Lingo24: a translation services micro-multinational, active around the Globe

In 2001, at the age of 22, young Scotsman Christian Arno launched translation agency Lingo24 from his bedroom in his parents’ house. Two years later, the agency had employees in New Zealand and China, and by 2005, more than 20 people on its payroll.  Soon, the company had a website in three languages and four offices abroad.

Today, Lingo24 directly employs more than a hundred members of staff and has a network of over 4,000 translators around the world.  Its clients are based in more than 60 countries. It provides round-the-clock services and has branches in Panama, China, the US and France.

In 2009, the company, whose head office is still in Scotland, achieved a turnover of 4.67 million euros.

A global SME, a micro-multinational

Lingo24 is a global SME that now operates in practically every timezone, managing several teams. It occupies a clear place in the ever-growing category of micro-multinationals. Christian Arno, its founder, has been recognised as an entrepreneurial figure in the eyes of several British daily newspapers.

Of course, these days the Internet is the company’s strategic field of operations, with its customers arriving in ever-increasing numbers via the web.

What steps did the Scottish SME take to establish itself at this level?

Dan Aldulescu, Lingo24 Marketing Manager, provides some answers.

“Addressing the global market? A natural progression”

“Any company offering a good product or a quality service will sooner or later find a need to globalise. If the company in question is large enough to have the financial resources to launch into markets outside of its home country, the expansion process will be straight-forward: once its marketing resources are strategically in place, it won’t take long for the public to hear about it”.

“The real challenge facing SMEs wishing to open up internationally is using the appropriate strategies, all the more so when, in addition to localising marketing and communications material, they also anticipate setting up physical offices“.

Accordingly, in 2008, Lingo24 opened an office in Panama and an additional office in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Seizing niche opportunities on which to base international expansion

Initially, the international expansion was aimed at diversifying markets in order to reduce the risks associated with exchange rate fluctuations. Gradually, however, the Scottish company developed a highly realistic deployment strategy, from analysing the following:

• “Identifying countries where employees master the linguistic and technical aspects and where salaries are competitive (such as Romania) in order to be able to cater to Europe and North America
• Targeting poorly exploited markets such as Scandinavia and the Netherlands.
• Adapting linguistically and culturally to each new market or office as well as adapting staff proportionally to requirements”.

Global Internet marketing, but with an approach tailored to each country

For Lingo24, the Internet is key to reaching out to international prospects.

“Localising (adapting to local customs and cultures) regional search engine optimisation of websites was one of the main strengths of the globalisation strategy”.

The company’s online presence is achieved primarily through a search engine positioning strategy, as well as targeted keyword pay per click campaigns.

“Today, over 50% of searches entered on Google are in languages other than English. More than a third of these are entered in another European language”.

“Adapting the online marketing strategy into foreign market languages offers competitive advantages”.

“As searches demonstrate, the majority of consumers (approximately 85%) look for information in their own language before making a decision to buy online. Speaking these prospects’ language determines their confidence in the company and the services or products it offers”.

A paid-for geographically targeted digital strategy

“With a quality US online marketing strategy, sales in target markets soared”.

“For the US, this increase reached 1,000%. For Scandinavia and the Netherlands, growth exceeded 500%. Overall sales in Europe also recorded a sharp increase of 300%, and now represent 37% of total sales”.

Managing remote teams in all four corners of the world

To support its development, Lingo24 had to adapt its organisational structure. Managing a world-wide network of service providers is no easy task.

The following teams have been set-up or expanded:

The Sales team, which also includes native speakers for Scandinavia, the Netherlands and Germany in order to be able to respond ever better to the requirements of potential clients.

The Project Management team, which takes care of production, the translation service itself. Project Managers have access to a network of 4,000 freelance translators who can provide almost any language combination.

The Linguist Management team, which is responsible for recruiting translators and ensuring that the work of all its translators meets with the quality standards set by the company.

• The Marketing team, which is in charge of ensuring the online visibility of Lingo24 in addition to other activities associated with brand image.
• The Human Resources team, which is responsible for the recruitment needs exhibited by each team.
• The Finance Management team, which oversees the effective management of the company’s accounts.
• The IT team, which provides technical support and develops new technological solutions for the increasingly efficient running of the business.
• Management is provided by the head of each team, who report to the Senior Management in the form of Managing Director, Christian Arno, and Operations Director, Jack Waley-Cohen.

Some social media marketing best practices…

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Can we build a virtual Silicon Valley, via social networks ?

“Why Japan, like other developped economies, needs to embrace the economy of creativity”

Hiroshi Okano is professor at the Graduate Business School of Osaka.

He is a specialist of creativity. According to him, Japanese companies have always been good to procuced very nice technological state of the art products. Nevertheless, they integrated too seldom the creativity, design and cultural inputs which give, today more than ever, the value to new items.

Toyota, once the champion of innovation in the world, is now facing a huge crisis due, for a part, for its inability to start from the customer’s taste and cultural sensitivity instead of giving the key of innovation mainly to engineers, who draw very efficient cars but too light in terms of emotional attraction.
Nowadays, however, Japanese cultural productions are becoming very popular all around Asia.

Will the economy of Japan rely more, soon, on cultural soft products than industrials outputs ?

Jeremy Rifkin: “We are more and more connected in our biosphere as we are in the blogosphere”

Media: the rise of “content in the cloud”

“Enterprise 2.0 is shifting from buzz word to reality for a growing number of companies”

Stuart McIntyre is a British consultant, expert in the Enterprise 2.0 concept.

“Enterprise 2.0 is not anymore a buzz word : it is becoming a reality in a growing number of firms, says Stuart McIntyre. Today, collaboration, knowledge sharing practices via new internet tools (a.o. social softwares) are helping companies to improve their productivity and, above all, their innovation capabilities, in their day to day live”.

“However, Enterprise 2.0 is not only a matter of using online social tools, underlines the consultant, who was speaking at Blug 2010, a IBM Lotus conference in Brussels. Enterprise 2.0 needs a cultural shift, new behaviour and the support of the leaders at the top of the organisation. Involve the leaders is critical in order to turn a traditional firm into a true enterprise 2.0. It is a managerial challenge”.

If Enterprise 2.0 can drive innovation up, it won’t erase the R&D department, though.

“Nevertheless, a company should evaluate the cost of not tapping into the ideas of the people working in other departments within the organisation, either be it the marketing, sales, HR or finance units...”

Opera: “Cloud computing is not enough. The web of things will have a greater impact…”

Facebook is taking over Google : it sounds like the Web is becoming truly social

Everybody has noticed it. It is no anecdote :

Facebook has taken over Google as the most visited website in the US.

(source : http://www.sneijers.net)

There is no reason to believe the trend is to weaken. As far as Facebook keeps growing (above 400 millions users nowadays), the biggest social network in the world should soon takes the crown of world n°1 website off the head of Larry & Sergey’s search engine.

The web is already social, and Facebook sets the pace

As a matter of facts, the shift has occured, yet. The web is truly social.

Whereas Facebook grows in size, the social network remains far in the shadow of Google in terms of revenues. Those could reach 1 to 2 billions dollars in 2010,… twelve less than the latter.

Though, Facebook runs in the tracks of its forerunner. The Facebooks ads service sounds like a terrific, very accurate, advertisement tool that could become very popular in the years to come.

Moreover, today, lots of discussions, conversation, content sharing or news posting take place directly on Facebook. Companies have skipped the stage of setting up their own blog and rely solely on a Facebook page and/or Twitter account for their digital marketing.

Google Social Search and the race to catch up with the social web

So far, Google hasn’t lost the game. Despite its backfire in China, the search engine remains strongly armed.

However, recent initiatives induce Google is in a defensive position.

The company had to strike a financial deal with Twitter in order to index its content in its search results. Google has been challenged by internautes regarding the instant search.

Recently, Google announced a number of move toward more social search and actions. Not always succesful, so far.

Social network Orkut has hit in a limited number of countries.

Google Buzz hasn’t been a very big hit, useless to say.

With Google Social Search, the company of Mountain View is touching its core business.

The service, still under beta version, demonstrates how the social web is now taking the lead as opposed to the historical web.

Google Social Search relies on the social graphs the company has an access to, via Gmail and other logged in tools.

Hereby, though, Google implicitely recognize that social recommendation is more relevant than its search algorithm.

There, it is not sure Google is in a better position than Facebook…

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