International Business and Technology Blog

The social media online phenomenon now has  unparalleled scale, in which billions of netizens communicate and much, much mullah (dollars, euros, renminbi, yen, pounds, …) is transacted. And know this: those numbers are only going one way and that is up.

Social media, that is websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking, is at the least an oversized noisy teenager that you can't ignore, or more probably a robust mid-twenties adult to engage with fully. Either way, every business must now know that you ignore social media at your peril.

Successful companies are using social media channels to engage with their target business and consumer audiences and collecting serious money. Just look at the top 100 companies in the Fortune Global ranking: 93% have Facebook pages (updated weekly), 79% have a YouTube channel (average 2 million views of their corporate content) and a Twitter profile. How is your business doing?

Check out our IBT Online brand evolution. The IBT success story began in 2002, when we were delivering first class international business development services, helping hundreds of small and medium sized companies to expand globally. Since that time, the digital disruption has transformed the traditional exporting and global business development rulebook. Today, global sustainable sales, brand and business success is impossible without a strong online component. 

At IBT Online, our focused and core strategy for tomorrow is clear: to create value for our corporate clients by deploying innovative online technologies, website localization and international online marketing services, that deliver measurable growth in global sales, brands and businesses.

Website globalization is now recommended by ExporTech. Website globalization means fully customized and localized websites that deliver sales, brand and business growth in far flung markets around the globe. ExporTech is the US national export assistance program that helps companies enter and expand in global markets. ExporTech, recognizes that the digital disruption has transformed exporting and international business.

In today’s online world it is essential to include website globalization in export strategy, alongside planning, education, training, trade fairs and other export supporting programs. US Chambers of Commerce have long recognized that Corporate America’s #1 marketing and sales tool is their online presence and nowhere more so than when going international. As part of the Exportech range of programs, website globalization will now “help participating companies go-to-market and implement their export growth plans”.

An Online Global presence means creating, building and delivering website localization and international online marketing to deliver sales, brand and business growth in far flung markets across the globe. Companies looking to go global often ask us, just like in Love Story, “where do I begin?”. The answer, as per the song, is with the “first hello”.

Most companies today have their core domestic website – for US companies it is generally the .com English language website. But to grow your sales, brands and businesses globally in today’s multi-national, multi-cultural and multi-lingual world, Online Global has become a business necessity. Check out some of these amazing stats about the top languages in the internet, as well as the growth and number of non-English websites and e/mcommerce platforms. You can’t compete anymore with a traditional English-only .com website.

Domain names, specifically internet Top Level Domains (TLDs), are increasingly an integral part of all business strategies and global brand development. Businesses spend many millions on domain names. There are many egregious valuations to demonstrate this phenomena including the amounts paid for: fund.com ($10M) , hotels.com ($11M), privatejet.com ($30M), insurance.com ($36M) and lasvegas.com ($90M). TLDs have a recognized quantifiable commercial value. Take fb.com ($8.5M) which was purchased by Facebook to redirect to facebook.com; iCloud.com ($6M) purchased by Apple for the same reason. And what about your company, your brands and your country code domain names?

Today’s online world offers business globalization at an incomparable speed, cost, flexibility, scalability and profitability compared to all other routes to market. The international internet business model is a paradigm change, where successful globalization is achieved through localization. Cumulative online local successes, market by market, delivers global success, hence the “glocal” mantra. Successful corporates seeking to grow their businesses globally are leveraging this optimal online route, local market by local market, and gaining their global success on an unprecedented scale. Without borders, the internet offers companies across all sectors, opportunities to internationalize. There are some outstanding well published, even infamous, examples, including Amazon and Uber. However much glocalization is a no-brainer, getting it right is tough, demanding high levels of both online technical skill sets, coupled and with local market understanding. So let’s get you started on your glocal (global/local) program today.

Apple makes a lot of things look easy and intuitive. Their global online presence and marketing is a great example, we give them A++. Looks easy, but does your company get anywhere close? In our ongoing review of best practices for global online website presence and marketing, we dive into some of Apple's 100+ websites. Successful website and online marketing internationalization requires a range of skill sets and competences, made all the more complex by the inevitable geographic dispersion. Nevertheless there are companies that are extremely good at this, like Apple. In fact, Apple is so good that its online stores are the main driver for the >$200Billion net cash stockpile, most of that earned outside the US.

Here’s the first clue: in today’s online world, set out to be found! And that changes everything: less cost, less time expended, faster recruitment (days even…), more and better quality candidates (as they span a range of access routes to market). And finally a better business relationship as the potential partners are approaching you, rather than you chasing them, so you are in the driving seat. Change your 20^th century rule book: don’t go out there using traditional “Find an Overseas Distributor” routes. Deploy today’s online technologies to be highly visible in your target markets and let those “best of” potential distributors find you. Set out to be found and identified as the company that they want to represent in your target market - their local market. Today’s 21^st century rule book is all about letting your international online presence do the heavy lifting. So throw away those “Yellow pages” and put up those “online localized pages”.

Read all about it! In fact, you should watch it. It's official, video has killed the copywriting star, a one minute video has the same value as 1.8 million words. Video is destined to be the #1 medium for both business to consumer (B2C) and business to business (B2B) communications. All industry metrics tell us that companies with brands to develop are investing more in videos and their platforms. Corporate videos of all nature and purpose (presentation, mission, explainer, product, testimonial…) are finding their way onto their own and/or 3^rd party websites as well as their social media channels including You Tube, Vimeo, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, We Chat and, of course, LinkedIn. Video is the evident future powerhouse of content, replacing heavy duty and time consuming text. Roll over the guidelines from the likes of David Ogilvy’s “7 Tips for Writing Copy That Sells” and rise up the visual instructions from those at YouTube and Videolicious!

Small business exporters around the globe are amongst the biggest beneficiaries of the newly established international digital connectivity. The recent McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) report entitled “Digital Globalization: the new era of global flows” quantifies this for us as “used cross-border bandwidth has grown 45 times larger since 2005. It is projected to grow by another nine times in the next five years”. That’s worth reading twice. We enjoy the huge benefits of this every day, everywhere, unnoticed. That is until it stops functioning and then we get frustrated. Across the globe, wherever we are, we demand that every office and every home, café, car, train and now airplane is connected; even walking down the street we are all phoning, texting, buying, selling or just surfing the internet on smart  phones and mobile devices. Global digital connectivity is becoming ubiquitous and is changing every aspect of how we do business, not just nationally but internationally.