On my short visit to Israel I’ve been invited to join the July MIT forum at Tel Aviv University titled “Web Marketing: Converting Traffic to Sales” discussing the subjects of online marketing, search engine & social media marketing as well as aspects of search engine optimization.

If there’s one thing that’s clear is that companies, marketers and IT professionals, now more than ever, are looking to better understand what this whole thing is about.

Let me summarized the web marketing presentations for you :

1. There is no one formula for success - “It depends” or “There are no tips”. Web marketers would like to put it that way – web marketing is a difficult ongoing never-ending struggle to try and understand how users behave and as a result - adjust to audience behavior to get “conversions”. Which leads to the second main point …
2. Webmarketing is all about experimenting. A/B testing, ad adjustment, landing page adjustment, experiment with just about everything.

I’m not sure I agree. Although what they claim is essentially true and is what web power technology is all about – the ability to get instant feedback on what you’re doing immediately – people want something more about web marketers’ experience and talent. For someone to hire professional help or attend a conference and get “we don’t have answers” and “we’ll see, let’s play around a bit” is confusing and frustrating. It’s a problem with all areas of marketing but when it comes to online businesses, this becomes an ever worse phenomenon. The audience in the crowd almost refused to accept it. “Give us some bottom line tips” they demanded, but the presenters wouldn’t go along. Which brings up the question of what a good web marketer does. Is s/he good because they know how to set up effective A/B testing? because they have more experience with knowing that they don’t know and would like to know more?

In recent years my main interest and the focus of my PhD studies has been international cross-cultural differences in organizational and consumer behavior…

Tlalit did a good job of scaring the audience with the notion that cross cultural differences are almost impossible to predict and even more difficult to understand. What might work for one English speaking country will not work for the other. Our globalized world has never been more local, it seems, especially when it comes to the web. I’m mainly involved with the Taiwanese and Chinese webosphere, as opposed to the one I’m personally and professionally related to in Israel and the States and the differences between all of those are remarkable. I could layout some of the basic differences in perception between the different countries that go deep within through values, traits, norms and social behavior, but for now I suggest the example I gave with  “Blogging Ethics - Anonymity Freedom of Speech vs. the Dark Side” to get a sense of the differences. The HSBC campaign for understanding culture differences is another funny look at the subject.

Then came SEO and the audience wanted answers. Branko of the Israeli SEO Scientist outlined out some of the principles for SEO and the audience couldn’t get enough. Listening to the people sitting around me, it seemed like they perceive SEO as the black art of online witchcraft, where a selected few know the secrets of the all-capable almighty Google. It really isn’t so.

SEO is not that complicated and it’s something that everyone can do, and fairly easily. You don’t know much about SEO? fine, let others do the job for you, and I don’t mean SEO experts, I mean use open source tools that come with SEO built-in. Unless what you’re looking to do is really revolutionary, there’s no reason not to base an online business or a website on CMSs like Drupal, Joomla and if it’s simple enough – Wordpress. If you use those, even if you don’t do much – you’ll get much better results than with a custom made website. With simple modules and tweaks, you can get the CMS based website to implement all of the common SEO guidelines. Don’t want to listen to long lectures about SEO and pay SEO experts for things you don’t even understand? just insist on building your business with an open-source CMS.  Technical onsite SEO has never been so easy as it is today, and don’t let anybody confuse you otherwise.

It was an interesting event, in that it allowed me to see how my clients perceive and understand what it is that I do. Check out the MIT forum website for future events. SMO is always quick to live blog on the MIT forum events in Hebrew. Also, SMX is coming to Israel soon, you might want to check that out if you’re in the area.