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McElroy’s Vision Statement McElroy’s Mission Statement |
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IQPC Web Globalization Conference, 2006.(Implementing the Global Web Organization Process and Infrastructure to Optimize Brand Extension and Global Returns) Evan Norman – McElroy web specialistSmart global companies know that their brands, the supporting content and media, and the way their customers and prospective buyers experience the brands should be initially codified and disseminated with an entirely global perspective. This seems like an overly pedestrian statement, provoking a “duh!” from anyone who claims to have the least bit of business sense. However, the reality of how an organization thinks about the way it does business with the rest of the world is often that of reacting to the needs of global buyers, or simply being unaware that half or more of the company’s revenue comes from sales regions outside of North America. Everyone from the CEO to web development team members around the world has to re-align their strategies with a global-brand mindset in order to effectively give their company a true global presence on the web. This was the common theme throughout all of the presentations at this conference. There are, of course, dozens if not hundreds of obstacles along the way to making this happen. In many instances, the organization had done business overseas for many years, sometimes before the advent of the internet, but had continued to craft its brand and accompanying vision and mission statements in a completely U.S.-centric approach. This inevitably led to the creation of dozens or more “rogue sites” (websites run by regional sales offices not authorized by the central corporate office). These rogue sites had sprung up to provide content of their own in their native languages during the past ten or so years, leaving the corporate office faced with the challenge of roping back in the control of its own brand and message as it was received by other locales. In one case study, the senior management knew that having the central corporate site in other languages seemed like a good idea, but it had no idea how much revenue outside the U.S. came from global buyers, nor was it ready or willing to do more than simply hire one person to handle the entire globalization of its company website. Several examples of metrical approaches were provided to help attendees receive not only verbal buy-in to globalize the website, but financial buy-in as well. Presenting a brand to a global audience carries with it all of the expected, yet oft-overlooked, issues of user interfaces for global audiences, international SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and domain protection. Many international sites are being produced with little consideration given to how buyers in other countries will find the sites, either from search engines or from the main corporate home page. 10x Marketing’s pre-conference on international SEO and John Yunker’s presentation on best practices for gateways to global websites contained practical tips on how to increase international visibility and usability. The push for automation continues to be a major topic of discussion among those who manage and need translation of global web content. Idiom’s presentation addressed this entirely, and the audience was quite impressed with the GMS (Globalization Management System) that was showcased, its ease of integration with existing content management models, and its use of a built-in TM (Translation Memory) tool. (As an aside, TM seemed to hold only a minor place in the heart of the global website manager. Automation of the translation process was paramount.) In spite of automation being the Holy Grail for creating, managing, translating and updating content, many of the attendees complained about how their existing CMS/GMS strategies were lacking. This was due to either the insistence of upper management that outmoded CMS tools be used, or due to the lack of a given CMS tool being capable of delivering what its salesperson initially had promised. This year’s conference illustrated how fundamental website globalization has become for many businesses, and how aligned it has to be with high-level corporate goals and visions. Almost every single presentation carried the phrase “global brand awareness," or some variation thereof, as a kind of mantra to explain what drove the need for website globalization. The technical nuts and bolts of handling a multiple language website will continue to play an important role in the discussion of website globalization, but the real focus has become that of making globalization of the website an integral factor in successful C-level corporate strategies—once these strategies incorporate the rest of the world into their visions.
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