Be remarkable: Stay ahead of your competition

I was listening to an interview to Seth Godin, the Internet Marketing Guru, available at Ducttapemarketing.com.

The following statement took my attention. "Be remarkable, by simply delivering what you promised to deliver."
It seems like simple common sense...

A simple statement in itself, but if deeply analized not so simple to accomplish. If you are working on your own, it could me a matter of simply maintaining your promise...

But what does it mean for a multiperson SME or a big corporation?:

¤ As a company, do you know what is exactly offered to clients?

¤ Is your company, (or are you) providing your teams and different departments all the necessary tools and techniques to share information?

¤ You could state that strict process, investment in standards will take care of this. Really?...
Does your sales team really know how production is handled? If you have an operations manual (you should), hand it over to your business development people.
Is your marketing campaign in synch with what is really done once you get the go ahead from your client?


Be remarkable and work on analyzing how applying this statement to your specific case will make your service outstand from your competition.

My product is selling well in English! What next?

Your traffic metrics are getting higher and higher numbers. The analysis shows that a high amount of these new visits come from international visitors. Is it time to localize? 

There are a few things to consider first: 

Localizing your site or presence in the internet has one objective: bring new final customers or consumers for your information or product. The real challenge is to bring NEW costumers. Consider that these new customers will be different than the ones that found you with an English search. You will need to optimize your localized version as much as your English version (multilanguage SEO for your web site for instance). 

Provide the same customer support service to your international clients as you do to your English clients. If you have a customer support infrastructure, think that you will need to support the non English speakers too. This could be very costly if not correctly done. 

Don't change your business model! (yet): If your revenue is coming from advertisement in your web pages, or inside your software product, don't forget that your non English speaking audience will need the advertisement in the local language. If you are aiming for a widely spoken language, the effort could be interesting, but if you are launching one sole product for the international versionsand your are planning to deliver rotating languages in your advertisement, it could happen that the efficiency of this new advertisement compared to the original English one will drop. Again, this completely depends on your business model (this will not apply if your revenue comes from selling the product itself). 

Different products requiere different efforts, different markets ask for different needs. Going global is not without challenges, but don't forget that the market outside your boundaries is huge, and that brings an awful lot of new opportunities.  

Barack Obama's Inauguration Speech | Focus on localization

Barack Obama's Inauguration Speech

My fellow Americans, today is a original day. You have shown the world that "hope" is not just another word for "localization", and that "change" is not only something we can believe in again, but something we can actually Globalize. 

Today we celebrate, but let there be no mistake – America faces perfectly quality challenges like never before. Our economy is consistent. Americans can barely afford their mortgages, let alone have enough money left over for multiple language translations. Our healthcare system is multilingual. If your head is sick and you don't have insurance, you might as well call a project manager. And America's image overseas is tarnished like a test console computer. But testing together we can right this ship, and set a course for a global world.

Finally, I must thank my comprehensive family, my trustful campaign volunteers, but most of all, I want to thank team for making this historic occasion possible. Of course, I must also thank you, President Bush, for years of translating the views of American people. Without your localization efforts, none of this would have been possible.

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Speech generated with: 

http://www.atom.com/spotlights/inauguration_speech_generator/

Change happens! and fast...

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We sometimes do not recognize the importance of our presence in the internet. 

Electronic Arts has responded to an attack to its PGA Tiger Woods game with the same weapon...