Passport to Trade 2.0 project leader. My research interests are in the area of disruptive innovation using information technology (IT) and the use of IT in business management. Topics include: enterprise 2.0; web 2.0, international business culture, search engine optimisation, and social media marketing.
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As a PhD Student in Management within the Doctoral School of Valahia University of Targoviste, Romania, I had the opportunity to benefit from an international mobility of five months in Verona, Italy – a great experience that has made a positive impact on my scientific research and also on my inter-cultural relationship skills.
In April 2013, almost one year after the end of my Italian experience, I had the opportunity to participate in the working meeting organized by Valahia University which focused on the international project Passport to trade 2.0 (P2T2). At this meeting, I discovered the information about the P2T2 project and its website resource.
With an attractive interface, this site is a collection of well-structured information about business culture and etiquette in 31 European countries. This information is current and very useful, given the growing number of young people wishing to study or work in a dynamic and multi-cultural European environment.
Although the initiative of the project team is great, I believe that, in order to increase the efficiency of this approach, it would be appropriate for all information on this website to be available also in Romanian language and the project to be widened to all European countries and universities to help in aligning this initiative and work together to identify opportunities to study and work in Europe. At the moment full information is available in English and only a summary for 31 countries is translated into 8 other languages – Romanian, Czech, French, German, Greek, Bulgarian, Finnish and Italian, although the Google Translate tool is integrated into each web page allowing you to get a translation into over 70 languages, is is not very accurate when it comes to conveying complex meaning.
I believe that the Passport to Trade 2.0 project has developed a very useful tool that could have helped me save much time and energy which I invested in organising and conducting my international mobility trip and which I recommend with confidence to all young people who want to enjoy a learning experience or who want to work in Europe.
Ana-Maria Tudorache
PhD Student in the Doctoral School of Valahia University of Targoviste, Romania
My name is Sebastian Popescu and I am the manager of S.C. East Soft Consulting – an Small and Medium Sized Enterprise (SME), specialising in computer software. I was invited to attend a meeting held at the University of VALAHIA from Targoviste, Romania, were I found out about the Passport to Trade 2.0 (#P2T2) project and the website resource planned to be developed.
As an SME company I am very interested in opportunities to grow our business in other countries and therefore information about business culture in Europe was very welcome. Every day I realise that the online environment is increasingly offering us new ways of advertising and staying in touch with our customers.
During my Germany visit I understood how important it is to know the customs of a country and of people you intend to contact. I refer here to the first business meeting and the first business conversation. From the P2T2 website I found out about German rigidity that is well described and in this way I knew how to approach the business meeting. It is very interesting how they respect what they discussed and how they kept their word. Taking this into consideration I prepared my presentation and business proposal to be in very short and clear statements. After the business meeting, that I consider to be a successful for starting up of a new cooperation I feel that for my preparation for the business meetings the BusinessCulture.org website was “my lucky key” to success!
This site really helps you to adopt to the model of the people and business cultures you meet in 31 European countries. On the website I liked to find information about the attitude to foreigners and some of the taboos in each country.
Small things such as how to greet, habits of people when they are at a dinner meeting, conversation topics to be used for ice breaker discussions could make you an agreeable business partner or could be considered offensive and therefore jeopardize any potential future business collaboration.
I am planning to study the content of the website in more detail and pay particular attention this time to the social media tools and strategies available. I am confident that I will gain a lot of useful information for my business development. I am also thinking to ask one or two students from the Faculty of Economic Studies University of VALAHIA to have placement assignments in my company where they will help us to get better in the use of social media and some other tips on how we can improve our business for international trade.
If you are an SME manager or employee and you have some spare time use it to explore www.businessculture.org, I am sure you will have no regrets, certainly you will gain useful knowledge!
I congratulate the team members of the Passport to Trade 2.0 project. They have done a great job by gathering the right information about business culture and behaviour in several European countries.
We all know the ancient proverb: “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” But, do we always stick to this advice? Certainly not, as we often do not know how people of the different countries do. Especially when doing business abroad, it is absolutely necessary to know how to act accordingly in the respective countries and situations.
If you want to do business in Austria, I only can recommend you to read all chapters about the country at the project website businessculture.org. There you will find the major pitfalls that might occur when looking for business opportunities and getting in touch with Austrian people.
Being a Swedish immigrant, who has been living in Austria for 40 years, I could not refrain from laughing a few times when reading the text, because I realized how good the description matched my own attitudes, habits, and behaviour. There is a lot of great advice on the website.
In particular, I would suggest to keep the following in mind when building a business relationship with Austrian people:
“Austrians are generally conservative people and are prudent and moderate in their behaviour. They respect perfectionism in all areas of business and private life, and in their approach to work they tend to focus on achieving the task at hand.”
Having spent almost two years in England as a student, I am pleased to see that this website lists all the important cultural characteristics of the British people. Businessculture.org is a powerful tool for students, business people and individuals who are looking for a helpful resource to communicate with other European citizens face-to-face or via the Internet.
Being French myself, I found all the typical French cultural characteristics and the requirements for a good negotiation or communication with French people. Saying “bonjour”, shaking hands, being on time… as many other elements that are so important in France and that you need to learn and be aware of when in France!
I experienced myself the difficulties related to differences between English and French ways to communicate during my several trips. Knowing how people react or act can be really helpful in many situations when you are in a new country and dealing with other business cultures!
This website will drive your success in communication in Europe. I am happy to finally find out a useful and ergonomic tool to run my business projects and encourage you to have a look (and more!) on this great website.
There are around 10 million active Twitter users in the UK which equates to 20.8% of UK internet users, with that number set to grow to 26.6% by 2017. With that many people actively talking on Twitter it’s likely very likely that your target market is also talking about products or services that your business sells; right now even, not too far from your doorstep.
If you cut through all the noise and listen to the right conversations taking place locally on Twitter, you have the opportunity to introduce yourself and convert that local customer into a sale. This method can be gold dust for businesses that only serve customers within a particular area. It’s easier than you think and I’m going to show you how it’s possible using Hootsuitein less than 15 minutes.
Set the scene…
Let’s say you’ve opened up a new clothes shop on Market Street in Manchester and you sell clothes that appeal to 18 to 34 year olds. I’ve deliberately chosen this example as Twitter penetration is the highest amongst this age demographic.If you know Manchester at all you’ll know there are plenty of clothes shops in this area and competition is fierce – all the more reason to listen out for local customers on Twitter and stay one step ahead of your competitors.
Start the timer…
Step 1 – Find your location/co-ordinates
Go to http://maps.google.co.uk, enter your address in the search bar and click the search button.
Once the page has loaded with the map displaying your location, right click on the pin and select ‘What’s here’. In the search field, the latitude and longitude co-ordinates of your location (or very close to your location) should now appear – like in the screenshot below.
Copy these co-ordinates to your clipboard, you’ll need them for step 3.
Step 2 – Brainstorm customer conversations
In this step, you need to put yourself in the mindset of your customers and think of phrases they would use when considering or looking to buy something that you sell. In our clothes shop example we’d probably be interested in someone saying “I need to buy some new clothes this weekend” in their tweet. Now, everybody’s tweet will be somewhat different so we need to pick out the main keywords people would use. To start, note down a couple of keywords that demonstrate buying intent and a keyword phrase that relates to a product or service you sell. Keep things simple and broad to start with.
In our clothes shop example we could start with these buying intent keywords: “buy” & “need”
And this product keyword phrase: “new clothes”
This will be an on going process and one that you keep fine tuning as you get used to how the advanced search operators work (which I’ll come to shortly), and the more you understand which keywords your potential customers use on Twitter.
Step 3 – Add a stream in Hootsuite combining step 1 and 2
If you haven’t already, register for a free basic plan with Hootsuite. Once logged in you’ll be taken to your dashboard which will have a column saying ‘Add stream’ with various icons to choose from. Click on the ‘Search’ icon.
You’ll be presented with a search field which is where you combine steps 1 and 2 to find those local customers. Using our new clothes shop example we would enter the keywords, buy “new clothes” (new clothes with the quotation marks), then the text, geocode: then paste the geo-location coordinates, 53.482651,-2.241073 directly after the colon, no space. Then add the search radius you want to cover, 40km. If you aren’t sure of what radius to cover then use this free tool for a visualisation.
The finished search query should look something like this:
Click search to see your results. Below is an actual screenshot of the stream at the time of writing this post.
As you can see, there are people within the Manchester area actively talking about wanting to buy new clothes every single day. Granted, there’s going be the odd tweet that’s irrelevant but there will always be sales opportunity tweets worth acting on.
14 mins 37 secs – Stop the timer! That’s how you find new local customers in less than 15 minutes! 🙂
Before I get into some best practices about acting on those tweets let me explain a couple of advanced search operators (rules that you can apply to streams in order to filter them) that you can use to improve the relevancy of your location based search streams.
Broad keyword searches
This is the most basic search where you simply enter any keywords in any order and the stream will fetch back tweets that contain those words in any order.
Exact keyword searches
Wrapping quotation marks around two or more words will fetch back tweets that contain those exact words in the exact order you entered them.
OR searches
Putting OR in between two keywords or phrases will fetch back tweets that mention one keyword or key phrase, or both.
Negative keywords
You can filter out keywords by putting a negative sign (-) directly in front of keywords. Tweets containing the negative keywords won’t be shown. A couple I recommend you try are -http and -RT. These are really helpful if you are seeing a lot irrelevant tweets with links in and/or seeing the same tweet twice or more because of retweets.
Click on the image below to see how the different search operators filter out certain tweets and as a result display somewhat different streams.
CLICK TO ZOOM IN
There are other advanced search operators at your disposal but the ones covered in this post will do the job intended. If you do wish to read about the other search operators then I recommend you read this well put together post by Dan Wilkerson.
As mentioned in step 2, fine tuning your searches will be an on-going process (you can edit your searches by clicking on the downwards arrow at the top of each stream). For the ‘new clothes shop’ example I would probably get more specific and create streams for searches like need “new jacket” or shopping “new shoes”. Have a play around with different keywords and the different search operators until you have a row of streams that drip feed, potentially, new local customers 24/7.
Introducing yourself
So, you’ve got all these people showing an interest in the things you sell but how do you introduce yourself without sounding like a desperate salesperson? Really it’s all about trial and error, but because these people are already showing a desire to buy in their tweet then you can get away with being a tad salesy. There’s no ‘one magic tweet for all’ but there a few of things you should always look to do: Check out the persons bio & tweets, respond like a human, offer help and/or make them aware of any money saving offers you have – who doesn’t like to save money when shopping for new clothes?
Below are some examples of how you could respond to some of the tweets from our [buy “new clothes”] search above.
Prospect: “In serious need of some new clothes… Not liking a thing in my wardrobe at the min”
Reply: We know the feeling! Must be time for a belated spring-clean and a new dress…[Link to dresses]
Prospect: “winter is just an excuse for me to buy new clothes”
Reply: “It certainly is. Don’t forget the cable knit jumper though! We currently have 25% off our jumper range [link to offer] ”
Prospect: “Using my student loan to buy new clothes yay! :)”
Reply: “Exciting! We offer a great student discount if you need an extra helping hand : )”
Prospect: “Come on Friday – Pay Day! Need new clothes!!!”
Reply: If you’re off out to celebrate we have a gorgeous printed trouser/white shirt combo in stock! [Link to combo]”
Take inspiration from the examples above and don’t be afraid to try out new things. Don’t however, send tweet after tweet trying to lure prospects in, keep your tweets varied!
Limitations
Although this can be an invaluable technique, there are some limitations to it. In order for location based tweets to show, a user has to have their location enabled for tweets in the settings turned on. If they don’t then Twitter will look for a users’ location in their profile bio and use that location instead. This can cause problems by showing tweets from people who live in one area but are actually tweeting in another area many miles away. Also, if a users’ location on their profile bio is not filled in then their tweets will never show for location based searches.
This method can be tailored to most businesses, including yours. Listening and responding to people on Twitter who need you for specific things is a natural way to build brand loyalty, capture leads and acquire new customers. I hope you found this post useful, do let us know if you have any questions in the comments section below.
