Why I Will Never, Ever Hire A "Social Media Expert"

From Business Insider: Why I Will Never, Ever Hire A "Social Media Expert"

Great observations in this article.

“It’s not about building a website anymore! It’s so much cooler! It’s about Facebook, and fans, and followers, and engagement, and influence, and…”
Will you please shut up before you make me vomit on your shoes?
IT’S ABOUT GENERATING REVENUE THROUGH SOLID MARKETING AND STELLAR CUSTOMER SERVICE, JUST LIKE IT’S BEEN SINCE THE BEGINNING OF TIME.

Fake Euro Translators

We have been receiving fake Euro translator resumes coming in via email several times per week. There have been 14 in the month of April alone. When you pick out any distinctive phrase from the resumes, you can invariably find this phrase has originated from Translator Cafe or Traduguide. The mails are always sent to “undisclosed-recipients” but would seem likely that any company or agency listed with the above two industry websites would be receiving them.

So it's come to this: Linguists pay to see jobs on offer

A funny thing that really shows the plight of the biggest players in the industry--Lionbridge expects translators to pay them for the privilege of being able to see what jobs might be on offer. From their GeoWorkz site:

...The marketplace gives you access to search, sort, and view hundreds of jobs such as translation, proofreading, desktop publishing, localization engineering and more. Get started today – just click below to subscribe. Access to the GeoWorkz Jobs Marketplace is part of every paid Translation Workspace subscription. Jobs are posted and updated daily so check back often. And remember, no matter where you are located, now you have access to Lionbridge jobs around the world...

Yes, this is an amazing advance for the industry. :)

All kidding aside, the biggest players in the industry have massive overheads since they are located in expensive locations, but their business model is the same outsourcing model from 1997. Any new start-up immediately begins miles ahead of them in terms of margins while being able to dramatically undercut them in price.

Besides an attempt to monetize the linguists they work with, GeoWorkz represents another attempt to rejigger the localization work flow in the face of Google Translate and Google Translator Toolkit. While we don't know what Lionbridge is really up to, "innovative" new directions like this are usually key for positioning the company for major mergers and acquisitions and its future strategic direction.

CSA predictions for 2011

Interesting predictions from Global Watchtower: Predictions for 2011: Increased Visibility for Language Services (Global Watchtower is the blog of Common Sense Advisory).

Most localization industry predictions have not had a good record of success. For instance, throughout the 2000’s predictions of CMS and TM systems somehow turning the industry into a mature corporate-dominated arena were a bit far fetched at the time, and have subsequently not come true. (This was expected by many savvy agencies who work at the coal face of the industry :) ).

While it is true that "workflow systems" are still a vision presented as a marketing ploy to corporate clients, the reality is that the back end of the localization industry largely remains a commodity driven cottage industry preformed at home by the cheapest resources available.

Still, the phenomenon of machine translation—and in particular the involvement of Google into the equation (the only player with scale enough to make a dent in this process)—is changing the possibilities in the industry as well as how work is done.

CNS is picking up on this and several other issues, such as:

Instead of just squeezing suppliers for better pricing, they’ll start to look at the big picture, turning to more sophisticated solutions, such as automation and process optimization to address the need to offer multilingual content and services without breaking the bank.

With some top vendors pressing receptionists into project manager duties, the top down push for lowering costs and raising margins must indeed be severe. The conflicting desire for ever higher quality at the same time is what is pushing the move to computerized systems for automating the process and giving higher ups in the organization the illusion they have control of the process.

The one concept missing here is the fact that so many major localization vendors have gone through big external infusions of cash and near brushes with death (and this was even before the economic downturn of the last few years) that shaving sourcing costs continues to be a mania and a necessity.

Another trend:

Internal localization and translation departments will question whether they should go the route of outsourcing wholeheartedly, and whether a large internal staff is truly critical for efficiency in managing their language activities. Smelling the opportunity, savvy LSPs will work with their customers to develop more consultative arrangements, enabling them to offload more work.

This is particularly interesting to us at Admerix as this is at the core of what we are set up to do—provide industry veteran project management that is affordable. We allow major LSPs in expensive locations to offshore their production to an affordable location while maintaining industry expertise. This thinking runs counter to what most companies are trying to do—cut project management expertise and somehow make up for it with expensive online process-management systems.

What Went Right and What Went Wrong At Your Company in 2010

So many year-end company newsletters (as well as company blogs) are simply a waste of time  since they focus on the minutiae of a company's internal workings (staff profiles, cheery news about how the company fared in the past year, etc.). These are all things that no one cares about. In business, we all care about our own problems and how to solve them.

Considering that the only reason effort was put into newsletters and blogs was as a marketing activity to create consultative relationships with clients and adds value, it is amazing how anyone could think that company newsletters telling about staff member hobbies and recipes could be worth anyone's time.

As you can tell, we at Admerix have little patience for the traditional year end newsletters, so we decided to try to make a year-end message that does not focus on our performance and issues, but instead on our clients and the issues the localization industry is facing.

Take a look and let us know what you think: What Went Right and What Went Wrong At Your Company in 2010