented websites without translation couldn’t be international. Russian Internet is very young and we just started to accumulate knowledge about earning money in Internet.
If you want to work in Russia, your website should be localized by Russian professionals. It will be better if a project manager is also Russian. Localization should not be limited with translation of navigational elements and content. You need to gather expertise and say: guys, we have a site that helps English speaking users solve their problems; let’s do a site that allows Russian users to work with it. Main business models vary from country to country.

Artem: Russian dominates. Runet is very isolated, that’s why we don’t have world wide projects. There is nothing special in localizing the site: Russian managers, target audience and effective design.

- even the worst interface can be popular. I mean odnoklassini.ru (classmates)

Dmitry: For sure usability development is a pattern. More and more people want to put up money in Runet. Investors want to reduce risks. Already there are Usability companies with solid experience. This experience will accumulate; there will be good young professionals and good young teams.

- all Runet professionals have already found a job or are freelancers

Salaries and personnel demand are high, but education level of the candidates leaves much to be desired.

Dmirty: the main problem of all of internet companies – staffing problem. Lack of developers, designers, marketing managers. I think, there will be special courses, faculties and institutes soon.

- bad project management

Artem: We still use waterfall development model. First project evaluation, than tech job and debug. But the rest of the world use interactive method. As the result we have limited budget and low quality.

- online payments are not popular here

Dmitry: I haven’t seen good Russian eBanking.

and the last advice from me. Don’t use full screen ads videos on your site. Majority of the users have limited access to the internet and only 128Кbit/s or even 56Кbit/s connection speed.
Be creative and take part in this race. It’s really challenging.

The 4th solemn ceremony of the “RuNet Awards 2007″ took place in Moscow at 27th of November 2007.

There were more than 400 prize-takers of different nominations such as ‘Economy and Business’, ‘Health and Care’, ‘Technologies and innovations’ etc, the most surprising were the ‘Culture and Social Media’ nomination’s laureats.  Here are TOP 10:

1. Odnoklassniki.Ru - Classmate’s social network. Was announced in March 2006 and now it’s one of the most visited websites in Russia.

2. Livejournal.Com - Livejournal in Russia.

3. InoSMI.Ru - News from foreign cultures and countries. Nowadays Insosmi.ru is the most visited website.  Its focus is translated articles from foreign press in Russia.

4. VKontakte.Ru - Social Network, Russian version of Facebook.Com. For less than 1 year Vkontakte.ru became the most popular of social networks resource.

5. 7ya.Ru - One of the first Family’s website in .ru network was announced in April 2000. The project is the biggest Russian parent’s network and is mostly about ‘Pregnancy and Childbirth’, ‘Family’s relationship’, ‘Children’s education’ etc.

6. Rsl.Ru - Official website of Russian State Library. In it entrie existene it gave us all information about library’s activities.

7. KP.Ru - Internet version of the most popular newspaper “Komsomolskaya Pravda” in Russia. Was represented worldwide in 1998. The paper version is mostly about social life, stars’ life and actually has a reputation similar to ‘yellow press.’ The e-version has more or less the same content is existing as a separate issue.

8. RuNewsWeek.Ru - Russian Newsweek’s online version has their own content does not duplicate the content from the paper version of Newsweek magazine.

9. DP.Ru - “Delovoy Petersburg” since 2003 becomes a popular business magazines all over Russia though first it was represented in Petersburg in 1997 as a local magazine.

10. DJ.Ru - the first website about night life and clubs in Russia.

In 2006 the Top-3 were: RadioMayak.Ru (the Radio’s website), DP.Ru (the magazine’s website), TVkultura.Ru (the TV-channel’s resource).

In 2005 the Top-3 were: RuTV.Ru (the Russian TV-company), Kommersant.Ru (offline magazine), RSL.Ru (Russian State Library).

As you can see in 2007 there are 2 websites which are not the online version of some popular media production in Russia but also a Social Media resource. This actually surprised people because for more then 10 years the RuNet Awards mostly was taken by other offline popular media productions. And this year for the first time, the nomination for ’Culture and Social Media’ was given to the resources which are only online projects.

According to Adotas, SUP acquired LiveJournal from Six Aprt Ltd on Sunday December December 2nd.

The ad-supported blog site has a count of 14.3 million blog accounts and about 20 million unique users a month with over 150,000 new posts put up a day according to Reuters. Andrew Paulson, SUP’s CEO said in an interview with Reuters that “The deal will allow LiveJournal to get the attention, and frankly, the investment, to allow it to flourish.”

While SUP will be opening up a LiveJournal Inc. company based in San Francisco, Six Apart will continue to supply advertising and other services to the company. The report continued that the LiveJournal users are hesitant that the new innovations planned for the company may turn the site into just another social network.

In the U.S. two-thirds of the LiveJournal users are female ages 15-20, where in Russia, 58% of the users are male and the site is known to attract intellectuals and functions as an alternative forum for many of the best-known authors in the country. “Historically, it is a group of people with very, very strong opinions,” said Paulson.