Category Archives: Twitter

Twittering in Tongues: How companies are going global with Twitter

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Over the past six months, Twitter went from mostly serving people based inside the US to mostly serving people based outside of the US.

Source: Twitter.com

Today, 60% of Twitter’s 105 million registered users are based outside of the United States.

And half of all tweets are in a language other than English.

This is a remarkable trend, particularly since Twitter has only been localized into five languages so far.

A few months ago, I set out to better understand how large, multinational companies are using Twitter to reach users around the world.

I studied more than 225 companies across 21 industry verticals (representing 80% of the Interbrand 100). And I interviewed a number of people who manage Twitter feeds in different markets.

This work resulted in the report Twittering in Tongues. This report is a first stab at a phenomenon that is very much in its early days, so it’s hard to draw any sweeping conclusions. But there are some clearly emerging trends, which I discuss. I also highlight a number of Twitter’s inherent international limitations and provide some recommendations for companies considering localized Twitter feeds.

Here are a few findings/recommendations from the report:

  • Most companies have yet to launch international Twitter feeds. Only one-third of the 225 companies studied support one or more Twitter feeds outside of their domestic markets. What makes this ratio interesting is that every one of 225 companies studied supports two or more localized web sites. So these are all companies that do business in three or more countries. A number of companies that support more than 20 local web sites still only use Twitter for their domestic markets.
  • Sony leads the pack with support for 20 international Twitter feeds, mostly through its Sony Music division. Microsoft, Cisco Systems, and PricewaterhouseCoopers are also out in front with support for 10 or more country specific Twitter feeds. CAVEAT: Counting feeds is a tricky business. Not all corporate feeds are actively managed (which I did not count) and not all local feeds are easy to find.
  • Brazil rules. Brazil is by far the most popular Twitter market outside of the US. Nearly half of the companies that support one or more international feeds have targeted Brazil. Not surprisingly, Brazilian Portuguese is the second most popular language used on Twitter.
  • Local Twitter success depends on local web site promotion. It’s also no surprise that the local feeds with some of the highest numbers of followers also had high visibility on their local web sites. Companies such as Dell and Samsung lead in this respect. Below is a screen shot from Samsung’s Brazil home page; Twitter gets prime real estate.
  • Twitter is local by design. Based on my interviews, most of the in-country Twitter feeds have been launched without any central approval process or even awareness. This also applies to local Facebook and YouTube pages. The evolution is local Twitter feeds is similar to the evolution of local web sites in the 1990s. Back then, local offices often created their own sites, with their own designs and platforms. Over the years, the central offices reined in these disparate sites — sometimes going too far and dampening local enthusiasm. The key challenge I see executies facing now is balancing local control with global consistency. While consistency is important, it should not come at the expense of local enthusiasm and innovation. In the end, the success of local Twitter feeds depends on the local offices.

For more information:

Translation crowdsourcing is the new black — and you can tweet me on that

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bird-translator

Was there any doubt that Twitter would not try to crowdsource its translations?

After Facebook proved that it could use volunteers to go from 1 to 100 languages in two years, it was just a matter of time before Twitter adopted the same model.

Twitter is starting out with the FIGS (French, Italian, German, and Spanish). And here is a video tutorial from Twitter that shows you how how the platform works.

Crowdsourcing is the new black these days, and much of it deserved. But despite the buzz, companies should be very careful before embracing the model.

Very few companies are translation-worthy

Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, TED, and Twitter have legions of fans who are happy to lend their translation skills. But few corporate sites or services are so translation worthy. And there’s the ever-constant risk of translator backlash or burnout. We are in uncharted territory, and as more companies pursue this model, we’re going to see more and more efforts backfire. Hey, maybe we’ll even see companies begin to “pay” their volunteers in non-monetary forms of compensation. Which leads me to…

Crowdsourcing may not save you much on translation

The translation platform, the management of the platform, the management of the volunteers — they all require resources. And the odds are that you’ll still want to retain professional translators to manage the amateurs, which is not a bad thing. There is a peace of mind in having a vendor who does this sort of thing for a living signing off on a newly localized web site before it goes live. In the end, translation crowdsourcing is not about saving money.

As far as I can tell, Twitter has only a thousand or so text strings that require translation. In the time the company devoted to building this translation platform, it could probably have had the site localized in 50 or more languages.

Over time there probably will be cost savings, but I would argue that cost savings should not be the motivator and probably wasn’t the motivator for Twitter.

The platform companies develop to support crowdsourcing should have other measures of success, such as user engagement and testing, partner opportunities, and developer involvement.

For example, on the Twitter Translate information page, this paragraph jumped out at me:

Will my favorite applications be translated, too?
We know that Twitter is not all about Twitter.com, so our global reach shouldn’t be limited to Twitter.com either. That’s why we’re planning to give our developer community access to the translation files so they can create wonderful apps that use the translations, too.

This is where Twitter is headed with the platform, as well as Facebook and Google. Once you have the platform, you can get creative with it — expand it to developers so that they can quickly localize their apps. You can even try to open up the platform for “partner” sites to use — which is what Facebook is now doing.

As companies comes to grips with social media, they are slowly learning to let go. Employees blog and tweet. Customers post content on corporate sites, and now they are co-creating the localized products.

The top-down localization model is giving way to the bottom-up model, and this is a profound change, even if it’s limited to a handful of companies — albeit companies that represent a few hundred million users. I’m still trying to understand how far this phenomenon will go.

Unicode (used creatively) makes your Tweets go further

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I’m not exactly a power-Tweeter, so I can’t say I have the need for a tool that stretches Twitter’s 140-character limit.

Still, I get a kick out of Maxitweet.

To understand what it does, here’s an example.

I entered the following text: 149 characters.

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago–never mind how long precisely–having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore

And Maxtweet squeezed it down to 136 characters:

Caǁ me ʪhmael．Some years ago–never m㏌d how▕ong precێely–hav㏌gl计ᅱe or no money ㏌ my purse，and noth㏌g particular to interest me onshore

Those funny looking characters interspersed are pulled from Unicode’s wide pallet — such as ێ (ARABIC LETTER YEH WITH SMALL V). This character was used in place of “is.”

Other substitute characters used include “计”, “ʪ”, “㏌”, and “．” (I hope they all appear on your browser. Note that this blog is in Unicode but you may not have the right fond needed to display the characters)

Normally when I see this type of character substitution I think of phishers creating bogus domain names. But for once this traditionally nefarious technique has found a recreational application.

Here’s how the Tweet came across on on my iPhone:

maxtweet_twitter

Go Unicode!

The Twitter Domain Rush: Don’t Get “Twit-jacked”

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My previous post on Twitter got me thinking about what other companies had registered language-specific domains for their Twitter accounts.

Turns out, most companies haven’t even registered Twitter accounts for their primary brands.

Like who?

Apple, for one.

Here we have someone who apparently likes apples but isn’t Apple:

twitter_apple

It appear that Microsoft reserved its account early on, though nothing is there. Microsoft does have about a dozen Twitter accounts that do include content.

twitter_msft

Coke — someone who drinks Coke, but not the company.

twitter_coke

While Pepsi does have a Twitter account.

twitter_pepsi

The Wall Street Journal has an article out about this domain name rush.

So many questions come to mind:

  • Will Twitter enforce trademarks for valid holders? Usually, the WIPO does this with domain names, but this isn’t actually a domain name in the traditional sense.
  • What percentage of the millions of new Twitter accounts being registered every day simply squatters hoping to make a quick buck? That is, how much of Twitter’s growth actual growth?
  • And what about third-party domain marketplaces — will we see them emerge? Or will Twitter start its own marketplace?

In the meantime, if you’re thinking about reserving a Twitter domain, do it now before getting Twit-jacked…