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Localization 2.0
By Max Sobol | March 5, 2008
I was thinking about the year 2000 recently but not the way that most people think about it. The much-hyped Y2K bug that was arguably the biggest non-issue in recent tech history wasn’t even on my list. As I recall, Google was not yet a household name, everyone was talking about e-commerce, portals were the rage, and broadband mostly referred to groups like Destiny’s Child at the time. Who would have thought that Localization and thinking Local would have been at the top of my to-do list both then and now.
I was working for a nameless B2B content & community portal which was supposed to revolutionize the way that business was conducted on the internet. Specifically, I was tasked with taking our existing “platform” and localizing it for the businesses that we served. Who knew that this would be the topic of a blog post several years later? We even had a fancy name for what I was doing. It was called “L10N” and boy did it sound important when pitching the business to prospects! As I worked through all of the nuances of getting the graphics, text, content and links to conform to the region I was concentrating on, among other things, two specific concerns came up.
First, how were we going to appeal to the local traffic that we needed to use the newly-localized portal? Second, how were we going to track the leads that actually came through other than using the all-encompassing click count solution of the day? I won’t bore you with what we came up with back then, but I will tell you how I’d handle it now. If I only had a crystal ball.
Combining the power of OpenList with local VoiceStar call tracking phone numbers would have been my holy grail. Not only would it have shown true ROI, but it would have given me the opportunity to pitch my “think outside of the box” solution at the next big powwow. Imagine it…local, trackable content coupled with local, trackable phone numbers. Oh yeah, and all of the fancy analytics behind that to truly bring the message home. Talk about adding real value to “L10N.” It’s funny how it all comes back to you once you get past the acronyms. Here’s to re-inventing Localization eight years later and truly making it worthwhile.
Topics: Call Tracking, Local Advertisers, Advertising, Content, Uncategorized |