Here is an excerpt from and the link to a marketing article I found pretty interesting. There were other insightful observations if advertising/marketing is your field.

The classic way to market products or services through participative technologies is to establish yourself as an expert and provide objective content that goes beyond your specific products or services. To sell, you first have to be useful. The more useful you are, the more you will persuade people to visit your Web site and check into your products or services.

This advice still applies today with broadband and iPods. You need to find out who your core talkers are and where they are talking, give them positive subjects to discuss, track what they are saying, and determine how this affects your overall marketing efforts. If you do it right, consumers will advertise for you.

Ah, the Holy Grail....

Lisa

At McElroy, most of us are naturally pretty fascinated by linguistic studies. One such article that caught my eye was recently published in the Guardian.

Professor Robert Foley takes a structural approach to studying how human languages are related. An evolutionary biologist, he is studying the interplay between languages and genetics, and his laboratory is the island of Melanesia.

If you've been taking more long-haul flights, you might even have pondered links between English and Hindi, Persian or Bengali. Or maybe not; although they're all part of the same Indo-European language family, it's hard to imagine they're related. Linguists, however, have long been able to determine when languages are related, even if they sound totally unconnected. But their ability to do so is limited by one important factor: time. "There is a sort of language barrier, around 8,000 years ago," explains Professor Robert Foley, professor of human evolution at the University of Cambridge.

"The classic way to compare languages and determine if they are related to one another is to compare the similarity of words - 'one' in English and 'ein' in German, for example - and linguists have a vast array of techniques to do this. But it's all done with words."

Further information about his project.

Tags: languages | linguistics | words

Doing business in Finland? Although geared toward the tourist looking for a different sort of European vacation, this article is rich with examples of the uniqueness of the Finnish culture.

"Krapula," he sighs.

That's Finnish for "hangover," a word I added to my own limited vocabulary the first time I was here. Last night, Stites was out drinking with some colleagues. One of the advantages of early winter sunsets -- not that the sun makes that many appearances this time of year -- is that Finnish bar life starts at 3 in the afternoon.

"There's a whole culture of krapula in this country," says Stites. "Finns understand that sisu needs help in the winter, and krapula is the price. You would never show up for work in the U.S. and tell people about your hangover. In Finland, everyone understands."

Finnish | Finland | culture

When good translators go bad...

U.S. authorities have arrested a translator working in Iraq and charged him with offering a bribe to entice a police official to buy armored vests and other equipment for $1 million.

Faheem Mousa Salam, 27, of Livonia, Mich., was arrested Thursday at Dulles International Airport, the Justice Department said. Salam is an employee of the Titan Corp., a government contractor working in Iraq.

Tags: Translator | bribe

Who is one of the hottest new economic players in the Middle East? Surprisingly, a country besieged by earthquakes and constant political turmoil internally and with its neighbors, Pakistan is devloping a true middle class. Thanks to debt relief from assisting the U.S. after 9/11, as well as economic reforms that include the privatization of several industries, Pakistan's numbers are growing faster than many expected.

The proof is in the numbers. Last year the country's GDP growth rate hit 8.4 percent, the world's second highest behind China, following two years of solid 6 percent growth. This year the economy is predicted to expand by nearly 7 percent. After years of instability, with the government and military trying to distract people from their economic woes by waging jihad in Kashmir and railing against neighboring India, a true middle class is now developing. Economic reforms have given the government money to invest in health and education, and foreign investors are eying Pakistan for the first time. In many ways the country has become the world's most surprising economic success story.

Tags: Pakistan | reforms | economy

Aside from having excellent wine, a vibrant culture, and an interesting shape, Chile apparently has an economy that is rapidly growing again. While still poor, it appears to be growing faster than many other South American nations.

Between 1989, when the current Socialist/Christian Democratic coalition reached power and democracy returned to the country, and 2005, the Chilean economy has grown nearly 6 percent per year, more than doubling per capita income. Poverty has been drastically reduced; education, health, housing and other social indicators have all improved significantly, and even inequality, that terrible bane of all hemispheric societies, has finally begun to diminish, albeit modestly. For practical purposes, Chile is on the verge of occupying the lowest rung of the highest ladder: becoming a still poor but now developed nation, perhaps like Greece or Portugal a few years ago in Western Europe, like Poland or South Korea more recently.

Tags: Chile | business | economy

Foreign investors are looking at Asian companies in a new light. Returning profits to shareholders is now seen as a sign of success in the once-growth-obsessed region.

March 26, 2006 issue of Newsweek - Every once in a while, it makes sense to rediscover the wheel. Outside of Japan, the hot new offering from Asian companies has been a staple in U.S. and European markets for decades—it's the cash dividend on stocks. The trend reflects a dramatic shift in Asian corporate cultures since the crisis of 1997-98, when a model built on borrowing massively to finance growth, without regard to profit, crashed and burned. Before the crisis, paying out part of profits as dividends was not only rare, it "was almost seen as a sign of failure," says Robin Parbrook, head of Pacific Equities (excluding Japan) for Schroders, the international fund-management firm. "The conventional wisdom was that in fast-growing Asia, companies should invest. We have had a sea change."

Tags: Asian | business | investment

It would seem that within a few generations, Traditional Chinese will die out, as even Taiwanese people have adapted the practice of using Simplified Chinese.

THE United Nations will only use simplified Chinese characters after 2008, the Beijing Morning Post said today, citing linguists.

The UN is currently using both versions of Chinese characters -- simplified characters and the original complex form. But the UN has decided to rule out the complex form after 2008, said Chen Zhangtai, chief of the Chinese academy of practical linguistics.

Tags: Chinese | Simplified | Traditional

I just listened to an interesting and informative podcast from a Venture Capital convention taking place in San Francisco. The discussion for this clip centered around the impact of globalization upon starting a new business. The comments from the panelists speak for themselves. Businesswise, taking an isolated, U.S.-centric approach to developing your brand will ultimately be its failure. Although there are many proponents of "English is the language of business" as well as machine translation for global communication, the consumers of a brand will continue to have their purchase decisions heavily influenced by cultural values, which requires content to be localized for global markets.

“…Twenty years ago, they would have considered the US as a big enough market, but today it really is a global market. You have to think about building your company, building your expertise… everything about building the company now, it’s more global and so the whole job of venture capital has a global orientation towards it…”

"We are all citizens of the world…"
"…geographic barriers are crumbling"
"…biggest change paradigms because of globalization"
"An isolated brand over time will fall if it doesn't take into consideration the global picture."

Tags: VentureOne | Globalization | market

Does this mean we will be seeing a new television series this fall: Law and order--Multilingual? The need that is being met in Fairfax is probably not all that unique in the U.S., however, the solution to the problem seems to be.

Perez studied the population and languages of Fairfax and determined that the greatest need was for Spanish, followed by Korean. Seven of the 10 members of the new unit are fluent in Spanish, two speak Korean and one speaks Vietnamese.

Recently released county statistics show that the need for other languages will grow. In 2004, more than 300,000 Fairfax residents -- close to a third of the population -- spoke a language other than English at home, and more than 80,000 lived in a home considered "linguistically isolated" -- no one 14 or older spoke English well.

Tags: multilingual | police | languages