In 1960, Jane Goodall went to Eastern Africa (one of the first women ever to venture into an African forest, risking malaria or injury) to start what would become the most intimate and insightful collections of research ever done on chimpanzees. Her discoveries filled volumes, including:

• She found the first animals besides humans to use tools.
• She discovered that chimpanzees have wars, and that they adopt unrelated children.
• She discovered they ate meat.
• She forced us to reconsider what “man” means.

Goodall didn’t force her way into the group. She spent months sitting in a spot she called “the peak” learning by watching with her binoculars. From this distance, she noted patterns, such as the hierarchy of the community and slowly earned the trust of the skittish Gombe chimps.

One day a male chimp approached the camp, leaping, screaming, and running in circles. It was terrifying, and most of us would have either ran or taken a defensive posture. But Goodall had learned enough to see through the dramatic display and stayed calm. After a few tense moments, it became clear why it was there. The male chimp only wanted a banana that had been hanging in the camp. Goodall gave it to him, and history was made.

The rest of the community saw what the first chimp had done, and that Goodall had not harmed them, and the trust spread. Over the following years, she became the only known person to be fully accepted into a Chimpanzee community. If she and her team had been assertive, insensitive or clumsy, the community would have sounded a warning cry and a very tall wall of defense would have been erected.

The “Goodall Effect” allowed integration into the social fabric of the Gombe community, and could be a good metaphor for educating traditional brand managers about integrating into the fabric of social networks.

Listen first, learn, offer something of value, learn the culture, and never ever betray the trust.

Photo taken by user:Jeek in w:Hong Kong University, Hong Kong on 24 October 2004.

The North American SEM industry grew from $9.4 billion in 2006 to $12.2 billion in 2007, exceeding earlier projections of $11.5 billion for 2007 and marketers are finding more search dollars by poaching budget from print magazine spending, website development, direct mail and other marketing programs.

The SEMPO study released today offered some good news for Agencies, as 53% of advertisers outsource their organic SEO because it is to hard to stay up-to-date with best practices in-house. 37% say they don’t have the right tools, and 33% say they get more bang for their buck with an outside provider.

But overall, a trend to in-house these efforts is still strong. Forrester research shows least two-thirds of U.S. businesses prefer to keep SEM in-house. In-house training and education efforts will probably continue to improve and drive performance gains.

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I just got around to reading the LatLong blog where they brought my attention to the fact that Lexington is now covered by Google Street View. I wish I’d have seen the camcars.

Sure Enough, you can now tour Lexington with your trusty mouse. At here’s Main and Broadway, and below that the Main St. Library. In addition, many other areas were added as well.

MA: Springfield
NY: Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse
NJ: Newark
VA: Virginia Beach
NC: Charlotte, Winston-Salem
SC: Columbia, Greenville
GA: Atlanta
FL: Boca Raton, Cape Coral, Ft. Lauderdale, Jacksonville, Sarasota, West Palm Beach
AL: Huntsville
MS: Jackson

TN: Knoxville

KY: Lexington, Louisville
OH: Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo
MI: Ann Arbor
MO: St. Louis
KS: Topeka
NE: Lincoln
OK: Oklahoma City, Tulsa
NV: Reno

They also added more parks, which is cool if you’re planning to visit

Everglades National Park (Florida)
Florida Keys
Grand Teton National Park (Wyoming)
Yellowstone National Park (Wyoming/Montana)
Rocky Mountain National Park (Colorado)
Joshua Tree National Park (California)
Death Valley National Park (California)
Lassen Volcanic National Park (California)
Sequoia National Park (California)
Lake Tahoe (California/Nevada)

These folks should have thought a little harder about naming their business. I guess as a B2B oriented company they didn’t think it would matter much. Anyway, it was an amusing photo as I imagined someone repairing my tractor and then offering some psychological advice.

Ian McAnerin had a great idea today at SMX to help us get through some of the most difficult parts of website translation. He’s called it a Symantec Expression Equivalency Document, which, in his words “rips the soul out of the marketing copy” while it’s being translated and then re-insert it later.

Creating a stripped-down version of emotional marketing text can serve as a vehicle for moving to a new destination language by freeing it from the burden of carrying nuance during translation.

Well written English marketing copy is often full of culturally-specific emotion, which is very difficult to translate.  Nuance that drives us to convert in our native language may not work after the perilous path of translation.  This is especially true with website translations from English to Asian languages, for example.

Ian pointed out the following process in his slides.

1. Bulletize the facts of the original copy

Stripping it down to its basic facts. Ian suggests that by removing the emotional component and stripping the “soul” from it - leaving a fact-oriented bullet list of things to discuss.

2. Use the stripped down version as your translation source

After you’ve created this fact-oriented English version, you will ask for it to be translated into your target language. You can use software or human translators for this part.

3. Re-Insert the Emotion using a native speaking-skilled writer

The last phase of the journey is when the fact-based document is handed to a native-speaker who understand the delicate emotional details for the target language. In this case, the person may not even know the original language the document started in.

4. (Sometimes) Re-translate the resulting copy to English

This is a round-trip approach that can be used for quality assurance of your translation efforts.  If you have the budget and the copy is important enough - it make sense.

Kristjan Mar Hauksson points out that doing a great job in translation shows ‘respect’ for the market, and that regional credibility will take a boost.

Search marketers who ignore international SEO are severely limiting their reach and abilities.  The above ideas show that even without a lot of knowledge about the destination language you can still prepare information for effective use around the world.

Putting together my backpack for SMX Advanced and getting the office set up for a few days out. If you’re heading over, make sure to say hello.

I realize it’s never a good time to be absent, and to my clients I say thank-you for the patience. These conferences are an important part at maintaining skills, networking with industry leaders, and battery recharging.

I’ll be on Twitter: scottclark during the conference, monitoring the #smx backchannel, or you can email me scott [a-t] websiteadvice.com.