Global content and country sites: consulting and project piloting

Though all projects we were involved with had some element of global content governance, two assignments in particular focused exclusively on it. These were for B2B companies in the fields of technology and biotechnology, and the goal of the assignments was to:

• establish rules around global and local content (who gets to publish what, where; what can be changed/removed/locally-produced, and so on);
• improve information and publishing flows between central and local teams;
• improve visibility and access to localized content;
• improve transitions between sites and languages.

After content analysis, some competitive and statistical review, as well as stakeholder interviews, we made recommendations that covered everything from content planning to publishing, from creation to governance, from rules for different site typologies to global content opportunities.

A third assignment, this one in the oil and gas industry, was very similar in nature, but instead of country sites, we focused on clarifying the purpose of a constellation of business unit, company and affiliate sites.  Recommendations covered ways to improve both consistency across sites, and access to information about the company’s global presence.

A smaller assignment involved helping a technology company evaluate its options for strengthening its global web presence.  We looked at existing resources – content, people, budget, tools – presented some options, and enabled the customer to make an informed decision.

We also did a lot of operational project work, helping this same client roll out a series of new country sites.  In this case, Dot-Connection acted as the global content lead on the project, acting as the interface between central web and content stakeholders, local country managers, translation agencies, project managers, and technical teams.   (This coming year, we’ll be helping to maintain these sites.  We’ll proactively support countries by helping them manage their editorial calendars, remind them to make necessary updates, and otherwise support them in their efforts.)

Linking content quality to resources and tools

One of our bigger projects this year was for ecommerce company, and it involved analyzing and evaluating representative content on 11 sites in 7 languages for overall consistency and quality. The goal was to identify issues common to all languages (and some specific to one or two); and to put these issues in the context of the customer’s internal and external ecosystems.   Recommendations included short-term content quick fixes, longer term opportunities to take advantage of, and the resource and tool requirements to make it all happen.

Web management consulting and content workshops

I spent a lot of years managing web teams, so some of my work continues to revolve around helping web teams create greater value for the business.  We worked with one client in particular to provide support and input on workflows, business rules, governance models, and support services, among other things.

I did two types of workshops this year.  The first was more training oriented, focused on giving marketing managers with limited backgrounds in digital content some context for why their worlds are being turned a little upside down.  The other is what I call a readiness workshop: an international non-profit company had already decided on a tactic – a campaign website – but still needed to clarify not only its purpose but how the site would be sustained over the longer term (if indeed, there was to be a longer term).  The outcome was to put all the key sticky issues on the table so that they could be resolved and that the stakeholders were all aligned on the site’s purpose.

Learning and contributing

As founder and lead consultant at Dot-Connection, I try to keep abreast of several fields: content strategy in particular, but also localization, technical communications, content marketing, user experience, and communications in general.   I was honoured to be invited to speak at the Confab content strategy conference in Minneapolis in May 2012, where I gave a talk called Balance and Compromise: Issues in Content Localization.  I gave the talk again at an IABC France event in June.

I also attended conferences as a participant. The Content Strategy Applied conference, hosted by eBay in London in March, was a great opportunity to hear a lot of very interesting case studies.  There was also a great content strategy track at TC World in Wiesbaden in October; there I had the opportunity to do a content modelling workshop with Ann Rockley, one of the world’s premier enterprise content strategists.

Meanwhile, I’m active in both IABC France, where I was director of communications for two years, and am now chapter Vice-President till end of this season.  I also manage the Content Strategy Paris Meet-Up group.

So voila….it’s been deeply interesting and rewarding, and I’m very grateful to both the clients who entrusted us with their business, and to the agencies and world-class consultants who chose to bring us in as collaborators on their projects.  I wish all of you a very productive and enriching new year!

Geographic attributes and values are often used to meta-tag content items like press releases, news stories, events, customer case studies, and product notices. This is a story that occurred in Malaysia.  This is a case study about a customer in Germany.  This is an event that is occuring in the Netherlands.  This product, with this feature set, is sold in Spain.  And so on….

But a news story about an event in Malaysia may well be of interest to audiences in the U.S.  A case study of a customer located in France very likely is relevant for audiences in Australia.  So while the values may be the same, their purpose is not:  ‘located in’ is not the same thing as ‘relevant for’.

Just make sure your CMS is capable of handling both.

It starts off with a two-line summary:

When a multinational company produces a localized country site, usability is often lost.

How true, how true.  But then,

 Local advertising agencies design good-looking sites that don’t communicate.

Hmmm…. My experience with multinational websites is that there is often a global template that countries have to adhere to, whether they like it or not.  I keep reading.

Many of the websites we tested around the world had uncommonly low quality — not unlike what we saw in the United States during the 1990s.

I had to laugh at this one: when ‘Corporate’ launches a new site, it can take a long, long time to roll out that new site to all countries.  So, some of the local sites Nielsen tested may well have been designed and written in the U.S., way back when (OK, probably not the ‘90s).

He then goes on to use the example of a product category page on the Sony Australia site.  He justifiably bemoans the lack of information scent on the page, and the hopelessly flowery tone of the content.  Then:

If Australian designers are good, then why are Australian-designed country sites often bad? It’s not Australia’s fault. It’s because multinational companies’ country sites tend to be bad.

Well, true, but it’s unlikely that this site was designed for one country only.  I took a quick look at several of Sony’s country sites to confirm my suspicions.  The page Nielsen uses in his column – design, content, everything – can be found on a few more of the company’s sites, including India and New Zealand.  Who knows where that content was written and designed?  In any case, it’s coming from a central repository somewhere.

Incidentally, most Sony country sites in the Asia Pacific gateway have moved to another design; it is quite possible that Australia is among the last of the bunch to migrate, but that’s just my guess.

Next up:

 There are 3 problems inherent in having a big company’s country office design a localized website:

Well, there are definitely problems when this occurs, but again, it’s unlikely the Australian team designed the site in his example (or if they did, they didn’t do it for Australia only).

If the local staff is concerned only with sales, they might not understand the company’s product strategy or the true purpose of different products. This leads to a superficial presentation of the product line.

Again, this doesn’t ring true.  There’s probably a catalog of the full portfolio of products, with associated, approved content sitting in a central repository, and countries can choose to display the products that are relevant for their markets.  Individual product descriptions may be adapted to reflect local technology or market specifications, if these exist.   Countries may or may not have a lot of flexibility in what the can adapt.  And if they have yet to migrate to a new design, they may well be forced to use content that’s long been retired from other sites.

Local marketing staff members typically don’t understand Internet marketing and are at the mercy of any advertising agency hired for the account. Rather than follow a user-centered design process, such agencies focus solely on glamorous appearance-design.

Yikes. That’s a pretty broad generalization; surely this must be true of some marketing folks (and more than a few agencies) in the U.S. as well?  That said, it is true that many country operations have very few resources; sometimes there is only one person to handle everything from events to PR to web to logistics (though I hope this is not the case for Sony Australia…).

When this is the case, there are many other issues, like: not knowing enough about the CMS to be able to use it effectively to change and adapt content; not having the time or skills to migrate to a new design; or not having anyone with web writing skills to adapt content to local market requirements. In fact, this is often when local agencies get called in…

The local folks want to showcase their independence from headquarters and deliberately produce a local site that differs from the global site’s more thoughtful design.

This certainly happens a lot, but when it does, the design is usually vastly different from what’s been produced centrally. It breaks all brand guidelines, adopts a completely different approach, and ends up as something you wouldn’t recognize as being part of the corporate constellation.  This wasn’t the case here.

Nielsen is right about several things, though: poor country sites can damage brands, and  companies need to consider local sites as part of a global Internet strategy.  Too often, country sites are an afterthought.  Multinationals put great effort into their main, big corporate sites, and then they start thinking about sites for other markets.  Roll-out takes forever and many countries are ‘stuck’ using old, substandard content and design far longer than they’d like. Many country website managers tear their hair out in frustration at NOT being able to do better (especially if they follow Jakob Nielsen and have taken his training).

So yes, poor country sites reflect negatively on the brand, and multinationals do need to get better at this, but the root causes of the problems go much deeper than a lack of local knowledge about usability and good web writing.

PS. I gave a talk at Confab on ‘Balance and Compromise: Weaving Localization into Content Strategy‘ that addresses some of these issues. You might want to check it out.

Duplication is an issue for same-language country websites because much of their contents are the same throughout. Depending on where the user is, Google will serve up only one version of that duplicated content; the challenge lies in serving the right content, for instance, the .com/uk/ product page in the UK rather than the same product page that sits on .com.

Now, Google has long used several methods to determine which content to serve to users in different countries. You’re pretty safe if your content is on a country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD); for Google, that’s the strongest indication that your content is targeted to users of that country. You’re also pretty safe if your content has been translated (and not machine translated – that would be considered spam) into another language.  And Google does look at whether the content itself has been localized: for spelling, local currencies, local contacts and addresses, prices, etc.  There are other factors as well: IP addresses, and geotargetting tools in Webmaster central, for instance.

It can get complicated

But what if you don’t have a ccTLD (many companies don’t)? Or if you have a very large number of sub-directories or folders – and little translated content? Of, quite commonly, your .com site dwarfs all other sites in terms of traffic and inbound links? In these instances, it’s quite possible that Google will not serve the page you intended for your specific language and country.

The rel-alternate-hreflang tag seems designed to address these issues. As Pierre Far, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, explained in a blog post by Gemma Birch on the Multilingual Search blog:

The aim of rel-alternate-hreflang is to help us show the most relevant page on your site to our searchers based on language and, optionally, country. Forming page-level relationships like this goes well beyond simply geotargeting whole sites to specific countries, and allows for smarter handling.

The word is still out as to how widely adopted this markup will be.  Apparently, few companies have yet to implement it (3M has – check the comments of the Google Webmaster post.  I tested a couple of their pages and it does seem to work, though their sites are on their own ccTLDs).

One issue seems to be that, although the solution does seem to work, it also seems to be….a lot of work, since it involves adding a lot of code to an awful lot of pages.  Understandably, many companies are still in a wait and see mode, especially as Google is still refining its approach.  But it’s definitely something that companies who are having trouble getting the right content to users in the right markets should look into.

A few quick tips

Use country-code top-level domain names.  Yes, you need to purchase them, and it does require more infrastructure, but then again, if you plan to expand globally, do you really want other companies to squat your domain name?

Use geotargetting settings. You can specify country using webmaster central tools, but these are inappropriate if you are providing your site in multiple languages, without specifically targeting countries.

Have separate urls for each language, don’t use cookies to serve different language versions.

Make it easy to change country/language throughout the site if you think there’s a chance people may end up on the wrong page.

Do not machine translate your content and expect Google to find it.  Google will interpret this as spam.  It suggests offering your users the ability to machine translate the content themselves; at least, things are clear and users are not misled as to the expected quality of the content.

Localize your content.  Use geographically specific information on your pages:  contacts, prices, currencies, spelling, different keywords…Your content should be 30% different.

More information

I’ve been reading up quite a bit on this subject recently, because it’s been an issue on recent assignments, and I’m not an expert.  If you want to take it further, here are some resources you might want to look at:

Videos from Matt Cutts, Head of Google’s Webspam team

Does translated content cause a duplicate content issue? No, unless you just throw it into Google Translate.  Auto-generated translations are likely to be considered as spam.

 Is the same content posted under different TLDs a problem? If you’re on different ccTLDs, no, but if you’re using folders or directories, it may or may not. It  depends on whether you have exactly the same content on a 45 folders or in 4 or 5 ; if you’ve localized the content somewhat to account for different spelling, currencies, contacts, prices, etc.

Google resources:

Multi-regional and multilingual websites

New markup for multilingual content

Blog posts:

The alternative hreflang tag: strategies for multilingual domains

Google’s New Multilingual Markup Signals New Issues Of Concern For Global SEOs

Cutting through the confusion of Google’s guidance to multilingual website owners

Google’s Multilingual SEO Tips From SMX Munich

Contenu dupliqué : Définition, types de contenus dupliqués, solutions (in French; use Google Translate if necessary

From Geo-Targeting Tips From Google: Deliver Relevant Local Content 

For really technical discussion on implementation, I found this Google+ discussion hub hosted by Google’s Pierre Far.

Stephane Dujarric is a former ABC reporter and currently the director of news and media for one of the most sprawling seas of bureaucratic acronyms you could imagine: the United Nations.

He was at the IABC Europe conference in Turin last April to deliver a keynote talk entitled ‘Bartering for Communications’.  It was based on a single premise: that working through partnerships is the only way to have real impact when you have limited resources but something to ‘trade’ (in this case, the organization’s global reach and legitimacy).

UN Photo/Mark Gordon

While I was curious from a purely intellectual standpoint about what would he would say, I wasn’t sure how much of it would apply to my mostly B2B world. After all, the UN has communication challenges that most of us don’t. (Few of us have as a mandate to promote world peace and security, for example.)

Yet whether we sell cloud computing services or laundry detergent, routers or handbags, pharmaceuticals or support for charity, we all have to compete — for attention, for funding, against resistance to change.

How the UN competes

Dujarric went on to discuss the mix of tactics he relies on to compete — and get the organization’s messages out.

Let others tell your story

Through a tactic Dujarric calls participatory media, the UN works closely with content creators who can have influence on their communities – film and television in particular. ‘We’ve reached out to film industry, be it Hollywood, Bollywood or Nollywood to get those issues into the scripts. We provide one-stop shopping: script review, logistical help, and help filming on our premises. We’ve opened up the UN,’ he explained. Gone are the days when Hitchcock had to build a studio for his shots of the UN in North by Northwest! Moreover, today the organization adopts product placement tactics; television shows like ‘Ugly Betty’ have featured storylines about malaria, for example.

If the UN works closely with content creators, it also depends on celebrities to get its messages across. “We have a lot of goodwill ambassadors, from music, sports, even Royals. Athletes have a way of communicating to young people, who are not really interested in hearing from the UN. Sports figures like Zinedine Zidane are very important to us. They give us a lot of time; they allow us to use their likeness, they go out into the field,” he explained.

Make it really easy for the media

News organizations are slashing bureaus and limiting their presence outside their home countries, but they still have a need for coverage. Using a tactic Dujarric calls advocacy journalism, the UN has a news center that supplies raw footage, TV feeds, radio clips, photography and stories in wire format to the organizations. Of course, diminishing resources have led to a change of standards: He recalled his time at ABC a decade ago, when the news organization would not put on air video it did not produce. ‘But now, they need it, and as long as they’re sure of the quality and strength of the content, they can,” he said.

Use new channels and ‘old media’ formats in new ways

Like many organizations, the UN has a Facebook presence. Last year, it experimented with a live conversation between the public and Helen Clark, who’s a former New Zealand prime minister and administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). To make the conversation more engaging, they used a ‘hybrid journalism‘ format and had it moderated by a BBC journalist. They invited questions prior to the event, and the moderator continued to feed questions during the session. The video, on how to end poverty, got about 10,000 views.

Enable your teams

The UN’s real work is done in the field; that’s where all the stories are. Three years ago, it approached the manufacturers of the Flip cam, and purchased video cameras at a reduced priced – something the manufacturers were able to do as part of their Corporate Social Responsibility efforts. Dujarric’s team created an instructional DVD, and sent the videocams out to both communication managers as well as program officers. (Dujarric provided similar handbooks and toolkits for non-professionals on how to best use Facebook and Twitter.)

How do you motivate people who are not primarily communicators to communicate? Dujarric advised to work closely the leaders who ‘get it’ and then showcase their work. ‘Once you show that one person’s clip got on TV, then others follow,” he said.

Focus on the story, not the brand

This is all about putting the issue before the logo. ‘At the UN, it’s often a challenge,’ he noted, ‘but at end of the day, it’s the issue that’s key. In the end, the payback is much more. Audiences are much more sophisticated; people sniff out the bull, so that’s a self-correcting factor.

For the Flipcam project, for instance, field managers focused on demonstrating the impact of their programmes on people; only the last third of the story was the UN angle.

Get the most out of your content

Dujarric said they got a slew of terrific stories from the project. They then developed short videos that were UN-branded and posted to YouTube and used on Facebook. Broadcasters, however, received raw footage, without voice-overs, as well as the accompanying scripts. ‘We try to get most use out of every dime,’ he said.

And finally, demonstrate impact

As an intergovernmental agency, the UN needs to develop communication products that show that donor funding leads to real impact. There’s been a change in focus from how fast money could be spent to ‘what has the impact been’? (Sounds like a lot of marketing departments, no?) And while that’s a completely normal question, it has required a change of mentality.

A change of mentality, a focus on content, reduced budgets, competing for attention – isn’t that what we’re all facing right now?

View my highlight n° 1: Making content accessible for smaller languages.

The first was a presentation given by Asanka Wasala, a PhD student and localization researcher, at the Multilingual Web Workshop in Limerick in September. Entitled
‘A Micro Crowdsourcing Architecture to Localize Web Content for Less-Resourced Languages‘, the presentation grabbed my attention with the first two slides.

Take a look at them. The first is a tag cloud of the most common languages you’ll find on the web. Note the extraordinary place taken up by English. Now look at the second slide: that’s a tag cloud of the smaller languages on the web. Notice how many of them there are. In fact, many of those languages are not only under-represented on the web, they’re barely there at all.

In his presentation, Wasala focuses on Sinhala, a language spoken by more than 15 million people in Sri Lanka. But the Sinhalese are not only hard-pressed to find content on the web in their native language, they’re also unable to use tools like Google Translate, which does not yet translate Sinhala (at least, not yet, though making content accessible is clearly Google’s mission). He goes on to talk about a crowd-sourced localization initiative that would allow Sinhalese and other users to translate sites on the fly, and have that translation sit in a translation memory for others to benefit from. (I encourage you to listen to his 13 minute video if you want to know more.)

Several things struck me about his presentation. The first has nothing to do with language and everything to do with data visualization. The overwhelming dominance of English on the web was not new to me – I even referred to it in my own presentation on localization issues in content strategy. But somehow, looking at those same numbers in a table, and then viewing that same information as a tag cloud – well, the impact is just so much greater. These slides – a very simple application of data visualization on a familiar subject – brought that home for me.

More fundamentally, though, this presentation drove home another point: content is indeed the ‘last mile’ of the digital divide. We may be catching up on connectivity (indeed, IBM claims it’ll be resolved in five years), but if substantial groups of people cannot access information because they cannot understand it, can we truly say we’ve closed the gap?

So as we spend 2012 and beyond thinking of how to make content engaging, sticky, authoritative, killer, relevant, useful, compelling and what have you, let’s remember that for many people in the world, content simply needs to be one thing: accessible. Hats off to the linguists, computer scientists, researchers, and organizations working to make this happen.

*I just posted Highlight N° 2, and it’s February 6th. Sigh…sorry folks, but client work comes first, and client work is sometimes unpredictable.

I came to the web from content. For years, I was a copywriter, writing all sorts of things for print: articles, speeches, brochures, reports – that was my lot. Then, in the late 1990’s, companies decided they needed all this stuff on the web. So I came to the web from the world of content, and I discovered a whole new world.

As a content person, I regularly rail about the lack of consideration ‘web folks’ give to content. It drives me nuts to hear people talk about how they need an app, or a mobile site, or a new game – when they haven’t given a moment’s thought—no, that’s not fair—they haven’t given enough thought to the content they will need to make those sites and applications come alive.

But to be fair, content is nothing if it isn’t delivered, if it falls on deaf ears. And if it can be delivered in ways that cut through the noise, all the better. So I’m going to spend three days listening, learning, about all these new delivery mechanisms and channels that will take our content and take it to new places. I hope to learn as much as I can, and transmit as much as possible to people who are like me: the internet has changed our lives, we want to take advantage of it, we’re wary of a lot of things, and pretty ignorant of many others. I’ll be writing my posts with you in mind !

I’m also looking at it from the perspective of a digital immigrant mother of two teenaged digital natives: what will I learn that will make my life easier? There’s a start-up competition, where eminent judges will evaluate 10 or so ideas that may or may not become the next Foursquare.

I checked out the start-ups, and there’s one in particular I’ll follow. This is a start-up that seeks to alert Parisian drivers of new parking spaces that have just become available. I can see the potential in this, but I have a question: can this app also be use to find your car when you can’t remember where you parked it? Hey folks, I can guarantee that if your app can do this, you will become rich. Think of all of us digital immigrants, middle-aged and losing our memories. I, for one, will even invest!

Voila…I’ve gotta get to bed, the day starts early tomorrow. Look for the Orange Team’s coverage on the Live Orange blog.

You think that I don’t even mean
A single word I say
It’s only words, and words are all I have
To take your heart away.
The Bee Gees, 1966

I’ve been thinking a lot about the importance of words ever since I came back from the Content Strategy Forum in early September. (I’ve also had this song as a soundtrack I can’t seem to get rid of, thanks for Forum speaker Eric Reiss.) But in fact, that’s all I’ve been doing: thinking about it, mulling it through.

Then, this weekend, I came across a post in my twitter feed: On writing simply and saving the world economy (sub-head: Is corporate gobbledygook the cause of the economic apocalypse?). Two hours later, on public transport, I came across an older post by @krismausser on the Business value of words, where gobbledygook is once more singled out, maybe not for the economic crisis, but for undermining our ability to communicate with our customers.

It struck me that this was a recurring theme at conferences and seminars I’ve attended recently – regardless of the subject. It started with the CS Forum, where raconteur extraordinaire Gerry McGovern made his case: it’s not content, not even sentences, but words—individual, single words– that make or break our websites or our apps.

The single biggest thing that prevents users from doing the tasks they need to do, says McGovern, is poor choice of words in website labeling. It’s the proliferation of words that aren’t clear, that are approximate, which could provide answers – but then again, maybe not—that trip us up. Our sites have too many words that compete with each other. And this is terribly confusing for our users. Not convinced? Watch the video, this man is persuasive!

A few weeks later, I attended a session organized by IABC France on trends in corporate communications. Assaël Assary, head of French research institute Occurrence, spoke about the increasingly low trust levels French employees have in the public discourse of their country’s corporations. It’s not that people aren’t listening or being reached, it’s worse, he said: they hear our messages, but don’t believe them. Gobbledygook may be one reason, but spin is another. This relentless effort to portray even the most disheartening of news in a positive light has contributed to the ambient distrust of corporate ‘messaging’.

Could it be that the two are linked? That the corporate propensity for gobbledygook and spin has made it difficult for anyone to believe that the choice of one word or another might actually have an impact on the success of our websites?

I recently had someone ask me why we needed a writer to write a login page, because there really wasn’t anything to write but a set of simple instructions. But when you listen to Gerry McGovern explain how some invest in testing the exact wording on their calls to action (Donate vs Donate Now vs Please donate vs Why donate? Vs Donate and get a free gift – this from the Obama campaign) because they have a real impact on conversion rates, you wonder why all companies don’t take this as seriously.

We in the corporate world have legacy of developing content that no one believes will ever really be read and taken at face value. We’ve been doing this for so long that it’s hard for people to believe that words count. But they do. Enterprises need more than content owners, they need ‘word’ owners; people who will be accountable for the performance of words, not only on their websites but in their communications at large.

As enterprise communicators, we may not take anyone’s heart away; but, words are indeed all we have to help us lead the way, so we better mean it, and we better invest and take the time to choose those words carefully and thoughtfully.

PS. You can always listen the Bee Gees song — it’s a classic — but I invite you to listen to a cover performed by one of my favourite singers.

Well, if you’re experiencing storm problems with your content, or suffering from related ones — lack of governance, no maintenance, rework, too much content, lack of purpose, and so on – you’re going to have them to the n^th degree if your content needs to be in 5, 15, or 40 languages.

Localizing websites and web content is hard work.  It can be costly, time-consuming, and a logistical pain in the butt. It creates complexities all over the place: for information architecture, SEO, look and feel, your CMS, and your infrastructure.  And it’s made that much harder when you’re working without a content strategy.

It’s worth repeating:  content strategy plans for creation, delivery, and governance of content – ALL content, not just the source content.

Much like trying to retrofit content into wireframes, starting the localization process after the source content has been created (and often published) can lead to problems that could have been avoided with better upfront planning.

There are a lot of things that content strategists can do to facilitate the whole process:

Ask the right questions as you’re setting your target. External market forces, internal strategic ambitions, cultural and language factors, as well as the site’s objectives: such factors need to be considered and weighed against each other in order to make smart decision about your overall model, the number of languages you’ll support, and the critical mass of localized content you should deliver for different types of locale sites. (I suggest you ‘tier’ your sites: it’s unlikely you’ll be able to handle the web presence of a large subsidiary in the same way you would for a 2-person office in a new market.)

Get a handle on your universe:  What are you spending now? Who owns the budgets? How are you organized to support your localization efforts? How do localization and local web operations teams work together – if indeed there are different teams? What tool sets are at your disposal? Do you have a language service provider? Several of them? What are your metrics telling you? Is your CMS flexible? Is it integrated with your language tools? What language tools is your company using?

Get a handle on your content:  Start by qualifying your source content. Take out your inventory – and if you don’t have one, now’s the time to get it started – and assess it. Is there a little or a lot? Is it stock or flow? It is relevant for all audiences, or is it susceptible of being localized in some way? Too often, companies make all-or-nothing decisions about the content (yes we translate/localize – no we don’t); the choices don’t have to be so stark.

Compare your desired state to what you actually have.  Enlist some help reviewing your existing local sites. That’s one of the biggest added complications of working in global environment: your team rarely has the language skills required to assess what’s there (or maintain it, for that matter).  Plus, it’s a lot of work.  Unless you have sizeable internal resources to support you here, it’s practically impossible to do this part without external support.

Integrate localization issues into your editorial specifications:  Page specs are great for aligning people on objectives, and serve to provide guidance to those who actually write source content.  Voice and tone, terminology requirements, what elements will be localized – getting it right from the start can save a lot of frustration down the line.

Make a plan and get it done – but do it in chunks.  For many companies, developing a content strategy is daunting; they’re not sure it’s worth the investment to do the upfront work.  So taking on such a project and adding the global dimension to it can have people running in the other direction.  Part of this is because we try to do it all at once, during the redesign.  I’m a fan of Lou Rosenfeld’s ‘redesigns must die’ approach: yes, there will be projects, but managing website changes should be part of an ongoing and daily maintenance plan, kind of like putting one foot in front of the other when you’re climbing a very steep hill.

There’s more, of course – lots more.  I spoke about this recently at the Content Strategy Forum in London.  Here’s my presentation.

Note: I’ll also be speaking about this next week at the W3C Multilingual Web workshop in Limerick, Ireland.

Reason #1. Last year’s edition was a milestone for the content strategy community.  It was the world’s first dedicated conference on the subject, and it was in Europe—Paris, in fact.  I took it as a sign from the heavens because it was held at just the time I was kicking off of my own consulting practice in the field.  Kristina Halvorson, whose little red book has become a bible, was there to give a keynote and a workshop. And I discovered an entire community of kindred spirits.  So, obviously, I’m looking forward to v2.

Reason #2. This year’s edition (v2) promises to be a hit. I’m finally going to hear Gerry McGovern, who wrote the book on Killer Web Content years ago. Lisa Welchman will speak eloquently, as always, on web governance.  Many of the practice’s thought leaders will bring fresh perspectives to day 1; day 2 will feature a host of speakers whose names may be less familiar, but whose experiences I am anxious to discover.  There are hands-on workshops on day 3. And Kristina Halvorson will be on hand again to lead the closing panel.

Reason #3. This one’s a personal milestone for me, since it’ll mark the first time I not only attend but present at a conference.  The subject of my talk is localization and the content strategy process.  I’m convinced there are a lot of things we can do upfront– as we plan and develop source content–that can make the localization process easier, faster, and less costly.   Today, those processes are often disconnected and sequential; they need to be better integrated and handled, at least in part, in parallel.

So, voila, three good reasons for me to be excited about next week.  If you’re interested in content strategy in general, be sure to follow the hashtag #csforum11 on Twitter; there will be loads of tweets from the conference, and probably as many reports.  So stay tuned…..