Google Continues Efforts to Bring Asian Business Online in Thailand

Google Thailand’s Go Online initiative to get small and medium businesses online has far exceeded expectations, country head Ariya Banomyong told me today. The company aimed for 50,000 business to sign up in the first year, but 65,000 had done so at the end of six months in January and 40,000 business websites were live.

Encouragingly, the program -– similar to Google (NASQAQ:GOOG) initiatives in India and Japan – has been extremely popular in rural areas outside the capital. Khon Khaen, in Thailand’s poorer Northeast or Isaan area, has been one the leading cities for SMEs using the service.

Go Online features free website registration, hosting, email, a business listing on Google Maps, and consultation and training. “Thai consumers are already online, but many businesses think that it will be difficult and expensive to go online so we want to educate them,” said Google’s head of communications and public affairs Amy Kunrojpanya. They’ve also spelled out the process in a handy video (in Thai) on YouTube, of course.

Another part of the package for those signing up with Go Online is THB2,000 ($65) to spend on Ad Words. And let’s remember before things get too altruistic here: The more people and businesses online, the more money Google makes from advertising on AdWords and AdSense.

Ariya said that the Google Thailand office in Bangkok was the second to open in Asia Pacific after Australia (before Singapore, India, or Japan), demonstrating the importance of the country to the internet behemoth. Ariya elaborated:

Thailand isn’t tagging behind world trends, it’s right there. There are 30 million people online in Thailand. There’s 109 percent mobile phone penetration and 28 percent smartphone penetration.

Besides getting businesses online, Google is trying to promote Thai people who are already online to produce more Thai language content – and it’s even better if they use Google’s tools like Blogger, Translate, Google Plus, and Google Guru [1]. “Thailand is the 20th biggest country in the world, but less than 1 percent of the total content on the internet is in Thai. We want to change that,” Ariya said.

Ariya would probably be happy to learn that even Bangkok’s motorcycle taxi drivers are producing Thai content online, like Dejchat Puangket, who scooped journalists by uploading photos of the Bangkok Valentine’s Day bombings to his site on Thai blogging platform OKNation.

He’d probably be even happier if the motorcycle taxi driver was using Blogger!