Cross-Cultural Twitter Interview With Klaus & Flavia Westerwelle

Twitter Interviews – #CKinterview

Today’s Cross-Cultural Interview is with Klaus & Flavia Westerwelle.  You can also find them on Twitter: @transdomo. This is a 2 part interview:

• Part 1 – On this blog we get to know Klaus & Flavia
• Part 2 – Klaus & Flavia answered 10 cross-cultural questions in a Twitter Interview with the hashtag #CKinterview.

Klaus & Flavia Westerwelle are a German couple now based out of South Carolina. Their company Transdomo helps businesses develop internationally through a wide range of services.

Their Transdomo website gives you more details about what they do, and links to several blogs.

Klaus & Flavia Westerwelle – Part 1

Here is the first part of the interview with Klaus & Flavia – The transcript of the second part of this interview on Twitter has is below. You can follow us on Twitter with the hashtag #CKinterview.

Cindy King: Hi Klaus & Flavia, As you know, I’ve been following you on Twitter for some time now. And I feel like we are kindred spirits across the pond – we are interested in the same topics of international business development and related cross-cultural issues. It’s interesting that you are originally from Europe and now in North America, and for me it’s the reverse.

For those who don’t know you, can you please tell us something about yourself, where do you come from, where do you live now? What you do in life?

Klaus & Flavia:  We both are born in Germany, were self employed and owners of an interior design company. Flavia also worked as Graphic / Textile Designer. Working in interior design we came in contact with a lot of international companies and people and traveled a lot for business. Traveling in the United States we fell in love with America and dreamed about living in the United States. We tried to find a job in the US and also started to play in the greencard lottery. We won the ability to apply for a visa after playing for six years and moved to the U.S after receiving our visas. We are now living near Greenville, South Carolina

Cindy King: I know that you are German and now live in the US, how long were in Germany?

Klaus & Flavia: We lived in Germany for nearly 40 years and have been living in the USA for more than 12 years now.

Cindy King: Do you speak any other languages besides German and English? How would you describe your cultural background?

Klaus & Flavia: We speak English and German and Flavia a little French. We both don’t feel close to one particular culture. We certainly have our roots in Europe. Our rational feelings, thoughts and behavior might sometimes tend to be more like Europeans, but our soul, dreams and spirit are definitely more American. But, because we also do know and love the different cultures in other countries like the France, Deanmark or England, overall we consider us to be much more international than connected to one specific culture.

Cindy King: So how much of your cross-cultural experience is related to your professional experience? Is there a story behind your interest in international business?

Klaus & Flavia: Our story began with our immigration to the US. Flavia started to write about our experiences and published several books. She created and maintains a special website, a forum and blog to support, provide tips and connect with people who also immigrated to the US or are planning to do so. Klaus worked for international companies and volunteered at the German-American Chamber and the International Center of the Upstate.

We both more and more supported and assisted families and companies to move and get settled in the US.

We finally decided to use these expertise to start our own company, TransDomo,LLC in 2005. With TransDomo we support companies and people with all services connected to moving and starting in the US. We also acquired our real estate license to be able to sell and buy commercial / residential properties for our international clients.

Cindy King: How did you pick up your cross-cultural skills?

Klaus & Flavia:  After moving to the United States, by the hard way – learning by doing.

Cindy King: Is there anything else about your international background that you’d like to share?

Klaus & Flavia:  Flavia’s family has roots in different European countries, we moved around in Germany nearly every three years and loved to travel a lot all over Europe. We think this might be the cause of not having specific roots in one single culture.

Cindy King: Let’s talk about your blogs…

Klaus & Flavia: As described above, we started after immigrating to the US with one forum “Ausgewandert” and later with a blog “Auswanderer” to support, assist and answer questions from people who are interested in immigrating to the USA:

After starting our company TransDomo,LLC we added one blog “TransDomo” for our real estate department to keep in contact with our real estate clients and to provide information about our area and the real estate business.

Another TransDomo blog “Immobilien_USA” provides information for our international clients about real estate in the USA.

For business clients and companies we do provide a blog “American-German Business News” with information about German-American businesses and economic business developments in the USA and Germany.

Cindy King: This is an impressive list of blogs! Can you share one of your favorite blog posts with us, or tell us what you like about your blogs?

Klaus & Flavia: We do not have one favorite blog post. We do not blog about cultural differences, but business news and business or real estate economics in German speaking countries and the US. We always find it extremely interesting, that we always do have enormous material to blog about German company news, German inventions or start-ups but always do have huge problems finding the same amount of interesting news about the US.

Cindy King: Have you noticed any current trends in blogging or social media?

Klaus & Flavia: We started blogging about 1 year and tweeting about 6 months ago and think it is too early to recognize any specific trends. But we feel that a lot of clients, especial European clients, are not used to blogs or twitter for commercial purposes, yet.

Cindy King: What other online activities to do you do besides blogging?

Klaus & Flavia: For all the different channels mentioned above we also do feed twitter accounts to inform our clients in German and English. We also do have a facebook page- which unfortunately is very much neglected due to too much work. Of course we also do have several websites and send out our monthly newsletters for each channel.

We also use LinkdIn, Xing and Plaxo to connect with colleagues and clients and find especially LinkdIn and Xing very helpful.

Cindy King: Can you give us some insights into your cross-cultural affinities?

Klaus & Flavia: We always loved to travel to France, the Provence and Bretagne and hope to be able to do so in the future. We would love to learn French and Spanish and Flavia would like to improve her basic French skills.

Cindy King: Is there any foreign country that appeals to you?

Klaus & Flavia: Traveling the world and visiting Australia, Asia, favoring Japan and India is one of our longtime dreams. Of course, we could see ourselves living in different countries in different stages of our life. At the moment it would be very convenient for us to live in Switzerland for different reasons, as retirees we would love to live in the south of France (Provence).

Cindy King: Have you come across any cultural stereotypes that bother you, or you find inappropriate?

Klaus & Flavia: Of course, we are always astonished how deeply ‘Lederhosen’ and ‘Nazi’ is still associated with German.

We find it extremely inappropriate to use the term ‘Nazi’ in the current political discussion – although we do recognize that this is truly one of the cultural misunderstandings.

Cindy King: It would be interesting to see what research has been done on lifecycles of cultural stereotypes…

On another subject, do you have a favorite movie that could help people understand cultural issues?

Klaus & Flavia:

Mississippi Masala
House of Sand and Fog

Cindy King: Interesting, I’m going to have to watch those… Thank you Klaus & Flavia!  It is great to know more about you.  I can’t wait to get to the second half of the interview on Twitter later today.

Part 2 – The Twitter Interview

This is an interview series of the people I recommend you follow on Twitter for the cross-cultural and international business insights in their tweets.

More Twitter Interviews

• Charmayne Paul – @psitutor
• Lucy Chatburn – @pocketcultures
• Doreen Iannuzzi – @DoreenatDMS
• Donna Jackson – @wisequeen
• Chris Cotter – @CotterHUE
• Jack Yan – @jackyan
• Silvia Cambié – @XCulture
• Bill Ward – @DR4WARD
• Thierry De Baillon – @t_de_baillon
• Seshu – @PicSeshu
• Neil Urquhart – @culturematters
• Donagh Kiernan – @dkiernan
• Christian Hoeferle – @hoeferleconsult
• Caroline – @ohh_la_la
• Deborah Swallow – @DeborahSwallow
• Steve Roesler – @steveroesler
• Matthew Bennett – @matthewbennett

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