I just read an interesting article written by Anne Kennedy about going global in web marketing, where she points out differences in languages, cultures and search engines that dominate geographic regions. I found some of her stats eye-opening, especially pertaining to the dominance of European users, and the growth of the Internet outside of the United States.

How many of you have a global presence currently, or plan to in the near future, and if not, why not? What kinds of cultural or language barriers have you encountered? And how did you overcome those?

Well we have got a high amount of users from China, Belgium, Greece, AU, etc etc.

They can talk in a way most can't grasp, however I developed a way, and the language is fine, I have even spoke in chinese before to a Client LOL
You kind of just learn a way to understand things, language etc

The market in Greece, Italy and Spain is just exploding right now. We deal quite a bit with Australia and New Zealand, along with France, Ireland, England and Russia. Very little dealings with Asia.

Any chance on a link to the article?

I would say this makes sence and we have had an europe move up rapidly on the stats over the past year.

For the 09 period our popularty highest to low was: UK, russia, USA, germany and ukraine...

For the 10 period our popularty highest to low was: UK, USA, Russian, Europe, israel...

deffently interesting to consider.

I do have a global presence, however find it difficult to be active in my social networking profiles and web presence. The only barrier that I face is not having papypal in my country. Thats because of infrastructure barriers. Hope it get resolved in future.

Here's the link http://www.wilsonweb.com/seo/kennedy-global1.htm