By Ken Rosen
Hai! This Japanese word for “Yes” may be the most famous international communication error in U.S. business folklore.
The tale, of course, is Americans say “Yes” when they agree. But Japanese say “Hai” when they understand the speaker … even if they disagree. Many the proverbial American thought they had agreement with Japanese partners only to realize they were still at square one.
Pepsi hit a less famous speed bump in India in 2004. It ran an ad storyline that it, Coke, and others have run a thousand times in the U.S.: Sports team on field. Sports team thirsty. Child brings drinks. Cue music. What could be cuter, right? Except in India, this was viewed as promoting child labour. Result? Litigation and the comically non-controversial court assertion “no advertisement depicting child labour should be aired until further orders.” (Did I just see your eyes roll?)
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By Alexandra Reid
I’ll come out honestly and say that I’ve been using automation software for a long time now. Social media purists, go ahead and hiss at me if you will. I only ask that you hear me out.
For the last year or so, I’ve used automation software to schedule posts for this blog and tweets for Twitter. Just last week, I went a bit farther and purchased an automation tool to help me grow Twitter communities. And you know what? I don’t feel the slightest bit guilty about it. As a social media enthusiast and community manager for multiple accounts, I find it a necessary time saver.
Let me be quick to say that I do not use automation software for everything. In fact, I only use it for those menial, repetitive tasks like hitting the “post” and “follow” buttons. All the important work, including crafting messages and direct messages, engaging with others, searching for quality articles to share and locating those key industry influencers is done manually by me. In no way does the automation software deplete the quality of my accounts. It’s because of the automation software that I have time to engage with good people, which, while essential and the most fun, is often the most time consuming part of social media.
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By Alexandra Reid
This is the last installment of my three-part series on tactical methods companies can use to carry out rebranding across multiple social media accounts. In the last two weeks, I have discussed common pitfalls companies face during the process of changing their names and images on a variety of social channels, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and blogs and how to overcome them. Today, I’ll focus on how to change your company’s social media voice during the rebranding process, and how to know if changing your voice is even necessary.
A strong social media company voice
In our every day social interactions, many of us naturally seek out others who are centered and grounded. These qualities are expressed through consistency and stability of personality and are integral to maintaining healthy, long-term relationships, whether they are personal or business.
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By Alexandra Reid
This is part two of my three-part series on tactical methods companies can use to carry out rebranding across multiple social media accounts. Last week, I discussed common pitfalls companies face during the process of changing their names on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and how to overcome them. Today, I’ll focus on the steps required to change your company’s image across these social media channels, as well as YouTube and blogs.
It should be noted that rebranding is far more than just a change in visual identity and must be regarded as part of an overall strategy. If a brand has lost its relevance, changing its image will not fix its problems. You can put lipstick on a pig, but it won’t hide the fact that it’s still a pig. If this is the case, the company must reevaluate its answers to those core marketing questions about relevance, uniqueness, value, positioning and why people should care.
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As part of our ongoing series examining the ecosystem necessary to bring technology to market, we asked John Craig, a veteran of commercializing mobile technologies, to share his thoughts on how startups can achieve market validation to drive revenues. This is the first of his commentaries and we welcome your feedback.
By John Craig
The importance to emerging Canadian companies of being focused on winning deals outside of Canada.
As the co-founders of Purple Forge, Brian Hurley and I placed a significant amount of emphasis on exporting to the U.S. and around the world to get our business started. For those of you who don’t know Purple Forge, we develop and sell mobile applications as a service for politicians, event organizers, governments and interactive marketing firms. We are headquartered in Ottawa, Canada with offices in the U.S. and resellers around the world.
In 2009, we had a very simple idea — developing mobile applications for community engagement. The idea was to allow organizations to reach out to their key constituents to broadcast their news, events, social networking feeds and other information. These constituents would then share this information using their own Facebook and Twitter accounts, and then the organizations would ask these people to perform activities to the benefit of those organizations.
Cool, right? We thought so – and we wanted to prove it. So where to start? Well there was always the Government of Canada, which was in our own backyard. We knew the sales cycles are 18 months or more, and it was very conservative about adopting new technologies that hadn’t been proven elsewhere. We needed to find a customer who was willing to take a risk. Better yet, was willing to take a risk and would pay us to do it. That way, we could prove the value of the idea.
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