WebProNews » Culture

Most Internet Users Search Web in Multiple Languages

Drew Bowling — Tue, 29 May 2012 17:37:05 +0000

The latest factoid to be pulled out of Greenlight’s “Search & Social Survey (2011-2012),” a global survey of 500 people that sought out information about user experiences and behaviors, reveals that many people around the world conduct online searches in more than one language.

76% of the study’s participants claimed that they search for information on the internet in two more languages. 100% of internet users in Belgium, Italy, and Spain all conduct searches in multiple languages. Belgium’s sort of a given, though, as it has three official languages: Dutch, German, and French. Italy and Spain, however, only have one official language (Italian and Spanish, if you didn’t put that one together), which could mean that the popular American stereotype is true: most Europeans speak English in addition to their countries’ official language.

“The fact that Italy and Spain top the chart with 100% of respondents claiming to search in multiple languages, despite reasonably homogenized language use, is possibly a testament to the position of English as the quasi-official language of Europe and the relative prevalence of English language web pages,” says Adam Bunn, director of SEO at Greenlight.

What’s peculiar – and humbling, depending on where you live – is that in the countries for whom English is an official language, if not the official language, most internet users don’t do internet searches in a language other than English. One wonders if this is due to linguistic access issues for native English speakers or if these internet users simply do not need to search for content in a second language given so much of the internet is available in English.

Rearranging the information so as to reflect a different demographic, you can see below in the table that the occupations that are most likely to employ the internet at a high frequency typically conduct searches in multiple languages.

“The real takeaway here of course is not that marketing and IT firms in Italy, Spain and Belgium should instantly start optimizing their sites for multiple languages,” Bunn added.

When considering the data in this report, it’s worth considering that of the 500 participants in the Greenlight survey, only 3% represent Asia and 2% represent “rest of the world,” which I infer to include the continents of Africa and South America. 70% of people surveyed were in Europe with the remaining 25% in North America. In other words, it’s not exactly a globally-relevant study but if you want to focus exclusively on telecommunication or online dealings between North America and Western Europe, the data could prove to be somewhat valuable.

Online Dating Characteristics [Infographic]

Chad Sweely — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 18:08:25 +0000

Online dating is not an unheard-of term anymore, but is very commonplace now in today’s society. I am sure you know of at least one couple that met on the internet, or is in a long-distance relationship and uses the internet to help their relationship succeed. I remember when I was back in high school, I knew of an older couple that met online and thought to myself “I’ve never heard of people doing that before.”

Now that we live in a digital world, and with social networking, texting, and instant messaging having such an integral part of our lives, the premise of online dating is easier than ever. It can also be “up in your face” when you’re not expecting it. I am sure that you have seen the commercials on TV for online dating that reach out to specific audiences (e.g. ChristianMingle and OurTime).

Here is a “behind the scenes” look at how online dating works in today’s society:

Google+ Discourages Innovation For Employees

Shawn Hess — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 15:16:22 +0000

I don’t know what to think about this story, according to ex-Google engineer James Whittaker, Google+ was the nail in the coffin for the climate for innovation and creativity at the technology giant. Their competition with Facebook to be the number one social networking platform became the driving priority at Google and that stifled creativity in a major way. The creative climate that yielded many mile-marking accomplishments like Chrome and Gmail was in jeopardy.

Of the culture when he joined the Google team in 2009 Whitaker writes:

“The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate.”

But today he feels differently:

“The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus.”

He makes the assertion that Google had a long tradition of empowering employees and had policies in place that encouraged innovation:

“Under Eric Schmidt ads were always in the background. Google was run like an innovation factory, empowering employees to be entrepreneurial through founder’s awards, peer bonuses and 20% time. Our advertising revenue gave us the headroom to think, innovate and create. Forums like App Engine, Google Labs and open source served as staging grounds for our inventions.”

So what changed the environment and the tone of the workplace? Whitaker explains:

“Larry Page himself assumed command to right this wrong. Social became state-owned, a corporate mandate called Google+. It was an ominous name invoking the feeling that Google alone wasn’t enough. Search had to be social. Android had to be social. You Tube, once joyous in their independence, had to be … well, you get the point. Even worse was that innovation had to be social. Ideas that failed to put Google+ at the center of the universe were a distraction.”

“Google Labs was shut down. App Engine fees were raised. APIs that had been free for years were deprecated or provided for a fee. As the trappings of entrepreneurship were dismantled, derisive talk of the ‘old Google’ and its feeble attempts at competing with Facebook surfaced to justify a “new Google” that promised ‘more wood behind fewer arrows’.”

“The days of old Google hiring smart people and empowering them to invent the future was gone. The new Google knew beyond doubt what the future should look like. Employees had gotten it wrong and corporate intervention would set it right again.”

His conclusion about these changes after spending months working to improve and distinguish Google+:

“Google+ and me, we were simply never meant to be. Truth is I’ve never been much on advertising. I don’t click on ads. When Gmail displays ads based on things I type into my email message it creeps me out. I don’t want my search results to contain the rants of Google+ posters (or Facebook’s or Twitter’s for that matter). When I search for “London pub walks” I want better than the sponsored suggestion to “Buy a London pub walk at Wal-Mart.”

“Recruiters often asked me to help sell high priority candidates on the company. No one had to ask me twice to promote Google and no one was more surprised than me when I could no longer do so. In fact, my last three months working for Google was a whirlwind of desperation, trying in vain to get my passion back.”

“The old Google was a great place to work. The new one?”

Hopefully this is a temporary phase for Google, but I fear it is not. Many of todays largest organizations started out as centers for innovation driven by collaboration and a spirit for innovation only to fall victim to the demands of stock holders and blind ambition to dominate a market.

Perhaps Whitaker just had a negative experience, but I suspect he is right, once you start down a path that discourages employee creativity, you stop attracting the best and brightest and end up with a bunch of bottom-feeders who would just as soon steal an idea than come up with one of their own. But this is just one individuals account of things at Google, I wouldn’t take it as fact.

The Internet Hasn’t Killed Culture Yet

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 23:43:00 +0000

Yahoo Publishing Network blog editor Michael Mattis had some choice words for author Andrew Keen, who decried the modern day Internet’s impact on culture.

The Internet Hasn’t Killed Culture Yet

Mattis opened up his rebuttal of Keen’s book, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture, by citing the demonization of television way back in 1961 by then-FCC head Newton Minow, who likened a day of television from sign-on to sign-off as a “vast wasteland.”

(Aside to our younger readers: once upon a time, TV stations did not broadcast 24 hours a day. Instead of informercials at 3 am, you’d see the American flag waving on the screen.)

Keen’s assessment of the Internet follows Minow’s thought. Mattis thinks of Keen’s book as a polemic that misses out on a number of instances where the Web supports culture rather than impeding it.

Such missives are best when they include a zinging personal attack, and Mattis delivered one:

Keen

Building Blocks Of The Social Web

Karl Long — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 19:59:05 +0000

In a brilliant post on nform.ca, information architect Gene Smith of the Atomiq.org blog outlined the 7 building blocks of social software. This pulls together the work of various people including Matt Webb and Stewart Butterfield and provides a framework that I think is valuable in thinking about social software.

The 7 building blocks are:

Identity – a way of uniquely identifying people in the system

Presence – a way of knowing who is online, available or otherwise nearby

Relationships – a way of describing how two users in the system are related (e.g. in Flickr, people can be contacts, friends of family)

Conversations – a way of talking to other people through the system

Groups – a way of forming communities of interest

Reputation – a way of knowing the status of other people in the system (who’s a good citizen? who can be trusted?)

Sharing – a way of sharing things that are meaningful to participants (like photos or videos)

The article also presents a graphic demonstrating how social media sites have different emphasis, and act in different ways.

One aspect that I think is maybe missing from this model is the concept of equity, maybe social equity but that might be redundant. I think potentially reputation may accounts for some of the equity participants build in these social networks, but it doesn’t quite cover some of the key motivations in social networks. Think about yelp or myspace, the way you build equity in those networks is through collecting, collecting friends on myspace, collecting reviews and friends on yelp (sure reviews are contributions and they are part of your reputation). I think the way people build equity and reputation in social networks is what makes a community sustainable, it’s almost the equivalent to the concept of corporate culture or “the way we do things around here”. Analysis of corporate culture may provide a nice parallel when thinking about social networks and communities. Believe it or not the analysis of corporate culture is not as dry as it sounds and involves, heros, myths, stories, norms, and values.

I don’t know about you but i’ve worked at companies that believed they could “create culture” by telling the right stories, providing hero figures, instilling values etc. There are some that would say creating culture is not possible, but possibly you can influence it. Is Tom a heroic figure of myspace? Brookers on youtube? Nish on Yelp? Is the elite badge on yelp a symbol that is creating culture?

Here’s some reading on culture

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Lead Nurturing – The YouTube Approach

Jon Miller — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 15:11:36 +0000

Content is critical for lead nurturing. Whether it is a case study, new research on some aspect of your industry, a how-to guide, or a whitepaper, content is what makes your lead nurturing programs work – and lead nurturing is what helps marketing drive more revenue to sales.

However, the internet has changed how buyers make B2B purchases, and more recently, it’s begun to affect how they consume content. Rarely does a business buyer have time to print out and read an entire whitepaper, watch a 60 minute webinar, or read more than a few bullet points on a website.

Instead, today’s buyers have become accustomed to consuming bite-sized chunks of information in small free periods. Before the internet, those periods might have meant a minute of mental downtime, but today buyers have Crackberries, RSS feeders, YouTube, and so on to feed them snippets of content all day long.

In this post, Are You Feeding the Snack Culture?, John Jantsch writes that capturing buyers early in the sales cycle means you need to feed them snack-sized pieces of content:

…education based marketing materials are essential for the prospect that is ready to be nurtured [using long-form content], but I think it’s equally important that you find ways to deliver the snacks of information that can help people begin to develop the relationship that makes them want to deeper.

A few tips from Foneshow blog: Snack-sized content needs to have a single idea, should be easy to share, and should require little or no commitment. If it can be viewed on a mobile device during an elevator ride, you are on the right track.

Oh, and by the way, I know my posts can be too long!

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Fortune Learns It’s Great To Work At Google

WebProNews Staff — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 21:54:29 +0000

Now that Google has been around long enough to be eligible for Fortune Magazine’s “The 100 Best Companies to Work For” list, it promptly debuted at number one.

All that is missing is Casey Kasem reading a Long Distance Dedication from a reader who used to be CEO at Novell to complete the news of Google’s chart topping arrival on the Fortune list.

Of course for everyone who isn’t a Googler, they probably have a different Kasem moment in mind considering their place in the working world. (KIDS! That mp3 is not safe for work!)

Fortune compiles its list each year, and looks at factors like employee benefits in selecting companies.

“Our new No. 1 sets the standard for Silicon Valley: free meals, swimming spa, and free doctors onsite,” the report said of Google. “No wonder Google gets 1,300 rsums a day.”

Fortune credits Google’s perks (“Google runs 11 free gourmet cafeterias at its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters.”) and culture (“Life for Google employees at the Mountain View campus is like college.”) in building a happy workplace. The company saw job growth of 67 percent in 2006.

Google is the most prominent computer-related technology company on the Fortune list, but not the only one making the top 100 companies. Network Appliance, Cisco, Qualcomm, Adobe, Intuit, Yahoo, and Microsoft all grabbed spots among the top 50 companies.

For everyone who isn’t working for a top 100 company, and is secure enough to do so, it may be time to ask the head honchos why their company doesn’t do the things that Google and others on the list do for their employees. (WebProNews is not responsible for demotions, firings, or chair throwings that could results from asking such questions of one’s employers.)

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The Second Life Hype Cycle 2.0

Kevin Dugan — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 15:51:58 +0000

In a great example of blogsourcing, my idea to gauge Second Life against the Gartner Group Hype Cycle is being refined thanks to a post from Linda Zimmer.

Tony Walsh at Clickable Culture updated and improved my initial attempt (shown here) and Electric Sheep’s Chris Carella also weighs in on the topic.

I’ve stopped following the Second Life hype months ago…most of our projects to date have been experiments for brands learning about virtual worlds. While we continue to climb the Slope of Enlightenment with our partners, I believe this upcoming year we will begin to showcase the power of virtual worlds and the ways they can build much stronger communities than the web.

In the comments of my initial post, Prokofy Neva notes how the hype cycle might get even more granular in its analysis.

All interesting points to consider.

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Considering the Importance of Corporate Culture

Kate Smalley — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 17:48:30 +0000

When it comes to sizing up job candidates, cultural fit is just as important to consider as qualifications.

That’s why hiring managers must use their heart and not just their head during the selection process. Your company should use insight to assess how the job candidate’s character and personality — not just skills — will fit into the corporate culture.

People are your company’s best, most important investment. This is especially true for executives and others in key positions that have the greatest potential to impact your bottom line.

Whether you need a senior-level executive or a department manager, you cannot afford to hire the wrong person. If you do, you could encounter a negative hiring experience, which can cost valuable time and money. Poor hiring situations can equate to lost production and business — not to mention other tangible costs related to interviewing, placement fees, relocation, and training. Minimum figures for executive turnover are reportedly four to five times the annual salary.

What Is Corporate Culture? By definition, corporate culture is “the act of developing intellectual and moral faculties, especially through education.” But in a broader sense, it’s “the moral, social, and behavioral norms of an organization based on the beliefs, attitudes, and priorities of its members.” Every organization has its own ideals, which are often based on the values of the founders or top management. At Atlanta-based Home Depot, for example, keeping all employees interested in the business is a top priority. All new employees — even executives — spend two weeks working on the sales floor, learning what customers want and need, and receiving a ground-zero view of the company’s core business.

Your culture, for instance, might emphasize respecting others and working as a team. If that’s the case, you should focus on hiring people who have demonstrated these characteristics in their previous work experiences.

How To Choose The Best Candidate For Your Culture So exactly how do you determine if a prospect is the best match for your organization? Although some companies rely on culture and personality assessments, there’s no scientific formula for hiring success. A positive employment experience requires a combination of background research, assessment and pure instinct.

First, you must clearly define, clarify and understand your company’s core values. Review the ideals that are expressed in your organization’s employee handbook, training sessions, marketing materials, and mission, vision, and goal statements. This will give you a “measuring stick” for weighing the behaviors required for success in your corporate culture with the prospective employee’s character.

Next, thoroughly investigate the job candidate’s work performance and relationships from previous positions to ensure you have an accurate sense of his or her personality. Then simply factor in experience, education and other important considerations to determine which candidate best fits the position and your company.

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Customer service: Company Culture Change

Wayne Hurlbert — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 14:54:03 +0000

Customer service is an important aspect of any business. Without customers to purchase the business’s products and services, the company cash flow dries up faster than a rain shower in the Sahara.

While most business people instinctively understand the importance of customer service, they all too often forget that customer service is part of every employee’s job.

Customer service a concept that should be undertaken by everyone within the organization. Many business people neglect the less obvious aspects of customer relations, and focus only on the front line personnel. In the retail industry, the importance of customer service is well known. The sales staff are trained in helping meet the customer’s needs, and a customer service desk is placed in many stores. Most organizations rarely think beyond that basic contact level.

The direct customer contact people are only part of the customer service aspect of a business however. When people buy your products and services, they are purchasing more than is shown on the cash register tape. A bad experience with a billing notice or a delivery truck driver very often creates a dissatisfied customer. These unknown problems cause many a buyer to vote with her feet right across the street to your competitor. Customer service extends far beyond the store walls.

Management has a responsibility to instil good customer relationships throughout the entire company culture. Everyone from the President and CEO to the maintenance staff are part of the customer relationship team. Everything your business does, or doesn’t do in any transaction, is considered by the general public in assessing your organization and its brands. A shoddy product production line, an unclean place of business, or a terrible accounts receivable technique can destroy the trust given to your company brand. Think in terms of quality and excellence in everything that the company does when discussing customer service with your staff.

If your business is not acting in the interests of good customer service, you won’t have customers for long. Let the customers lodge complaints about your products and services. A business blog is a great way to facilitate this interaction between the business and the target market. A business blog develops a conversation between reader and blogger, who is now a real person and not some faceless corporation, that nurtures a trust based relationship.

Completely open and transparent two way conversation has many powerful benefits. One that is obvious is the company listens to its customers, whether the news is good or bad. A benefit that might not be so obvious at first glance is the building of trust that the company and its brands are seen as doing business the right way. Openess builds trust, and people buy from those whom they trust to deliver on their brand promises.

Make customer service a way of life for your business.

Your bottom line will look much brighter as a result.

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