Social media: Lost in translation?

by Urs E. Gattiker on 2012/05/13 · 13 comments 1,008 views

in f standards - terms of the art

Translation and culture – make it work
Good social CRM (customer relationship management) requires that we consider cross-cultural differences, but challenges remain.
How do you ensure quality control when it comes to translating text?
Does the translated text convey the image AND style you want for your brand?
This is the third post in a series of sure-fire tips for making your corporate blog successful while communicating more effectively. The first one addressed, Blogging: The death of trust? and was followed by, Is your blog a failure?. Today we address translation. In the global market place, translation is increasingly necessary to communicate in the clients’ preferred language, whether a product manual, a flyer or an email communiqué. Read on for insights to help you master the communication challenge.

QuantityClick on image - Lost in translation - it takes fewer characters in Chinese than English.

A 78-character tweet or SMS/text in English is 24 characters long in Chinese and about 110 characters long in French or German.

The graph (click for more information) indicates that compared to Chinese, most translations will make a text longer. But even in English, things should be shorter than, for example, in German, French or Italian.

In short: When you translate your next blog post or sales brochure from English into Spanish, remember it will take more words to convey the message properly.

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Tagged as: benchmark, best practice, cross-cultural difference, KPI, reputation, ROI, SEO Google, SME, social CRM, social media

Blogging: The death of trust?

by Urs E. Gattiker on 2012/04/15 · 22 comments 2,345 views

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Update 2012-04-29 – next in the series: Is YOUR blog a failure?

4 rules to live by
A culture of suspicion could have dire consequences for bloggers and advertisers. Once a reader or client’s trust is lost, restoring it is difficult, expensive and definitely not fun.

This is the first post in a series of blog posts that address some surefire tips for making your blog successful.

Let me start with last year’s back to back earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown disasters in Japan. It shattered Japanese faith in most of the country’s government agencies. But the death of trust is an issue everywhere – even social media. For instance, Stephanie Schwab’s post talks about the so-called decline of blogs or, can we trust these bloggers, as referred to in Karen Russel‘s Teaching PR – March 20, 2012 newsletter. Stephanie raises some very pertinent issues regarding blogging ethics and trust.

After sharing a post entitled, Bloggers: Can I trust you, I decided to investigate this a bit further. Here I discuss four critical points that will affect your brand, reputation and the trust your readers or customers put in your content.

1. Give credit where it’s due

I recently received an email message for guest contributors. Among other things, it reminded us of the importance of copyright:

“We encourage your inclusion of photos, charts, cartoons, drawings and other embedded content in your posts, but if they are not your own creations we have to be strict about crediting the images and only using those to which we have proper rights,” (from SmartData Collective Contributor Newsletter | March 29th, 2012).

Whatever we write, it will be out there and we might be measured against the original sooner than we think, regardless of whether we blog professionally or personally. This also means we must acknowledge our sources.

You read until here, so read the rest (just click below) but first, sign up with your email (5,000 people have already done so) to get the next blog post first in your inbox.


 

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Tagged as: brand building, business ethics, disclosure, media metrics, money for nothing, reputation, risk management, ROI, ropes to skip, sCRM, SEO, social media marketing, social media measurement, transparency, trust, viral marketing

Twitter metrics: The ultimate tools

by Urs E. Gattiker on 2012/04/01 · 54 comments 4,715 views

in a analytics taking action,b why benchmark analytics

Anaytics and sCRM
We published a post about the 101 best Twitter tools, saving time with Twitter but how can we best measure our impact and resonance on Twitter?
We tested the best and the worst and present our four winners, guaranteed to help you achieve a bigger bang for your buck.

Since I began blogging in late 1999, I am continually discovering amazing things. In the process, I have also given a lot of thought to how social media works. This makes me wonder whether Twitter and other microblogging tools matter, and if so, do they help you scale your efforts and generate improved resonance for your work and tweets (Is social media un-social? 6 keys to success)?

Of course, social sharing means we must make meaning, not just buzz – make money, not just web traffic.

I thought you might be interested in reading about some of my experiences, and I would appreciate your help in curating this list by providing additional details and submitting further cases. Here are some analytics I recommend you use.

 1. The Archivist

The Archivist was built by Mix Online, which I am told is a group of somewhat opinionated designers and developers at Microsoft. While this is still in alpha or beta, depending whom you talk to, you can use it to get information. For instance, if you produce a hashtag # for an event, such as a conference, like #ComMetrics12, the software will help you gather information about:

  • the top users of this hashtag
  • the top words tweeted
  • the top URLs tweeted
  • the tweet vs. retweet (or RT) ratio
  • the sources tweets are sent from (tools like Tweetdeck or web browser), and
  • all of the above over a period of time (i.e. before, during and after the event)

Here is an example I created for Swiss Internet Marketing Day 2012… very useful, no?

With me so far? Then join our over 5,000 subscribers if you have not done so already by entering your email and get the trends and tools first.


 


Bottom line: This is a useful tool when organizing an event and using an official hashtag.

Check it out! More tools in the full post below.

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Tagged as: Altimeter Group, analytics, benchmnark data, best Twitter tool, blog benchmarking, blog metrics, cost-benefit, indicators, influence, Jeremiah Owyang, measurement, media measurement, media metrics, media performance, pagerank, performance measures, ROI, ropes to skip, sCRM, social media influence, social media measurement

Company failures: Why is Twitter so difficult?

by Urs E. Gattiker on 2012/03/18 · 52 comments 3,344 views

in c micro-blogging Twitter

Twitter Success Stories:
Are you ready for excellent ROI (return on investment) with Twitter for your B2B (business to business) or B2C (business to consumer) outfit? We tell you why so many micro-blogging efforts fail.

Others have said one should not dream about finding clients through Twitter conversations. What is your opinion? I outline why caution is important and what you can do to succeed.

1. Do not trust user numbers

By the end of 2009, the number of Twitter users reached over 75 million, with 6.2 million new user accounts every month. But even then, a large number of Twitter accounts were inactive: about 25 percent had zero followers and 40 percent had not sent a single tweet.

In March 2011, Twitter still stated on its About page that it had 175 million registered users, but only 56 million followed eight or more accounts. By that time, Facebook had 600 million users, all active at least once every month…

By February 2012 it was reported that Twitter boasts 50 million daily users. However, if 5 percent of accounts are responsible for 95 percent of all tweets, does this make sense for your business? Can you trust these numbers? We explain the problem below.

In the meantime, sign up like thousands of others to get our trend reports – before your competitors do:


 

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Tagged as: best practice, buzz marketing, measurement, navel gazing metrics, ROI, sCRM, social media measurement, social networking

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