I could listen to four case studies on two topics today.
Xonio.com presented it’s social media activities. Xonio is a B2C-portal focusing on mobilephones other mobile hardware stuff, mostly publishing testing reports.
Actually, they summarize almost everything in the social media topic: comments, boards, rss, even emailsupport for users.
On the other hand, they experiment a lot with twitter, facebook, blogs, tumblr etc – but that’s more the private business of the editors; it’s not really part of the xonio portal (except the blog).
It’s funny: to me it seems, that the social media buzz is used to justify the “old” community activities. They are in place, they don’t need any need investments – but they are a lot of work. Editors need to review comments, boards have to be moderated, questions have to be answered. The business benefit is SEO through comments and discussions, higher loyalty of the users, higher attention of and towards the markets. That somehow fits to social media and 2.0 discussions, even if it’s nothing new.
It seems to work for xonio anyway.
The next case study was the social media-oriented relaunch of sport1.de presented by the consulting company Anthea.
This was based on three main pillars:
Reduce navigation in favor of content. The left column originally containing the context menu was completely removed, the space is now used for more content in a nicer presentation. Clicking on contents thus replaces using the menu. I think that can work – but you need lots of good content and curious users. It might be less suitable for content that is not really news-related or that needs very specific categorization.
Second point is: they use rss, delicious, Mr. Wong and other tools to spread the content. The target is to create additional links or entry points. That also corresponds to the first issue: since every page can be an entry page, they have to contain a lot of content a provide a good overview.
The third pillar are comments, forwarding and user content. They are used to enhance interaction and user loyalty, but also to get new topics and to monitor the real interests of their users. That’s also a lot of work, but the results seem to be satisfying.
The second topic with again two casestudies dealt with multilanguage and multisite management.
Daniela Kraus, representing Zumtobel presented the global Zumtobel Universe with several brands, markets and portals, addressing also several internal and external target groups.
It must be quite a powerful solution that supports processes from the project idea (that may also be generated externally by an architect), general discussions up to detailed orders and billing.
That’s quite impressive, but definitely a very specific b2b-only issue. I really liked it, even though I’m not quite sure if I really got it.
Then there was me trying to present a decision model for the question what to translate into which languages in international intranets. My idea was to make people think about this question instead of just giving the perpetual answer “everything”.
I think that the decision of what to localize how is a powerful political tool, so you really need to know what you are doing here.
There are two main decisions: Do you want to use one common language or do you want to use several local languages?
Next step is: where to apply these decisions? Local languages are good for actions and dicussions on a local level (either internally or also with local customers). One common language is better for internation topics. – How can you decide on that? You need to ask a lot of detailed questions, that will also help to de-emotionalize the topic: The smaller your subject of discussion is, the easier you can deal with it.
The goal is to reduce the amount of necessary translations, to have clear and understandable criteria and to shape a consistent world for the intranet users: They must clearly understand when, what and why something is rolled out internationally, without having to really look for the information. Having a smart plan for localizing does also mean having a smart plan for how to introduce international topics to your users, how to set the agenda for the perception of your company as an international company.
You can view my slides here.
kbex 