Jani Penttinen

What is getting quite obvious to me is that a lot of business owners feel they should have social media presence in languages other than English, but practically nobody's doing anything about it. The main reason is that for most companies just maintaining at least some level of social media activity in a single language is already a stretch.

Typically, when you reach outside of the English speaking world, you're looking at quite a lot of extra work. First, you need to find a way to produce content in another language. You can either find a native speaker to join your team, or have the content translated from English and assign someone from your team coordinate the process. If you translate the content, you'll have more issues down the road when someone from that language group attempts to contact you in their native language. And of course, you're looking at rinse and repeat every time you decide to update the content.

The second problem is, where are you going to publish the content? Are you going to create a dozen different Facebook fan pages and Twitter accounts? A number of blogs? Are you going to be able to update all of those regularly? Even if you do manage to do all of that, you're going to end up with a number of smaller communities while what you really should have is a single place where all your fans are coming to.

Without going to the details right now, I should point out that PremiumFanPage solves all of those issues. It's funny that we've actually had the technology available for a long time already, but until now it's been limited to running the Xiha community. With the PFP solution we're able to start offering the platform to everyone out there.

Interestingly as the world is changing at a rapid pace, it seems the need for multilingual presence is growing across a variety of industries. Just about everyone I met during the week was able to find a need for the PremiumFanPage service in their own line of business. It was an eye-opening experience, really, as I couldn't have imagined so many different ways to utilize the technology.

Next to me on this flight sits a lovely and very talkative lady. It had turned out she is Brittany Andrews, a famous porn star with 20 years in the industry under her belt. She was excited to hear I'm from Finland. Apparently she has fond memories of the country, having been the host of Finland's largest sex exhibition three times over the years. "I don't think anyone else has hosted it three times", she says, with pride in her voice.

Once we established the international connection, she went on to talk about a burning issue she has in social media these days - her fans come from all over the world and they often send her messages in languages she doesn't speak! She'd love to have a system that lets her update Facebook and Twitter in languages other than English, and to be able to understand what the fans are saying!

I had already decided I'm not going to pitch her PremiumFanPage, as adult industry is not something we're after. But after a statement like that, how could I not talk about it! So I pulled out my laptop and gave her a little tour of what we are doing. Then I realized that all the great things to come out of CES have been actively supported by the adult industry - starting from the VCR back in 1970.

During the week I also learned of several language related services that I hadn't heard of before. I'll check them out over the coming days and try to post something in this blog for the ones that are most interesting. This makes me think the translation start-up industry is more active than I thought, but it is not receiving the kind of media attention it deserves. Hopefully we can do our part to change this, as translation / multilingual services are going to play a very important role in social media going forward.