Did you know? … Over a 10 year period, the capitalization of a company with a well-managed brand can expect to be 200% greater than a poorly managed brand.

How do you distinguish your company in a crowded global market place?  It’s a question Marketing Managers regularly ask themselves.   Building a globally valued brand is undoubtedly one of the most popular answers but this raises the next question.  How do you manage this in practice to ensure the brand remains consistent across international borders but retains its local relevancy? This is where Operational Brand Management steps in. 

Operational Brand Management …. A combination of people, process and technology that allows an organization to consistently and accurately drive the brand in the language of choice for the customers in a manner consistent with the corporation’s global strategy.

In order to translate the strategic intent to have a global brand into actual execution, Operational Brand Management identifies 3 core areas to focus on:

• Cross-divisional communication
• Processes, best practices and methods
• Technology

Each of these functions needs to be considered and aligned with strategic goals.  The following questions should be asked of each:

• Does the current process support or hindering delivery of a global brand? 
• What immediate, medium and long term changes need to happen? 
• Who needs to be involved in these changes?
• How will changes be measured?

Only by optimizing the individual elements of how global brand communicate with local audiences can International companies hope to build a truly valuable global brand.

It’s my pleasure to announce that SDL won the ‘Best Main Market Company Achievement’ category at the Shares Awards 2010 last month. The Awards were organised by Shares (http://www.sharesmagazine.co.uk/), the leading weekly publication for stock market professionals and private investors.

Over the last couple of years we’ve heard a lot about the merits (and in some cases not) of crowdsourcing translation for community, user generated and non-vital web content .

Social media sites such as Facebook and Linked-in have embraced this method for translating their sites into multiple languages to increase their global reach.  But the issue has always been the level of commitment required from volunteers to translate large amounts of content and the resulting accuracy of the translation. 

The latest innovations in Machine Translation (MT) must surely cast shadow on the time/cost/effort ratio of using crowdsourcing.  Why go to the trouble of relying on volunteers to translate content when sophisticated, customized Machine Translation applications such as SDL’s recently launched BeGlobal can do it in a fraction of the time and effort? 

Last week I attended two SDL localization seminars - one in Paris and one in London - both of which were highly enjoyable and educational  ... even if I do say so myself :).  The events focused on using innovation to increase quality, reduce time-to-market and drive down production costs for global information.  SDL presented and demonstrated 3 of their most innovative solutions for global content optimization:

As the 2010 FIFA World Cup approaches and we each get ready to cheer on our individual countries and favourite players, one of the things I’ll be looking forward to this summer is seeing the cultural diversity of the fans that flock to South Africa to show their support.  Sport always has a special way of bringing the world closer together and yet provides a celebration of its differences.  From the different coloured shirts, to the mascots, goal celebrations and chanting, each nation will be clamouring for attention on a world stage in their own special way.

Over the last few weeks, SDL have hosted two extremely popular webinars entitled Dispelling the Machine Tranlsation Quality Myth.  The webinars addressed the challenges of making Machine Translation work for your business and how integrating this technology into both your existing technology infrastructure and human translation processes can greatly increase ROI.

Kirsty Waller, Marketing Manager writes: With all of the talk about machine translation in the localization industry at the moment, an outsider looking in may be forgiven for thinking that translation technology had moved on to such a degree that we now had scores of robots perfectly translating millions of lines of text with no human input at all.