Welcome to (dot)RU.

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.