This past week a report surfaced that only 50% of tweets are in English. The other 4 top languages are Japanese, Portuguese, Malay & Spanish. The release of this report got me thinking as more global firms get into monitoring their brand online and the implications for them by this report.
We already have many public relations, advertising and other agencies using more then one social media monitoring tool for a brand. The big reason for this is because every tool is different and using two tools increases your likely hood that you won’t miss anything online. Also, each tool is going to offer something different for each brand. I know a few friends at different advertising shops are really digging Sysomos right now. However, what happens when your team is based in North American or Europe and you want to monitor your brand in Asia.
Going Global
I know many of the leading social media monitoring tools have the ability to translate into different languages but I’m beginning to wonder how good of a job these tools do. There is something said for a firm like JamiQ who is based in Asia and understands the culture and language of that continent a lot better then a firm based in North American or Europe. It’s the subtle differences that are going to hopefully make a tool like JamiQ a lot better at monitoring your brand then a firm not based there. This starts to leave me with more questions then answers:
- Should global brands being using a different social media monitoring tool for each continent?
- Will teams need to start to be continent based?
- Will the need for an agitator to combine each continents information into one dashboard exist?
- Are global brands even beginning to think this way?
I’m not sure where we are headed but this is a trend that I’m going to continue to monitor as I see it effecting how we work. As more people jump into social media tools then this trend is only going to increase in 2010 and beyond. This post was spurred by a conversation I had with my friend Alex Conde and the team at Proximity on Wednesday.
