 Well, this is Rob Hack with another episode of Exporting from Hawaii. Today, I'm very pleased to have my friend Kanzo Nara, he's president of UPWeb, and we're going to be discussing some technical issues about exporting from Hawaii, mostly around the areas of e-commerce, what's new and trendy and bilingual and multilingual websites and social media, marketing in Japan, topics like that. So, welcome. Thank you Rob for having me. Oh, thank you very much for being here. So, tell us a little bit about UPWeb. What is UPWeb? OK, UPWeb is a company I started in 2006. We do bilingual web design and bilingual web market, and mostly that's Japanese and usually we do customers that are Japanese trying to get into the US market or American trying to get into Japanese. If there's a company that comes to you and says, we'd like to do another language, not English, not Japanese, what do you find is sort of number three, number four right now? Number three I would say is a close tie with Chinese and Korean. The Chinese would be for mainland China or Taiwan. For Chinese, like language-wise, it would be for Mandarin. Yeah, so we're not really the country, but mostly for the language. You started coming in 2006. Do you host websites or are you just building them? We do both. We host websites and also develop. OK, so most of the websites you make are bilingual? Yes. Who does the translations? Either way, like a Japanese company comes to you and they... I do. I speak both English and Japanese too. OK, great. And what do you think is the percentage of your business? Is it Japanese companies coming to you that want an English version or the other way? I would say about 50% of our clients are local here in Hawaii. About 30% of the time, 20%. In the 50% Hawaii, I would include both Japanese and both Japanese. OK, great. Most of the companies that come to you and they ask you to build a website, do you consult with them on where the website is hosted or is that not important? It's not important as long as the server is not antiquated. Sometimes my clients like to use Japanese posting companies. The Japanese posting companies are usually a couple years different, but on that case, I would redirect them to the top level. That's interesting because if you're in Japan, yes, the Japanese mobile web but also just land-based web and a Wi-Fi donor at a home or an office, that's really good compared to Hawaii. So that's interesting that there are server farms. Yeah, it is kind of interesting. The reason is Japanese hosting a lot of time, they piggyback off of servers like overseas like in Germany or in the U.S. So a lot of times, you're sub-leasing servers. But here in the U.S., when you get a contract, it's hosting them. I don't want to talk about QP Web, but I know you also have the IDOO Web School where you're teaching people how to make your own. Oh, yes, I started the IDOO Web School back in 2015. The biggest reason was, websites are getting easier and easier to make. Compared to 10, 15 years ago where you had to code everything. Now we're working off a lot of content management systems and platforms and a developer like me would make the wireframe for the website and then the client would start adding content to it all. So that's where the IDOO Web School came in where we trained professionals at companies or IT departments to kind of run their own websites, make their own websites and keep it going for a couple of years or even longer. That's a great idea. So the content management system, do you have a preferred one, Word Press? Yes, I would say Word Press is the best option. If you're making a multi-level Word Press that can function smoothly in both languages. Yes, they had a few issues up until, I would say, 2015 or so, but they resolved that now in the new version of Word Press, version 5 and up has excellent... So if you are a small company here in Hawaii and you had just a few employees, maybe even part-time employees, but they needed to log into the website. One speaks...reads English better, one reads Japanese better. Can the CMS switch back and forth for that? No, it cannot. And the people need to be careful when they're making a website in multi-language. It's not to use too many fancy digits and widgets out there. You want to have two separate websites for multi-language websites. I've seen websites where they have three, four languages on one domain and if you have a tiny button that switches over to the language, you don't want to do that. You want to have separate domains, so the search engine can look at one website and say, this is in English. Because of the text ratio, whatever language has more characters is going to be the one the search engine determines. So let's say, for example, I own example .com. I don't own it as an example. If I were going to make a Japanese website, do you recommend I have example.com and then a subdomain on that, or do I buy example.jp? You don't want to do the JP for other countries because that's a geo-targeting domain. What you want to do is probably do a subdomain which is jp.example. It's a separate website and your language text ratio doesn't get doubled. Do you consult in search engine? Yes, we're based on marketing. With search engine optimization, how would you use different keywords to make sure that target market is coming to you? How it works is you want to have, there's a lot of good SEO tricks over the years. There was a lot of interesting back-end tricks you could use 15 years ago, but Google has been getting better and better and they focus now on what is called natural content. Basically you want to have good content, good information on the website that's original. Based on that, then we start setting up so it's not really the keywords and then the websites. It's more the content of that page. How often do you do a company update? I've heard you should do it daily, weekly, at least monthly but is there really any update? Yes, there is. The frequency of update is recorded by the Google search engine robot and the more frequently you update the more the search engine robot visits. Let's say a website like CNN would post several articles a day. They get scrolled several times throughout the day and each time it gets a time set. Average website only gets scrolled maybe every three weeks. Three to four weeks. We'll venture off down the side here for social media. Can you tie in your social media to your website as you refresh your social media? It is for the average viewer to your site but search engine-wise it doesn't have any effect. What you can do is bring in your Instagram gallery or your Facebook thread and incorporate it into your website. When viewers come to your website it looks like you have pictures on there. So they don't get read-in by the Google search engine. Particularly in Japan, many people forget that Yahoo! is still fairly strong in the US. Not really in the US, in terms of search engine. Do your clients have to be cognizant of that if they're looking into something? Do they need to build things that are Yahoo! friendly or not coming to play it? Not anymore. Yahoo! used to have their own search engine robot but presidents on the chairman of Yahoo! Japan actually outsourced their search engine robot to Google back in 2009. So right now all the same SEO criteria is carried over to Yahoo! Is Bing coming to play this? Yeah, Bing is, I wouldn't say it's a huge share. It's probably less interesting. Still, if you're a small Hawaii company trying to export Google oriented or organic searches, but for paid searches we do need the cater towards Yahoo! That would be more SDM. Let's stay on the subject of I think most people in the Hawaii, the United States, but in Japan, other parts of Asia-Korea, it's more ubiquitous people. And I think a lot of that comes down to when you think about that in Hawaii we're driving in Japan a lot of people will spend many hours per day in public transport in a train and subway. And there's a lot of time they have to actually look at and do things that they wouldn't be able to do other ones. Nothing else to sleep. But I see when I'm in Tokyo, well everybody's on their phone. That's a great time to be shopper. So do you consult on how to make websites mobile friendly? Yes, the number one strategy right now is to make your website responsive. By doing so you can have one website that works on a tablet, a smart phone, or on a desktop. Most activities you think from Japan, buying something or looking for products, is that done on a desktop? The data is, it's not so much searches in general. We're looking at preliminary searches, secondary searches, and third searches. So the data shows now that preliminary searches are 82% done on mobile. So people are searching for information on products on your phone. They might save it or share it with a friend. Then they might look on it a second time. But the purchasing part probably comes down to the third time. So they find the product they want early in the morning. They recheck it during the afternoon. They go home at night and they turn on their computer and they have to stop. But the preliminary search on your smart phone, that's the entry and service. And so I also know this by traveling stay in Washington, New York. If you're underground subway in those cities, generally your mobile phone doesn't work. Only when you get to a station, and you kind of re-log into the system. But in Japan, it's quite seamless underground. I found there's a few dead spots, but generally speaking underground internet is pretty speedy. So people can search on system for 90 minutes, which is different We'll come back to this right after the break. We'll take a quick break right now of X-40 from Hawaii. We'll be right back with I'm Jay Fidel of ThinkTech. Our flagship energy show among the six energy shows we have is Hawaii, the state of clean energy. It plays every Wednesday at 4 p.m. Come around and see us. Learn about energy. Keep current on energy on ThinkTechHawaii.com Aloha. This is Winston Welch. I am your host of Out and About where every other week, Mondays at 3, we explore a variety of topics in our city, state, nation, and world and events, organizations, the people that fuel them. It's a really interesting show. We welcome you to tune in and we welcome your suggestions for shows. You got a lot of them out there and we have an awesome studio here where we can get your ideas out as well. So I look forward to you tuning in every other week where we've got some great guests and great topics. You're going to learn a lot. You're going to come away inspired like I do. So I'll see you every other week here at 3 o'clock on Monday afternoon. Aloha. Aloha. Back with Rob Hack reporting from Hawaii and Kanzonara from QT Web Corporation. I do Web School and we're talking really about exporting to Japan but we could be conceivably talking about exporting to any way. It's just with Japan we have to be very careful about it. So do you have any comments about the Japanese language, how that appears in Web site? I think a lot of Americans are Hawaii based companies. They're making a Web site and they decide should I use alphabetical, aerial, some of the conversations like that. But in Japanese there's also font that should or shouldn't be used or an email or Web site. Can you just briefly talk about that? Well, technically the Japanese language isn't very HTML friendly. There's only basically two types of fonts in HTML. The rest you have to use Google Fonts. Google Fonts is a system where you kind of piggyback off Google and make your fonts look more pretty. But that kind of decreases your load time to your Web site. So it's kind of a catch 22. You can have pretty fonts on a heavy Web site or simple fonts on top of it. So again you would consult the company about what if you're a natural product of a company. New young, you're marketing to a person. Is there a type of Japanese font that you want that's traditional? You look at it and you say, oh boy, this is like a pre-war font documentation. That's actually an interesting point. There are so many fonts out there. Also like when you go into the Japanese language itself, you have calligraphy fonts. There's even calligraphy fonts that make your fonts look more old school and so on. Actually one of our logos is used with SUJI. So you can use kind of like the old school one to make you look friendly too if you want. But there's a large variety of fonts out there. But to be very fast loaded, you should stick to some of the fonts that are based on Google library. You and I have talked briefly about AMP. Can you explain to the audience briefly about AMP? Yes, AMP is mostly a U.S. thing, mainly Google bit. It's just a deviation for accelerated mobile people. The funny thing is in Japan and Korea they have very fast internet so they don't really need AMP. Their pages load right away. But here's the cap. We have 1.5 million Japanese visiting us in Japan. Once they get here, they're going to turn on their phones and their internet piggybacks off the bar system. So if the web page is slow, it's not going to load that fast. But if you develop your web pages with AMP, their pages will load really fucking 0.1 seconds versus the average load time might be 1.5 seconds. So are you advising clients to be AMP compliant? Yes, especially for services like restaurants or spas where people are searching for their services once they get here. Like post arrival versus pre-arrival. It really helps a lot because when you're out there, you're busy. You want to find information right away. The AMP, even now, you might notice they have the kind of tiny lightning mark that's good on search engines. If you click on that, it loads so fast. So people are starting to click on that more than the other regular search engines. Think about post arrival versus pre-arrival. If I look at it, there's really three different questions about Hawaii. One is a Japanese customer in Japan. Maybe they've never been to Hawaii, never local to Hawaii, but they like themselves. The second Japanese customer is somebody who is planning a trip to Hawaii and they do a lot of research. Then there's the people who are more spontaneous right now. From a social media, how are we as Hawaii companies, how are we best able to get to those? Should we be using Instagram, Twitter? Does Nixie still exist? Is there anything there? It's kind of dying out. It's not as trendy as before. What is the main social media? I would say for the age group of 15 to about 30 would be Instagram. 30 up to 60 would be Instagram. Do you advise, as you said before, for a website we should have two different domains. Would that be the same for social media? Should you have an Instagram, Japan account, Japanese account and English account? Keep the content the same. If you're going to post two pictures a day on Instagram, you've got to do the same too on Japanese too. Otherwise it's going to get lopsided. One is going to have more information and the lesser one is going to start to kind of fade out on the screen. But if you have official Japanese Instagram, official English Instagram, and they have the same quantity, then it's defective. But for a lot of businesses it's kind of hard to maintain two different languages. So for a small medium size company I recommend just using one account and posting all the languages. Do Japanese readers of social media do they get irritated if there's posts in Korea or in Portugal? Well Facebook is very good with this. They're coming up with different types of settings you can do in the back end. You can only accept languages in your native language or you can have multi-languages. You can do the same for posting too. So you can have your Facebook account allow Chinese users to like talk to your blog that you want. So they're getting more into multi-lingual aspects of that. And they're very good with it so far. One thing, we've talked about Japan like it's one big monolithic country. But it isn't. Tokyo is different from Portugal. And then where you were born in Hokkaido, that's much different from Okinawa or what have you. So is there a difference locally in Japan about e-commerce activity in Tokyo? Yes I would say people in the country side, especially the younger generation in the country side are probably more internet savvy. Because they're just not in the location where you can go to the nearest department or buy the latest. Cities like Tokyo, London and New York, you can find anything in the city. But if you go, let's say where I'm from up in Hokkaido, really small town and nothing like that, the closest city is like two, three hours away. So younger people want to order stuff. Remember, you know, back when I was younger, we had to order some magazines. You have to postcard in the back end. The younger people want what's new. They're more savvy with it. What do you recommend the first market? It's difficult because you don't know the product. Generally speaking, do most people target Tokyo first? Yeah, that's a very good question. In most cases I would recommend we do the entire country to start off. And then once we start getting in data, then we start focusing more on it. It's the same for the U.S. here too, depending on whatever product. Sometimes you might have the East Coast, West Coast people buying it, compared to the Midwest. A lot of your, once you do the campaign you might have Osaka and Tokyo getting a lot of hits. But it might be a different. So we really just got to try it out first and then start making a difference. A topic for, it could be a whole other show or a series of shows is shipping from Hawaii. If somebody buys something on a website based in Hawaii and they want to ship it, that's a very difficult thing. Everybody understands that. However, I know that there is a lot of data that suggests free shipping triggers people to buy much more quickly than if they look at a product and then there's a separate system. Have you dealt with any companies here that are shipping from the, they make an order from Japan and then they ship it directly from Japan? Anybody doing that to your clients? It's getting actually fewer. I'm getting fewer. But the product has to be kind of a niche product. They're not so much buying things like maybe just average T-shirts or souvenir things that you might buy easier in Japan or find on Amazon. If it's more of a authentic Hawaii product, let's say hula product, that's definitely something people want to buy that's authentic from Hawaii. Then they will jump through the shipping and get it back to the ship. I do believe that the premium products from Hawaii are the ones that can absorb a bit of a higher. The last topic we'll talk about if you just made a nice segue is Amazon Rock. Now those are strong in Japan. But they have differences between them. Do you consult to any companies on how to work with Amazon or Rock? Yes I do. For most cases I would recommend, for companies that are only here in the U.S., I would recommend doing Amazon just because they're a U.S.-based company so they're kind of more open to other companies selling in Japan. With the Rakuten you have to have incorporated companies. They do have some private accounts. Rakuten is a lot more, it's a larger share. They have the biggest share of online shoppers. But they have a lot of specific plans to get started so it might be hard to figure out where to go. Amazon is maybe easier to... With that we will wrap up this episode of exporting from Hawaii. Just to make sure people can find you at qp-web.com That's your website. Your email is nara.com You can be reached by telephone at 808-343-404 Thank you again very much for being here. I really appreciate it. Your knowledge on e-commerce is fantastic. This is Rob Hack wrapping up another episode of exporting from Hawaii. We'll see you again in two weeks. Mahalo!