Cross-Cultural Web

By Cindy King  ·  4 Comments
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Cross-Cultural Marketing

international marketingI have been doing a lot of work on how to bring cross cultural marketing expertise to your website.

Cross Cultural Communication Web Tools

What amazed me is just how easy it is to find “tools” to respond to different cultural communication needs.

We all respond to different things when communicating. These things are often subtle and can also involve totally different outlooks on life itself.

Each culture has developed its own form of communication using communication platforms common to all cultures. Company websites are communication platforms. So it is interesting to see how different cultures use the same platform to communicate in accordance with their cultural needs.

Politeness And Friendliness

I am no expert in Chinese websites, but I remember reading an interesting discussion on how difficult is was for certain Chinese dialects or languages to communicate effectively online. Many of the difficulties apparently stemmed from different rules in politeness.

It is true, as a cross cultural specialist, I have always found politeness and friendliness to be difficult to acquire when communicating with different cultures. Even with lots of practice and intimate knowledge of the culture it is easy to sound off cord with these two things if you are not a native.

Web Tools Get Across

Despite these few difficult areas, there are several “tools” you can use on your website to help you communicate better across different cultures. By tools I mean ways to use this communication platform in a way you can adapt to different cultures.

Can this really help your website communicate better in different cultures? It is easier to answer the question in reverse.

  • It is very easy to push foreign clients away if you are not using the right web tools to speak to their cultural needs.

This is very obvious. Afterward it is really a question of getting your cross cultural communication right. Web tools can help you communicate better with international clients. But there are many other factors involved.

You need to spend time tweaking your selection of web tools and your website communication. You can outsource your foreign communication to specialists, but I also believe you have to be intimately involved in the process.

Learn More About Cultural Behaviors

This week I start a series of articles on Cross Cultural Communication Web Tools over at Get International Clients. This is to accompany the series on the differences of cross cultural behaviors currently being reviewed in the weekly newsletter.

More On Cross-Cultural Marketing

  Filed under: cross-cultural marketing

                                    


Cindy King