High Context Consulting

Archive for May, 2008

May 30, 2008

Developing Your Own Technical Talent

I hear from many clients that it is still quite hard to find experienced technical talent for IT or web development and administration work. What to do when you can’t afford to lure away an experienced technical employee? One alternative is to develop your own.

The key to success is to design your positions and professional development program to enable you to develop an entry level person and then promote them in place. This eventually develops the skill set you need while enhancing your chance of retaining the person after they have been trained.

Design an entry level technical position that you will fill. Also design a more senior position, based on the original job description, that includes higher-level responsibilities and the requisite knowledge, skills and abilities. As your entry level new hire is developed, promote them into the higher level position which you have created by design. It’s good to have two to three of these junior to senior path positions in place, if you can afford it, so that you can have new talent in the pipeline before a trained person does eventually leave.

This does a couple of things. It offers the realistic chance of relatively rapid promotion for the entry level person once they have learned how to do the more advanced job. They don’t have to wait for someone more senior to leave, they can simply be promoted in place. This will help to acknowledge the value of their new skills to the company and contribute to keeping them with you longer than they would have stayed for a dead-end entry level job. It also creates a senior position that you can fill directly if you happen to find that perfect candidate (it does happen now and then!).

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May 28, 2008

Selling Like It’s 1989

I was shopping online a few days ago for a nice fountain pen. When you want a fountain pen, you start with Mont Blanc. However, Mont Blanc publishes no prices online and they do not allow their retailers to do so either. The result? Many pages across the web featuring very nice Mont Blanc pens, each with a ‘contact for price’ button.

I bought a pen from Cross instead.

Price really wasn’t an issue here, it was convenience. I did not want to go through the hassle of having to interact with a human for what should have been a very simple, self-guided, impulse buy.

Controlling price information was a feasible strategy pre-Web. Keeping the numbers hush-hush prevents retailers from discounting competitions, protecting profit and the sales channel. This does not work when customers can easily price shop across the globe and expect to be able to make an informed purchase immediately.

I shudder to think of how many sales Mont Blanc forgoes with this dated tactic.

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May 20, 2008

Campaigns and Loyalists

Ever wondered what happens when your marketing campaign generates a loyal following? Case in point: Closing a Disney community from Church of the Customer Blog.

This new online world trips up marketers from the big to the little, the for- to the non-profit. A key lesson in this story: building community into a by-design time-limited campaign is counter productive. Established communities want to continue even if the budget for their platform has run out.

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May 9, 2008

David Gammel’s Web Strategy Report, Volume 1, Issue 1

Thoughts On Strategy: Going International

A Brit, working in Switzerland at a multinational scientific research organization, invented the Web to help his colleagues easily share the results of their research from anywhere on the globe. The Web has been, and always will be, a global communications platform.
20% of the world’s population has access to the Web as of December 2007.
50% of the world’s population has cell phones.
Asia (including India and China) has the lowest percentage of population online but the greatest number currently online.
Internationalized systems support deploying content and services in multiple languages and support gathering data and payment in different formats and currencies.
Localization is the process of applying content, design and functionality to an internationalized system in order to address the needs of a country or region whose people share common cultural, economic, and linguistic attributes.
Not all web site audiences are created equal. Focus your efforts on serving those with the highest potential value to your outcomes.
Being truly global means being local everywhere. Do your homework, focus on your highest value audiences and build your international offerings over time.

Case Study: The Chinese Olympic Committee

The Chinese Olympic Committee is the body that won the 2008 Summer Olympics for China. They have deployed two sites as the country prepares for the big event later this year. One is in English and the other, naturally enough, in Chinese. They provide a good example of an organization developing two different presentations of their brand and information to two broadly differing audiences.

The English language site, en.olympic.cn, is clearly targeted to the entire world outside of China. It is in English and provides links to resources, information and headlines for anyone interested in the Olympics in China. Notice that the colors, although featuring some red, use more orange, blue and white.

The Chinese site, www.olympic.cn, is completely written in Chinese except for a link to the English language site and some roman numerals that count down the days until the Games begin. The color red is predominant and Communist Party iconography is much more in evidence. It is also a much more polished presentation and design compared to the English language site.

A few things to note:

The two sites have different designs and content, tailored to the outcomes and audiences for which they were created.
The navigation bars had to be structured differently, even if the sections were the same, due to the varying sizes of Chinese and English characters.
The one consistency between the two sites is the branding of the Chinese flag, Olympic Rings and the name of the organization in Chinese and English. This is the one visual element that ties the two together as part of the same organization.

By bifurcating their audience in this way the Committee is able to provide tailored information and design to their domestic audience and a different presentation and language to everyone else. This simple approach allows the home country visitors to have a culturally (and politically, I’m sure) tailored experience while the rest of the world can access foreign-targeted content in a generally more accessible language. However, the English language content still carries a very identifiable political spin to news and events, as the torch relay of the past month has triggered protests around the world.

High Geekery: Machine Translation

Machine translation of language is not anywhere near ready for prime time use. Executives everywhere are tempted by the low cost of machine translation when compared to hiring a human to do it. However, as in so many cases, you get what you pay for when you take the road less costly.
For example, using the venerable Babel fish web site to translate the home page of the Chinese Olympic Committee leads to the following headline in English:

“The badminton champion lucky new huge mythical bird and the numerous stars sings refuels China.”

Who knew badminton birdies have a role in the energy markets?

If it’s worth translating, it’s worth hiring a human to do it. If you cannot justify the expense, increase the value of what you are trying to achieve online or simply stick with your native language.

New Offerings from David

Here are a few new resources and events from C. David Gammel:

Article: Web Design Implications for Translated Web Sites
Blog Post: Why Heathrow’s Terminal 5 Failed Miserably
David is moderating a panel on building community and collaboration with global customers. The panel is in New York at the BDI Global Communication conference on Tuesday May 13.