Use of digital around the world varies widely. Some tools that are “passé” in the USA may just take off in other parts of the world. We will regularly publish guest posts by our local European digital strategists. Below is an entry by Mauro Turcatti from our Milan office.
Recently I was discussing with a client the chance to build their new project website only in English, as they are willing to target mainly an international audience. This would have cut production costs and sped up the process a lot. In the end we preferred to have the usual bilingual (Italian/English) site.
As in most part of the world, language is still a major barrier which eventually prevents people to simple things like purchasing online (fresh data in the EU shows the gap between domestic and cross-border e-commerce is widening) or joining social media. If a service plans to go global, it cannot but develop a truly multi-language platform. Facebook knows it very well, as it has just launched its service also in Arabic and Hebrew.
Italy made no difference. In this sense Facebook’s case had been remarkable. According to Nielsen Online on December 2007 the social networking site was attracting a mere 2% of those Italian citizen who had access to Internet. Twelve months later, the figure had skyrocketed to 44%, making Facebook the 6th most visited site in Italy.
What happened? On May, 14 2008 Facebook released its Italian version. Subscribers were only 355k and the service was popular only among the geek community. Few months later and after a lot of buzz, Facebook was steadily gaining one million user a month. Mainstream media started covering the site, which reached 6 million users by the end of 2008.
Today there are 8.5 million Italians on Facebook. Thanks also to the social network popularity, Internet usage is growing double-digits in terms of page viewed, time spent and sessions. This is good for helping Italy to keep up with the digital divide it still suffers. Alas, there might be a last wall to break down: foreign language knowledge. Marketers are reminded.
