A few months ago, GemmaBirch reached out to help cover the International Search Summit which took place in Seattle this week. I’m a sucker for complimentary conference passes (free knowledge, free food!), so I happily obliged.

The International Search Summit was piggy-backed in partnership with the Localization World Conference, which highlights strategies for international businesses. Sessions are focused on best practices for websites and online advertising with localization needs (aka translating content for a global audience). My colleague @Tina_Kelleher and I met up and spent our day listening to these speakers dance around the following themes.

Global Visibility

For online marketing beginners, there were plenty of information about localizaling SEO and SEM for greater global visibility. Creating international versions of website and localized landing pages for SEO were some of the takeaways from these sessions.

Intermediate to expert audiences who have been submerged in the industry for more than 3-5 years likely found strategic and testing methodologies helpful. For example, how do you even begin to decide where to localize? You can choose based on simple data like population, number of internet users (with demographic breakdown to match your target audience), and penetration of your selected market. Testing localized content is another underestimated best practice. You can use small targeted campaigns to test products and services to learn if localization is needed, just make sure your landing page matches your advertising content in the same language for relevancy.

Social Media (are you surprised? me neither but read on)

Facebook and Twitter were the highlight of each and every presentation. While there weren’t new and glass shattering techniques, there was a common theme that I think everyone should be aware of.

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Social networking websites are challenging search engines as becoming a top lead generation tool for content source and distribution. Search engines may serve as the initial point of entry to information on the web, but social networking websites also take into consideration common interests and seamlessly integrated targeting (because information being share is considered “referrals” from people they are connected to, which tends pre-qualify the interest of information they are receiving).

Due to this behavior, some companies are finding success by leveraging social networking sites for their acquisition needs. Looks like advertising experts who initially thought Facebook couldn’t monetize may be handed a can of whoopass in the near future.

Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance

Not to my surprise, there was a lot of buzz about the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance and my colleague Kelly Thomas Nojaim did a great job at answering a plethora of questions from the audience. For the most part, the audience was split pretty evenly among those who were pretty intrigued by the search alliance (because they run AdWords campaigns only) and those who were interested in the additional reach it would provide (159 million searchers in the U.S. and 15 million in Canada to be exact, thanks to comScore June 2010).

You can find more coverage of the International Search Summit through their hashtag #ISSSEA, which leads me to explain my long and overdue drama with tweetosphere.

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