Sam Flemming’s China IWOM Blog–an official blog from Sam’s consultancy, CIC–has a couple of interesting posts this week and last about Internet language used in China, and its implications for search engine marketing. Last week he cited as an example the messages from Chinese BBS from a couple of months ago talking about the Ford Focus:

Looking at Ford Focus net language, according to the 93,721 messages mentioning Focus in our June data set of BBS messages, the official Chinese name “福克斯” gets the most number of mentions with 50% of all Focus BBS messages mentioning this term. “小福” (Little “Fu”) gets 25%, and FKS gets 15% (a single message may have more than one mention of a nickname).

And this week, he looks at the nickname a full 15% of messages use for the car–FKS–and finds that searching that term on Google.cn, 10 out of 10 (first page) search results turn out to be about the Ford Focus. On Baidu, it’s eight out of 10. “None refer to any official Ford site and many refer to BBS articles,” writes Sam. “Neither has any purchased keywords…. Clearly, this is a missed opportunity for SEM.”

Performance advertising in China is tricky that way. Anyone familiar with Chinese knows that one of the big challenges to search is that, like in Japanese and Korean, there’s no space between separate words, which can be composed one, two, three, and sometimes four or more characters. Add this dimension to it–the fact that Chinese Internet language is inventive, dynamic, and full of slang used really only on the Net–and you have another interesting basket of challenges.

The CIC site is a good read on this subject, and you can download numerous useful white papers and semi-annual reports like this one on it that walk you through some of the more difficult issues on an industry-by-industry basis.