I’m flying out to Dublin tonight to speak at a conference tomorrow organsied by our clients Group GTI. The conference looks at the world of graduate recruiting in Ireland and I’ll be speaking on how recruiters can use search & social media to influence possible candidates, as well as simply attracting them.

As part of my prep for the conference I got hold of a really interesting report from the lovely people at e-consultancy, as well as some top-level research from ireach & the IAB, looking at the the state of the online marketing industry in Ireland and it made for surpising reading. You see, I had assumed that a country as similar to the UK as Ireland would have a similarly developed online marketing industry but in fact it seems a long way from the UK.

For example, whilst UK online marketing spend is 15% of total ad spend (having overtaken everything except for press classified, press display & TV) in Ireland it sits at just 3%. Yes, in a country where more than €3 billion is spent online by consumers, only €35 million is spent trying to attract them (compare this to the £2.8 billion spent on digital marketing in the UK in 2007). This is probably largely because of the slow uptake of broadband (in fact, the slow uptake of the net, full stop): just 45% of the adult irish population online, compared to 60% in the UK.

All of this made me realise that due to the global nature of the net, and the way in which the sites I like & engage in are often populated by a mix of Brits, Europeans, Americans, Australians and any other nation you care to think of, it is far to easy to assume that things are the same globally as they are here & in the US.

For example, the assumption that Google rules the roost everywhere. In fact in China, whilst Google is gaining ground fast, Baidu still has more than two-thirds of the search market. In South Korea Naver rules the roost, with Yahoo beating Google into last place.

The fact that I still make some of the assumptions I do (despite having warned others of the danger of doing just that in a recent Financial Times article) means that I’m really looking forward to a forthcoming conference called the International Search Summit. It’s being organised by Andy Atkins-Kruger and will feature a presentation by Tor Crockatt, formerly of MIVA, now of Microsoft.

I first saw Tor speak (when still a MIVA-ite) back at Search Engine Strategies New York in 2006, and then again at SES London earlier this year. Tor is without doubt one of the most intelligent and engaging speakers on the search conference circuit, and her talk alone is likely to be worth the admision price.

Header image: meyshanworld on flickr

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