In early June my colleague Yakir Hyman and I had the opportunity once again to participate as sponsors in the Sohn Conference in Hong Kong presented by the Karen Leung Foundation.

The Sohn Conference is a high-end NY-based investment conference that attracts the top minds in investment to share specific recommendations on investment with all of the proceeds of the conference going to fight cancer.

The Karen Leung Foundation was founded with a similar goal – a charity to raise money for critical research and action with a goal of reducing cervical cancer and its impact on families in Hong Kong. It also attracts investment professionals from Asia and around the world.

Five Blocks is proud to support the efforts of the Karen Leung Foundation and, over the years has gained a great respect for the kindness and professionalism of the Foundation’s staff.

This year much of the investment discussion centered around opportunities for investment in Asia – notably Japan. There were recommendation’s regarding Kyocera, Airbus, and Electric utilities in Japan.

For Five Blocks the opportunity was especially great. We provided assistance in the Search Engine Optimization and Social Media campaigns leading up to the conference. We also live-tweeted the event on behalf of the Karen Leung Foundation to ensure the best online real-time impact.

It was an opportunity for us to meet with several of our Hong Kong–based PR partners as well as to check in with all of our China and HK clients.

In conversations I had with various attendees one recurring theme was that in addition to seeing the need to curate reputation for their won names and firm names, there is now a greater understanding of the direct impact on stakeholders of having an optimized online presence.

There is no question that when I go to invest $100M in a steel mill in China, it will be easier for me to write that check when Googling the brand yields a positive even curated variety of web results including a robust wiki page, the corporate logo, a video for the brands accomplishments, info about key execs etc. third party validation etc.

Many industries in the US seem to ignore Asia – I believe we cant afford to do that any more!