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Power of local knowledgeGoogle ¡°Koreanizes¡± homepage
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¡ã Screen capture images of Second Life, above, and the Korean version of the Google homepage, below, after its initial redesign. Photos courtesy Google


Have you ever been invited to a Korean dinner? Be prepared for an extravaganza of banchan, the Korean side dishes made from such varied food sources as vegetables, herbs, fruits, beans, meats and fish. Korean dinner tables will sometimes even include a couple of desserts from the start of the meal. To many Western visitors accustomed to the sequential serving of dishes, the concept of multiple banchan accompanying bowls of rice and soup is baffling, to say the least.

How do you eat a Korean dinner? There is no culinary road map here for you as with Western dining - an appetizer is followed by an entree, and then finished with dessert. The answer is that it is pretty much up to you how you eat it. You first size up the many banchan, then decide how you will sample them, either crisscrossing the table randomly or spiraling through them. That is exactly how Koreans surf top online portals every day.

Naver, Daum and other Korean portals usually display dozens, sometimes hundreds of menu links on their front page. After you click a link, the subsequent page will always display a side menu bar, nudging you ever-so-subtly to click more pages than you thought you ever would. So pervasive and insinuating are the intricate site designs that it is not uncommon to hear someone grumbling that he or she visited portals to do online research but instead ended up reading racy celebrity gossip, and completely forgetting their original purpose.

To Korean online users addicted to local portals festooned with a plethora of menu links, the spartan design of Google’s front page comes as a shocking reminder of how different from the rest of the world their ethnic online behavior is. Google’s famed front page implies that its site was optimized for the sequential exploration pattern of Western users - a main search box followed by hundreds of search results, which again prompt you to click through to final pages. There is nothing cluttered in the goal-oriented pursuit of sequential online searching using Google. In contrast, the implicit message embedded in the design of Korean portals seems to be that you will not surf the site sequentially but spatially, just as you would graze banchan on the dinner table.

So it is little wonder that Google’s local share of total search queries has remained at a meager 2.4 percent for years, despite the site’s efforts to win over the hearts of Korean users since it launched the service in 2004. Google Korea has stressed repeatedly that it intends to remain a simple portal by insisting on clean site design, hence redirecting customers to their desired online destination as quickly and efficiently as possible. Google’s meager presence in Korea shows, however, that Korean users find it difficult to leave behind the spatial surfing patterns ingrained in their brains.

   
 


Google Korea announced last November that it would integrate “Blog, People and Hot issues links on the upper menu page, with Picasa, Gmail, Textcube and other Google services occupying the lower half,” thus effectively copying the styles of Naver and Daum. At the end of the day, even the mighty Google could not fight the tenacious local culture.

The list of global online brands that have failed to win over the Korean audience by insisting on original site designs optimized for Western users is long. MySpace heard its death knell in February 2009 and Linden Lab could not renew its contract for Second Life with its Korean partner, ending its two year experiment in Seoul.

Barunson Games, Linden Lab’s business partner responsible for localizing its service for the Korean market announced on Nov. 13 last year that it was giving up Second Life Korea, citing that the service had failed to attract the interest of Korean users.

Korea, along with Japan, has been a notoriously difficult market to break into for many global online service companies, as the local markets remain heavily guarded by the home-grown online powerhouses. It is doubtful, however, that those Western online brands did enough to understand and assimilate into the unique local cultures.

In the case of Second Life, Koreans were already enjoying their own virtual realities in the form of Lineage and other online games. The target market of Second Life Korea largely overlapped with those online gamers - male online users in their 20s through 30s. For those groups basking in their own brand of virtual space, Linden Lab might have had a better chance in Seoul if they redesigned Second Life as an interactive game space, where users could play with elements more attuned to their real-life narratives. What about Monopoly reincarnated as a massively distributed online game?

Linden Lab instead slapped users with another brutal virtual reality, whereas Korean gamers were searching for an escape from the harsh reality of daily life, as J.C. Herz noted in her Wired article six years ago.

Looking back, the default setting of Second Life’s party-style virtual stages, where users roam around looking for potential dates, friends or partners, looked and felt strange to many Koreans from the start. If you really want to connect with new friends here, you and others usually sit around a dinner table and drink Soju for hours. That is how you make new friends in Seoul.

My advice to prospective Western online brands considering entrance to Korea is to never underestimate the power of local knowledge. And try to learn the joy of sampling many different banchan - spatially.


 

¨Ï Jeju Weekly 2009 (http://www.jejuweekly.com)
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