Recently by Kaija Poysti

Every now and then the question of critical mass pops up when discussing the uses of social media in companies and organizations. "How many users should we have before social media is useful?" IMHO there is no absolute answer to the question, as it depends entirely on what you use social media for. A wiki can be very useful for a project team of 4 people to produce project documentation - especially if they happen to reside in different countries. A board of directors consisting of 6 people can save time by having agendas and and meeting minutes stored in a shared workspace and edited by all members.

Social media is inherently social, so instead of defining critical mass one could say that the minimum mass for social media is 2 people. If writing a blog saves you a couple of emails, that is already good. Now, I am not against email per se (although my inbox is a disaster, and I never remember which folder I stored that email containg a really good link). It is just that email was never intended to be either a teamwork or an information management tool, although it is often used as such.

Tomorrow I will be talking about business opportunities in multilingual social media here in Helsinki. It should be an interesting event - more about it tomorrow. As for now, I want to conclude this entry by referring to the fact that lack of time is often mentioned as one of the main obstacles to using social media. This can well be a generational issue. The younger generation uses IM and Facebook and is almost constantly online. I still seem to spend a lot of time in meetings, or writing and preparing materials, or reading and evaluating a lot of stuff. And despite of coming from the land of mobile phones I prefer calling people to sending SMS or Twitter messages. A good friend of mine has done a lot of research on learning, and has pointed out that learning requires long enough quiet time to absorb and understand new topics and ideas. In an environment with constant instant messaging, where do we find that quiet time for learning?

In addition to contributing to the Globalization blog, I will also be blogging a bit about what is happneing in social media in Europe. I will start form my own region here in the north, but will move also southwards!

Although it is still cold here close to the Arctic regions, the social media scene is humming. One site to visit is www.arcticstartup.com, where Ville Vesterinen and his friends blog about social media business in Scandinavia and the Baltic region. In addition to the blog, which tells about the latest news about internet and mobile startups in the Nordic and Baltic region, they are also helping to create a buzzing ecosystem of sharing ideas and growing companies together. Great job!

Another place to get acquainted with Finnish social media companies is www.sombiz.net.

There are plenty of interesting social media companies in Scandinavia and Baltics - some of them even surprising. Muxlim, www.muxlim.com, a global Muslim community, has its roots in Finland. Games are another strong area here; www.playfinland.fi is a great site to follow news about the Finnish game development scene. Max Payne came from Finland, and there are several interesting new companies, such as Frosmo (www.frosmo.com).

In addition to consumer social media, things are happening in the Enterprise 2.0 area, but more on that in next entries!

One of the areas which I will be interested to follow is: how will European social media companies address the question of handling languages in social media? Although many communities will be monolingual, I think there are enormous needs in corporations to handle multiple languages in the various Enterprise 2.0 applications. And with multiple languages, I mean much more than the user interface: all the user-generated content, communicating with customers, open innovations etc. Thoughs or comments on this?

Traveling in Europe during the holidays reminded me again on the importance of languages in the European market. With Bulgaria and Romania joining the EU the size of the European market increased yet again - and made it even more language-intensive. American companies wanting to sell to the European market, or outsource their business processes in the quite interesting former Eastern Europe, need to add yet a couple of more languages to be maintained in materials, web sites etc.

For those interested in reading more about the differences of language requirements in Europe, USA, and Asia, and on the solutions being developed for them, http://www.tc-star.org/pubblicazioni/D17_HLT_ENG.pdf provides an interesting European view. With the rapidly growing requirement for faster and cheaper translations, maximal utilization of automation is the only solution to meet the multilingual needs. This will include a shift towards giving end-users more tools to both understand and produce material in other languages. I believe that some of such new tools will come from outside the traditional translation industry: content management, collaboration tools or similar.

One of the big questions will be: can Machine Translation provide a solution? This will be the topic of my next blog.

It has been interesting to note that even inside the US, more and more languages start appearing in various services. Spanish is the obvious example, but at the Gilbane Boston conference we heard that e.g. a New England healthcare provider needs to think about providing information in Vietnamese and in Russian. The old saying "You can always buy in your own language, but you must sell in your customer's language" still holds true.

Although English has become the universal second language, people still feel more comfortable dealing in their own native language. Maybe the next generation will be different (although I guess that has always been the expectation of the previous generation) and will communicate mainly with smileys - but I believe that languages will not go away.

One could assume that in the European Union with its plethora of official languages there would be a lot of language tools available. Well, there is e.g. Eurodicautom at http://ec.europa.eu/eurodicautom/Controller, a multilingual and searchable term bank which includes about 5.5 million entries in 48 subject fields. It continues to be available, but it is currently not updated, as it is being moved into a new database - and the latest news about it are from 2003. So one can only hope that the migration will be completed soon and the updating can continue, as new words appear in languages continuously. Just think about "truthiness", which was chosen as Merriam-Webster's word of the year in 2006.

There are several other multilingual general and industry-specific dictionaries available in the web, such as the European multilingual environmental glossary at http://glossary.eea.europa.eu/EEAGlossary/. Another example is the Microsoft multilingual terminology at http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/tools/MILSGlossary.mspx. Googling e.g. with "multilingual glossaries" or "multilingual dictionaries" brings a lot of hits to various resources.

The thing is, multilingual content management and multilingual searches start from good multilingual terminology. There will be a lot of work needed in that area, both in general and in industry- or even in company-specific dictionaries. I will follow up on this topic later.

I am starting to blog here on mainly globalization and localization, and the many issues they bring to end users and organizations. To give you an idea about what my views and thoughts are based on, here is a short background:

As a native Finnish speaker I realized early on why languages do matter - very few people outside Finland speak any Finnish, despite its many quaint characteristics, such as 16 cases formed by adding endings to nouns. In addition, I studied operations research and systems analysis at the Helsinki University of Technology, which gave me a tendency to look at everything as processes which can be optimized.

For 14 years, I had a localization service company, Trantex, which translated a lot of software and documentation for major sw providers, such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, etc., and also did technical writing and training. In 1997 we sold the company to L&H and I moved to Boston, where I later became a consultant to Finnish high-tech companies entering the US market.

After all the years I spent in the localization world, I have kept following the industry, as I think there are very interesting developments and challenges ahead. In 1985 a translation customer told me that I should start looking for a new job, as all computer users will want to use only English software. Since then, the number of languages into which companies have to translate their materials has at least tripled. With the web and now with wikis and blogs, information can be published instantly 24/7 all over the world, and much of it is or needs to be in languages other than English. After all, only 5% of the world's population are native English speakers (354 million according to Wikipedia).

I welcome comments and discussion - though preferably in English :0). For a wonderful description of why Finnish would make a great world language, go to http://www.idiocentrism.com/squib.finn2.htm.