Photo by Tim Steele
This past Thursday evening, I was invited to speak at the very first meeting of the San Francisco Content Strategy / Content Marketing Pros Meetup group. This is a new group that is organized by Scott Abel, the Content Wrangler. The meeting was sponsored by Astoria Software and held on the top floor of the Hamm Building in downtown San Francisco. What an amazing venue!
The topic of the talk was The Seven Components of a Global Content Strategy. It was a very interesting meeting and we had a very knowledgeable group of attendees. The questions ranged from, “How do I get people at my company to talk to each other,” to, “What is translation memory and why do I care.”
My personal takeaway from the meetup is that companies of all sizes are grappling with global content. Whether they are already formally translating or just planning to soon, the issue of how to manage global content lurks in everyone’s mind. This is a good thing, as more companies are realizing that a) they need to localize and translate content for their international customers and b) having a plan for managing the potentially enormous amount of content is imperative. My goal for speaking at the meetup was to get the conversation about global content strategy started; to point out lots of things that people usually overlook or ignore (not intentionally) when they take their content global. It’s a situation of people not knowing what they don’t know.
Photo by Tim Steele
How about you? Is your company currently translating content? If so, what is your largest pain point in the process? If not, do you have plans to translate in the next 12 months? If so, what are you doing to prepare? I’d love to hear from you in the comments. P.S. Thursday evening just happened to be the night that the San Francisco Giants won the playoff game to get into the World Series. Here is the view out our window when the final home run was hit.
You can download the presentation from Slideshare. [slideshare id=40560264&doc=globalcontentstrategymeetup101614-141021143833-conversion-gate02]
Val is on the Advisory Board for the Technical Communications Program at the University of North Texas. When not working with customers or students, Val can be found sitting behind her sewing machine working on her latest quilt. She also makes a mean hummus.
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