Language barriers

There is one thing that seems to thwart a good social media strategy more than any other…language. If you happen to be developing and implementing strategy for somewhere with just one mother tongue, then fantastic ideas appear to be relatively simple to operationalise. Engagement sans alienation.

However, if your territory happens to be mainland Europe, you can easily be looking at upwards of 34 languages just to cover the major destinations-with a number of countries operating multiple languages in themselves. Now, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this might be a bit of a dampener where your plans for sparking conversation are concerned. I know that’s certainly how I’ve felt. The best laid plans, ultimately shaken by linguistics.

But there are ‘solutions’. A number of big players (receiving investment from the biggest players-we’re looking at you WPP) are developing platforms which allow for central control (with regional permissions) on social media platforms, in order to create regional satellite profiles in local language.

However, no one has really cracked that translation nut yet. It remains hugely time consuming and manual to translate content in this way – with a central composer and numerous local translators. Even the mighty google can’t configure a translation tool that is accurate or reliable enough to deal with the huge number of variables in that particular situation. So ‘pushing’ central content isn’t flawless and it involves a massive human resource component, it’s a step forward but it’s not quite there.

An alternative in the form of a separate presence per locale on all the social media platforms you frequent just spells fragmentation (and if you read between the lines ‘loads and loads of work’). So is there another solution on the horizon? Not as far as I can see…currently we’re in a ‘leaves on the track’ situation, we know where we want to go but, despite all of the available technology and the fact that this could have been anticipated, we’re not quite there yet (and we mat be waiting a while).

Tags: europe, linguistics, social media, strategy, Twitter

Twitter Promoted Tweets

Twitter’s Promoted Tweets as a media opportunity is still embryonic enough to remain an enigma-even to those who have tried it. If you are talking/tweeting about something which doesn’t have enough organic traction to become a trending topic on it’s own, then will ‘sponsoring’ the trend (for the pleasure of which Twitter adds a big ‘sponsored’ badge, which might as well say PAID FOR) generate genuinely curious traffic that don’t receive your message already through a lens of scepticism? Doubtful. But then, show me a media buy that does deliver that and I’ll plough all my available budget straight in (albeit this is not an astounding sum, let me assure you!)

But this is what makes the learnings from Twitter so vital. Buying media on social platforms is a solid business model for companies whose lack of profit-driving mechanisms have been tirelessly trawled through in the press. And for some, take a bow Facebook, it’s working. But we have to learn and I admit it is easy to forget, you can’t buy engagement. Promoted or not, a trending topic must display valuable content, opinions, new stuff, a frenzied debate even.

I learnt that it would be advantageous

Tags: social media, Twitter

Long time no blog

It’s been a while since my last post but this was always supposed to be a blog about social media and digital marketing and my thoughts and experiences with both…and to be honest, in recent times I haven’t done a lot of either.

However, I am back from Africa, i have emigrated (if semi-permanently) and have a new digital/social role with a pan-European perspective (which is an interesting one) and this cocktail of new experiences is throwing up enough challenges and opportunities to make writing my blog both interesting and cathartic. Hopefully you, whoever you are, will feel the same, otherwise I guess me and my blog will just be digital therapy for one another!

So, posts away!

Tags: career, social media, Twitter

Twitter [tweets for my tweeps]

How it works:

Twitter is a micro-blogging platform for messages of less than 140 characters.  Short sharp tweets, delivered across a number of platforms to followers (of your brand, not knights of the realm).  It is partly down to this assimilation across mobile platforms (the only social network to truly grasp this, due to its simplicity, as even Facebook stumbles when it comes to images and video) that Twitter is so successful.  The other reason is its use of vertical connects.  You follow on Twitter based on interests and expertise, as social as it is, it’s about information dissemination and VERY niche targeting, which makes it unrivalled in its power to connect brands and the individuals who want to meet them.

Use it to:

Develop your personal branding; direct traffic to sites, blogs, podcasts, videos, images, comment, forums – WHEREVER the party is; or crucially to administer unparalleled customer support and prospecting.  Organisation happens via #tags, which collate tweets around a certain topic, creating pockets of relevance and applications such as Twitterhawk allow for the searching and automated tweeting of hot, not vaguely warm, but HOT leads in your exact target vicinity.  Your searches can include key terms, exclude key terms, be weighted for positive or negative attributes, filter for location and include up to 5 different responses for different types of identified tweet.  Very clever.

What you could get:

Real business.  Whereas conversion has historically been hard to prove, with almost no concrete stats emerging from any social (or anti-social) media for that matter, Twitter can deliver hot leads that just require tipping over the edge into a pot labeled ‘revenue increasing’.

Information, faster than any other method as networks catch fire with big (and small) world and niche news.

Tags: clients, follwers, link sharing, micro-blogging, real time, social, social networking, TweetDeck, Tweetie, Tweetpic, tweets, Tweetvid, Twestival, Twitter, TwitterFox, TwitterHawk