Consumers in emerging markets with high mobile penetration and usage have a greater portion of people who prefer text to email campaigns, reports a recent survey by Ipsos. While 75% of all internet users surveyed prefer receiving promotional content via email over text, different patterns are being witnessed in large emerging markets like Russia, India and China where promotions via text messages are likely to have a significantly higher impact.

More than two-thirds of marketers think that Google Places will have a larger impact on overall rankings over the next year, finds an on-going local search survey by WebCertain. An even greater percentage of marketers believe that the impact of social on Places rankings will gain impetus in the following 12 months, although customer reviews are already perceived a vital ingredient in achieving a top spot on local SERPs. Do you agree? Take the survey now and receive a free copy of the final report, as well as the chance to win a ticket for an International Search Summit.

Social, Local and Mobile are inevitably tied together. Where you are, what you do and who you connect with are key for the next generation of marketing. At the ISS in London on 14th May, Bas van den Beld will look at how the mobile, social and local elements connect in international search and share some insights into the trends that are changing the landscape. Delegates at the summit, which is running alongside SMX London, will also get the latest updates on how to manage multilingual websites from Google’s own Pierre Far, as well as gain insights into a wide range of other international SEO, PPC and social media marketing topics.

See this year’s promising agenda right here.

The Middle East has become an area of interest to many organisations as the region is starting to show great promise, however cultural differences, linguistic challenges and legal complexities can prove difficult to overcome. The power of digital in the region became evident to the entire world during the Arab Spring, and if such developments can topple governments, they can just as easily make or break brands. In fact, it is on the agenda for the upcoming International Search Summit in London in May, as a result of the region's growing importance. Read the full article to get insights into how to approach this rapidly evolving market.

Rolling out campaigns internationally is often a rather complicated matter. Facing the challenge of how to most cost-effectively roll out a PPC campaign across 39 different markets and 18 languages, dating site Be2 chose to recruit people based on SEM experience rather than language skills. In fact, Be2 kept translators as far away from the campaigns as possible and instead relied on users to generate the keyword list by testing in Google’s broad match before rolling out on a larger scale.

The recent International Search Summit in Munich brought many of the current international SEO, PPC and social media challenges to the table. Google+, international link building, Yandex, and social media reputation management strategies were a few of the topics being addressed at the summit. Also, delegates received insights into how to employ the hreflang tag, Google’s multilingual website markup. Check out 10 key takeaways from the summit here.

Leading digital market intelligence company, comScore, today released its monthly analysis of the U.S. search marketplace. Google Sites led the explicit core search market, followed by Microsoft with 15.3% and Yahoo in a close third with 13.8% of the total U.S. search market. Google Sites accounted for two-thirds of all searches made in the U.S. during the month of March, up 4% from February. During the period, Microsoft and Yahoo saw similar gains to those of Google. Ask Network and AOL, Inc. made it into the top 5, claiming 3% and 1.6% of the market respectively.