Social media marketing is another hot topic right now. With around 600 million users signed up to Facebook and another 200 million on Twitter, not to mention the more business-oriented LinkedIn and various other smaller and/or locally based competitors, the sheer scale of social media interaction is phenomenal. Many businesses are using social media platforms for marketing, increasing brand awareness and customer service, but few, it seems, are combining the two areas of localisation and social media marketing.

Econsultancy’s 2010 Social Media and Online PR Report reported that 83% of marketers were planning to increase their spending on social media in 2011, yet only 26% were planning to run campaigns in more than one country.

So are they missing an opportunity? The answer has to be that, potentially at least, they are.

So what’s the point of social media marketing?

While social media marketing can be used for direct sales or customer service, it is probably more widely used for more general PR. ‘Background’ activities such as building and maintaining brand awareness, monitoring and responding to criticism and gathering feedback from customers can obviously have a major effect on your sales and overall success – even if it’s not always as easy to see a clear return on investment, as you can for localisation.

In a survey conducted by market research company Ad-ology, the owners of 1,100 small businesses described their ability to generate leads, to keep up with developments within their field, and to monitor online conversations about their business, as being the greatest benefits of social media marketing.

Social media should be used as just one part of an overall strategy but, given the popularity of social networks and their capacity to span borders and cultures, they can be invaluable when it comes to reaching foreign markets and territories.

What are the best sites to use?

The global nature of major players like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn mean that they can all be used to reach different markets and cultures. Last year, Portuguese, Arabic and Spanish were the fastest growing languages used on Facebook.

(Source: www.insidefacebook.com)

To a large extent, these figures are representative of the worldwide growth in internet usage, and take-up rates in general throughout the vast potential markets of South America and the Middle East. It’s entirely possible to reach many different markets through the social media platforms you’re already familiar with, such as Twitter and Facebook, but some countries are dominated by local networks that are unknown elsewhere.

In China, for example, Qzone claims to have a staggering 380 million users. It’s thought that many of these could be dormant accounts, but it’s still a massive slice of China’s estimated – and still growing – 400 million internet users. Renren is another big player in China, with an estimated 120 million users.

In Japan, Mixi has a market share of around 80%, amounting to some 30 million users, while Sonico is popular throughout Latin America and Orkut, despite having started life in California, is now the most popular social media site within Brazil (and until recently was the most popular in India, now overtaken by Facebook).

As well as these general social networking sites, there may also be a number of sites dedicated to your particular industry. These sites often have their own active communities and it might be worth establishing a presence within groups on these niche sites. The key is simply to identify the markets you intend to be active within and then research the popular social media platforms within those countries. Depending on the resources you have available, it may be enough to concentrate on the most widely used sites, or it may be worth dipping into smaller or niche sites as well.

Effective translation and communication

Once you’ve decided on the most appropriate social networks to target, you still have to communicate with your customers, and likely across languages. Translation widgets such as Babelfish and Google Translate may give decent literal translations in some cases, but they can be prone to the sort of contextual and cultural errors that are marketing kryptonite.

Ideally, you’d be able to hire native-language speakers to run your social media campaigns in every language market, but if you don’t have those resources available, you can always outsource the translation and localisation of your content and make use of machine translation software to get the gist of online conversations.

The world’s biggest brands have already realised that to continue competing, they need to be across social media in every one of their target markets – the good news is that, with the right skills and knowledge, the smaller players can compete on the same playing field.

About the author

Christian Arno is the founder of professional translation agency Lingo24. Launched in 2001, Lingo24 now has over 150 employees spanning three continents and clients in over sixty countries. In the past twelve months, they have translated over sixty million words for businesses in every industry sector. Follow Christian (@l24ca) and Lingo24 (@Lingo24) on Twitter.

It had to happen and it has, the revolution has been updated with new figures and the same banging soundtrack.  Enjoy!

Knowing a little about computers and web sites it began to dawn on us that we were going to have to pull something bigger out of the bag if we were to leave the land of mediocrity and really get in touch with the modern world and more importantly, new clients. After a recommendation from a business colleague at Marbella Consulting who had used Justin Parks in the past, we got in touch and asked for a little get together to chat about if and how he could help us move forward and really get our site out there and in front of client’s eyes.

So we got together and the way he handled the project from beginning to end was nothing short of pure professionalism. He worked alongside us all the way, talking us through what was new stuff to me really, social networking and client-building.

So how did we do it? Well we’re not ones to keep business secrets to ourselves as we have often benefited from the wisdom of others. Justin took a look at our site, saw that we had done a bit of work with it in order to try and get some hits from the search engines (which was just getting harder and harder as Google kept moving the goal posts on us), so he suggested that we go with what’s happening in the world today and get networked up socially with an aim to benefit both the rankings on the search engines and our brand and service profile on the social media networks.

To be honest we were a small bit sceptical at first about how that could help our business as we are a bit old school in terms of sites and publicity (add the site to a few directories, exchange links with a few sites and wait for the money to roll in!), but we discussed setting up a Facebook page for The Sara Service, which we did then asked all of our friends to join and all of their friends. Honestly, we was astounded by the response, it had never twigged with us that Facebook could also be used as a business networking tool.

We did more than a few deals using Facebook, mostly by being able to put last-minute and bargain stuff straight in front of people’s eyes. Then the next stage of the plan we discussed was creating a Sara Service Twitter account (which was news to me again), so I followed Justin’s advice and again, once we understood how it can and should be utilised we found that with Twitter the potential was even greater because basically we had the chance of getting in front of not just people we knew, but people who we wanted to know, people who had the capital to do bigger deals and more importantly, people who were interested in what we were selling. Its early days but its obvious what this can achieve when its been explained!

To wrap it up we’d say the 3 best things to come from this campaign are:

• The extra clients of course
• The feedback we have been getting from clients who have already been using social networking
• The power to stay in touch with our past and current clients at the touch of a button, keeping our repeat business and opening up our business to them and giving them access to contact us in a million different ways.

Thank you Justin from everyone here at The Sara Service, good job!

Sorrel Lewis & Jane Frith
Managing Partners
The Sara Service
Web: http://www.thesaraservice.com/
Tel: +34 695 082 710 / +34 661 801 627
Email: info@thesaraservice.com

Its not fun though, when you have to go through each site, login and then copy and paste that info, so most of us wont bother as its to much of a time sink and a distraction.  Instead we concentrate on just a select few and while these may be beneficial it could also mean your missing out on potentially profitable relationships and networking opportunities through omission.

Never fear through!  As always some smart Alec has had the very same problem and then decided to address it themselves, so let me present you with the two options you have, one paid for and one for free.

Ping.fm – Make Updating your Social Networks a Snap

Ping.fm has been around a long time and of course, the biggest advantage it has, is that its FREE.

That’s why we love it.  It covers a wide range of different social networks and since its free then you can scoot on over and check it out now.

Here is a convenient little link to ping.fm for ya.

Enjoy!

Only Wire – Automated Content Bookmarking

Only Wire is pretty much the same as ping.fm except that it is NOT Free. Well, kind of.  There is a free version that is supported with adverts, so that might be a little annoying.

It covers about 39 different social networks and I would say, if your a business, then this would be the solution for you.

Hope they come in useful.

American Mom Media

American Mom’s have taken up the social media mantle and are using it to track their children when at college or university to ensure that they make every effort to succeed and stay away from potential problems.  Some American Media Mom’s have even went further and integrated themselves into their children’s lives with alter egos to ensure they have a more direct influence on their development when out of physical reach.

Watch this concerning development and the story behind it right here:

Facebook, Twitter Revolutionizing How Parents Stalk Their College-Aged Kids

Now seriously… I hope your laughing.  I sure as hell am.

I love the way it shows the movement of the “blank” message across different mediums, from phone calls and word of mouth to blog reviews and opinion based comments to car stickers and mico blogging formats and helps us get a grasp of the Big Picture that effective marketing has become. Hat tip to the guys at 22squared.com for such a good job.

Enjoy and as always, comments are always welcome.

Peter has explained in his post and in the comments that he has been in communication with the Independent.co.uk newspaper over a matter of copyright infringement when they used a photo that he had taken , and applied “All Rights Reserved” terms to and which they decided to ignore.

As far as I can see this has occurred, and I am basing this on the information on Peters Flickr page, which I have no problem doing because he has quite comprehensively included the email thread and correspondence between himself and the contact at the Independent newspaper and he has approached the whole situation correctly and properly in my opinion.

The newspaper however, have not. I would suggest that you have a look at the thread and comments in their entirety as it makes for very interesting reading, for me, mostly because it shows how there is a serious lack of understanding about the nature of the Flickr site and its Terms of Service, or in other words, they thought, “Lets have that, its on the internet so it must be free, oh what’s that All Rights Reserved thing, ignore it no one will notice and sod the Terms and Conditions everything on Flickr is free”.

Horrible and inexcusable conduct from a national newspaper who should know better.

The campaign begins

If you live in the UK then the situation will be quite familiar. The program broadcast in the UK called X-Factor (much like American Idol in the USA) has for the last 4 years dominated the prestigious number 1 spot on the Christmas Charts releasing classic ballads and songs “in the spirit of the season”.  This seems to have annoyed some people.  No, actually, its annoyed a lot of people… and they had enough.

What started out as a idea on Facebook, quickly gained momentum across a range of social networks and the group exploded with discussions and encouragement by users to support the idea and help make an impression on the music industry.  Twitter picked up momentum using the hashtag #ratm4xmas or #RATM and there was a Rage Against the Machine For Christmas Number 1 Website available as well.

The crux of the situation can be seen in the numbers below over the sales figures below:

• (Series 1 – 2004) Steve Brookstein – Against All Odds– 250,000 copies sold
  
• (Series 2 – 2005) Shayne Ward- That’s My Goal – 742,180 copies sold
• (Series 3 – 2006) Leona Lewis – A Moment Like This – 571,253 copies sold
• (Series 4 – 2007) Leon Jackson – When You Believe – 490,000 copies sold
• (Series 5 – 2008) Alexandra Burke – Hallelujah – 576,000 copies sold

All of these Christmas Number 1 results where as a result of the X-Factor and basically, enough was enough, for people and they took a stand. The final results, as accurately as we can make them at this stage anyway are:

(Series 6 – 2009) Joe McElderry – The Climb – 450,838 copies sold

Rage Against the Machine (released 1992) – released by popular demand and a Facebook campaign Killing in the Name – 502,000

Source for figures: Unreality TV

The 2009 Christmas Number 1

The final result, based on these figures is that Rage Agasint the Machine not only achieved the number 1 single for Christmas in the UK, they also created the record for the the first exclusively download-only single to hit number one, after pulling in more than 950,000 fans on the Facebook page along side which a  JustGiving page was created to raise money for UK homeless charity Shelter which, as of 19 December, was reported to have raised over £50,000 (approximately $80,000).

Finally, Rage Against the Machine have promised to hold a Free Gig in the UK as a show of thanks for the support and passion shown by fans in the UK.  They are also donating a proportion of this unexpected “windfall” from the singles sales to the Shelter charity.

The current affairs behind it

The whole episode has created a stir with media interest reaching fever pitch as Sundays chart announcement drew closer. Simon Cowell was reported as having branded the RATM campaign “stupid”, “cynical” and even “bullying”.  According to the Guardian Newspaper Cowell stated:

“If there’s a campaign, and I think the campaign’s aimed directly at me, it’s stupid. Me having a No 1 record at Christmas is not going to change my life particularly,” Cowell said. “I think it’s quite a cynical campaign geared at me that is actually going to spoil the party for these three.”

How things can change.

GigWise reported tonight that Simon Cowell called the creators of the campaign, Jon Morter and Tracy Morter and thanked them for making it the most interesting chart battle for years.

The big winners out of this though are of course SONY, although the more fanatical are citing this as a problem, at the end of the day, that’s another issue to address.  There is always next Christmas I guess :P

For your Christmas viewing pleasure.

Rage Against the Machine “Killing in the Name” – Pure brilliance.

So What?

The point behind all this was that a feeling of expression was stirred in the world of social media.  People utilised the medium to effectively rally behind a single cause and make their opinions heard rather than simply accepting the Status Quo and accepting something that many thought was inevitable consequently affecting the final outcome and making their voices heard.

The obvious power behind this type of movement is and has amazing potential for the future and certainly is not the first time that its reach has been felt.  To say that this will happen again would be full hardy, but the fact is, it has happened and as many of us know, the proof is in the pudding. Social Media has again had an effect on the “real” world and will most likely continue to affect and influence public opinion and information distribution and syndication in the future.