Austrians? Yes, Austrians. My reasons will become apparent.

Does it really matter how well you communicate on your new web startup? Will a few typos and spelling mistakes really make a difference? If you’re formal when you should be casual, or flippant when you should be serious, will it really affect your big metrics?

Oh, dear reader, it may indeed. Sit down, take a load off, recline. It’s time for another story from the dawn of the internet age…

How well I remember the many long, arduous nights spent poring through localisation strings when I was a young web producer at Yahoo!. It was frustratingly slow, complex and prone to mistakes. All I was trying to do was make the Australian version of, say, Yahoo! Groups read less like an American version, changing American English spellings to Australian English spellings. Yet sometimes it was as hard as decoding the Rosetta Stone and rather more frustrating.

Frustrating because inevitably, the next upgrade to the product would include new code that would push all our hard work (or worse, random chunks of it) into the web server trashcan rubbish bin and we’d have to start all over again. Worse: usually little un-editable snippets of interface that needed translating would persist, or would mysteriously appear in the interface for yet another language. Suddenly some of the UK English translations would appear in the Australian product, or the French translations would appear in the Australian product, or vise versa. Usually they’d be accompanied by other snippets of lost code that would largely screw–up that feature of the product until a clumsy, hurried patch was applied.

There never seemed to be much rhyme nor reason for it, but Yahoo! was a young company, in a fast-growing industry. We had a war to win and there was no time to stop and take prisoners, much less check to see what language they spoke. Besides, products like Yahoo! Groups were just “Social Media 0.5″ – early pointers towards what would become MySpace and FaceBook. Nobody’s life was in danger if the platform ran with a few bugs most of the time. Nobody lost any money.

So I’m faintly horrified when I see mature internet companies in slow-or-not-growing markets with large amounts of customers’ money at play making the same mistakes. Like… PayPal.

I’ve been trialling Freshbooks recently for invoicing with my consulting business and one of the features I most love is the ability to accept online payment via PayPal.

Freshbooks I love. PayPal? Not so much. First there’s the big transaction fee they slap on processing my invoice payment and no interest they pay me on my balance. Then there’s the impression I have that their Help section is only loosely connected to their business and offers a diverting but largely pointless tour of “where things used to be on previous versions of PayPal’s interface and what they used to be called.”

But of most concern is the regular reminder that whoever’s managing the ‘glocalization’ of PayPal’s platforms is doing a terrible job. Today, PayPal seems to have mistaken me for an Austrian user. Funny? Yeah, hilarious if PayPal was just a social media site and not shifting my money around between various bank accounts and currencies.

What if the laughing clowns running the glocalization of the interface are of the same calibre as the developers making sure my money lands in the right place and has the correct fees deducted the correct number of times? Do I need to start second-guessing PayPal and checking every transaction? Because if I do, even an old fashioned cheque books start to look a lot more attractive.

The take-away message here is simple: the more critical it is that you attract and retain every visitor to your web business, the more important it is that you address them with the language they expect, in the voice they expect.

The extra bonus point is: the more your users invest in your web business (whether that be their messages in a group or their actual money) the more important it is that they see you execute flawlessly. You wouldn’t entrust your savings with a bank manager who addressed you partially in a foreign language, who kept giving you forms to sign that had random checkboxes and information that led nowhere. PayPal shouldn’t expect us to be comfortable with that experience either.

Glocalization is hard, but critical to get right.

Which decade was this written in? &quot;Prohibitively expensive&quot;? Not any more it isn’t. Google manages it very smoothly, even with tiny ad clients like me. Long past time to glocalize, Amazon! Uploaded with <a href=”http://plasq.com/”>plasq</a>’s <a href=”http://skitch.com”>Skitch</a>

Yet banks of all shapes and sizes are striving to "engage more fully" with the retail customer, build a longer relationship, "broaden the relationship" . In other words, sell us more financial products and keep us as a customer for longer by knowing more about our financial needs.

So help me optimise every saving, cheque, term deposit, loan, credit card, lease, equity trading and piggy bank account I have. Help me learn where my money is going each month, help me balance my household budget.

The typical online customer relationship with an Australian bank is now almost entirely a task-oriented one: I need to pay a bill or transfer some money, so I click on a bookmark, login, do my transaction, and log-off again asap. Yet, other than perhaps the ATM machine, the online banking application is probably my primary touch-point with the bank’s brand and brand experience. For most of us, the ATM and the online banking application is my bank.

If I’m a bank, do I want an entirely task-oriented relationship with my customers? Definitely not.

Task-oriented relationships turn rich, diverse brands into utilities – the only time I care at all about my choice of gas provider is if I learn that I can get gas a lot cheaper from another utility brand. I do NOT want my bank to become just another utility. So, how can banks use that utilitarian touch point of the online banking application as leverage into a broader, richer, engaging relationship with their customers?

How about: help them manage their finances?

By "finances" I don’t mean "accounts I hold with this bank" – I mean ALL the customer’s finances. Help me optimise every saving, cheque, term deposit, loan, credit card, lease, equity trading and piggy bank account I have. Help me learn where my money is going each month, help me balance my household budget and draft a plan that will lift me out of financial stress and empower me to meet my financial goals.Would that create customer engagement? Reduce churn? Would it be good to be known as "the bank that helped me manage my money better"?

So how? As is often the case, we need only study the lessons that tiny internet startups are learning. Copy them, partner with them, or acquire them if they’re really good at it. I’ve spoken to one Australian bank which is already doing exactly this, but since banks move slowly, that allows plenty of breathing room for others to join the race.

Wesabe is a great case study. A US web startup, Wesabe leverages the US trend to provide banking transaction data in OFX format as a means of parsing bank transaction data from its customers. I upload my month’s statement from my online banking application, and Wesabe parses all my regular transactions, categorising them as car payments, rent payments, entertainment expenses, music from iTunes and books from Amazon.I need to do some training to show Wesabe what each kind of transaction looks like, but the learning curve gets shallower fast, and in 2-3 statements, Wesabe knows enough about my financial habits that it hardly needs any help to do what Quicken takes hours of manually fiddling to achieve.

Wesabe then uses the power of community to show its users how their financial behaviour differs from other users. I can see what the average rate for credit cards is, or home loan interest rates, or whether I spend more or less than my peers on, say, magazine subscriptions.

Users can share tips with each other, and set financial goals that other users will help them meet. All with enough control over privacy and security to satisfy Australian online banking customers.Is my bank always going to come out top in user comparisons of, say, credit card reward schemes? No, not always. But those comparisons are happening already, both in the real world and online in Wesabe and other online communities.

Maybe a bank wouldn’t be entirely comfortable with the idea of customers being recommended competitive products, but how big an opportunity might there be to introduce the brand to the customers of other banks, if this was the first and most prominent application of its type in Australia? With the customer’s permission to review their financial situation, how many products could you introduce them to if you know their entire financial picture?

Sorry, again with the hypothetical questions! Australian banks shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that it won’t happen if they don’t act; Australians already make up a significant proportion of Wesabe’s users. Every Australian Wesabe user is then one step further removed from an engaged relationship with their bank online, and one step forward to considering their bank as just a utility.

In manufacturing industries, it’s relatively tough to glocalise your product – it costs time and money to move a steering wheel from the left to the right hand side of a car for right-hand drive markets like Australia (one of many reasons why I’ll never own a Bugatti Veyron!). For Web 2.o companies, glocalising is usually as simple as pushing a few bits around.

Web 2.0 companies must rely on doing glocalisation well because revenues-per-customer are slim and must be drawn from a broader base of customers. Companies posing for buyout are valued partly on installed base and user growth rates. More fundamentally, Web 2.0 businesses grow through network effects, and in a crowded marketplace with many competitors in every tiny vertical, it’s the best-glocalised service that will grow fastest and reach more markets.

When I signed up for Teamcowboy last night, from the first signup page it was apparent that nobody in the business was thinking much about the world outside of the US.

The signup page makes a common mistake – it requires you to choose a ‘region’ for your team and includes a list of US states and Canada’s provinces only. You can’t progress beyond this page, so my son’s Australian under six soccer team is now pretending to be located in Guam, since that’s the US protectorate closest to the same timezone as Sydney, Australia.

When it’s easier to register a team in the Federated States of Micronesia (sporting population: tiny) than Australia (sporting population: just about all 20 million of us) you know it can’t be a deliberate policy, it’s just near-sighted web development and business strategy.

For one soccer team, that’s not a big deal, though it’s likely to dissuade a lot of soccer mums from signing up. They’re likely to assume the rest of the site’s going to require them to fake other US-only information, and at some stage their investment in time for registration will be wasted.

Where it could become a bigger problem down the track is when TeamCowboy begins to monetise its online sports community, with advertisers unhappy about having geo-targeted ads served to audiences in the wrong country, and sports ecommerce merchants left to deal with customers who’ve ordered goods that can’t be delivered. This kind of mistake can be difficult to undo – once you’ve forced someone to pretend they’re in Guam, it can be hard to convince them it’s worth correcting the information later.

Other common mistakes in unglocalised user registration pages include forcing users to choose a 9 digit US zipcode, US city or state. Unless there’s a very good reason to restrict your userbase to domestic US territory (if, say, your content licensing has geographic restrictions) you’re just encouraging your users to lie to you in their very first interaction with your business. Nearly as bad: you’re actively corrupting your crown jewels – the data you can use later to monetize your audience, attract investors and find new users.

This is all the easy end of glocalisation. Things get progressively more challenging – but pay increasing dividends – when you start to consider offering versions of your website and your customer service in languages other than English, when you ensure that your terms of service, customer data and privacy policies are adapted to local legal requirements, and when you attempt to cater to fine-grained details such as different names for the same sport in different countries.

Some Web 2.0 services, such as tagging and media storage, require relatively less glocalisation to get adoption in overseas markets. Others, such as merchant review content and ecommerce, require intensive glocalisation. Glocalise well and you may find your biggest market is not in the US, and it may not even speak English. Social network Orkut started as a small in-crowd network for Google employees and their friends, but was dramatically ‘hi-jacked’ but a large, communicative and active worldwide community of Portuguese-speaking Brazilians. I was an early Orkut user, and it was not unlike being in a bar with a couple of friends having a quiet drink and suddenly being enveloped by a large crowd of friendly, outgoing, gregarious Brazilians – loads of fun!

Knowing Google’s ability to glocalise (it offers international versions of many of its products already and is gradually opening international offices not just to sell ads but to develop locally-relevant products) Orkut will one day be a big earner for the company.

What does all this mean to TeamCowboy? FIFA estimates nearly 250 million people play soccer regularly, in about 200 countries worldwide. TeamCowboy’s only doing a good job of reaching two of those countries right now, and simultaneously making a mess of its own customer intelligence and market valuation.

*In the US, it’s “glocalization” with a “z” instead of an “s” – providing local English spellings are a simple but important element of a truly glocalised business.

Update: I got an email from Travis at TeamCowboy this morning, not because of this blog post, but because he’d noticed that the team I’d registered overnight appeared to be based in Australia, not in Guam. He wanted to let me know that he’d added the ability to register a team in countries outside the US now.

The greatest strength of an internet startup is its ability to re-engineer overnight, and here it is in action. And his closing question gives me great hope for the future of Travis and TeamCowboy – “If there are any other changes to the site that you feel would help your user experience, please let me know. And of course, if you have any questions about anything at any time, just let me know.” I’ll definitely do that! Web 2.0 startups are able to engage in dialogue with their early customers. Those who choose to, and those who respond, will succeed.

In manufacturing industries, it’s relatively tough to glocalise your product – it costs time and money to move a steering wheel from the left to the right hand side of a car for right-hand drive markets like Australia (one of many reasons why I’ll never own a Bugatti Veyron!). For Web 2.o companies, glocalising is usually as simple as pushing a few bits around.

Web 2.0 companies must rely on doing glocalisation well because revenues-per-customer are slim and must be drawn from a broader base of customers. Companies posing for buyout are valued partly on installed base and user growth rates. More fundamentally, Web 2.0 businesses grow through network effects, and in a crowded marketplace with many competitors in every tiny vertical, it’s the best-glocalised service that will grow fastest and reach more markets.

When I signed up for Teamcowboy last night, from the first signup page it was apparent that nobody in the business was thinking much about the world outside of the US.

The signup page makes a common mistake – it requires you to choose a ‘region’ for your team and includes a list of US states and Canada’s provinces only. You can’t progress beyond this page, so my son’s Australian under six soccer team is now pretending to be located in Guam, since that’s the US protectorate closest to the same timezone as Sydney, Australia.

When it’s easier to register a team in the Federated States of Micronesia (sporting population: tiny) than Australia (sporting population: just about all 20 million of us) you know it can’t be a deliberate policy, it’s just near-sighted web development and business strategy.

For one soccer team, that’s not a big deal, though it’s likely to dissuade a lot of soccer mums from signing up. They’re likely to assume the rest of the site’s going to require them to fake other US-only information, and at some stage their investment in time for registration will be wasted.

Where it could become a bigger problem down the track is when TeamCowboy begins to monetise its online sports community, with advertisers unhappy about having geo-targeted ads served to audiences in the wrong country, and sports ecommerce merchants left to deal with customers who’ve ordered goods that can’t be delivered. This kind of mistake can be difficult to undo – once you’ve forced someone to pretend they’re in Guam, it can be hard to convince them it’s worth correcting the information later.

Other common mistakes in unglocalised user registration pages include forcing users to choose a 9 digit US zipcode, US city or state. Unless there’s a very good reason to restrict your userbase to domestic US territory (if, say, your content licensing has geographic restrictions) you’re just encouraging your users to lie to you in their very first interaction with your business. Nearly as bad: you’re actively corrupting your crown jewels – the data you can use later to monetize your audience, attract investors and find new users.

This is all the easy end of glocalisation. Things get progressively more challenging – but pay increasing dividends – when you start to consider offering versions of your website and your customer service in languages other than English, when you ensure that your terms of service, customer data and privacy policies are adapted to local legal requirements, and when you attempt to cater to fine-grained details such as different names for the same sport in different countries.

Some Web 2.0 services, such as tagging and media storage, require relatively less glocalisation to get adoption in overseas markets. Others, such as merchant review content and ecommerce, require intensive glocalisation. Glocalise well and you may find your biggest market is not in the US, and it may not even speak English. Social network Orkut started as a small in-crowd network for Google employees and their friends, but was dramatically ‘hi-jacked’ but a large, communicative and active worldwide community of Portuguese-speaking Brazilians. I was an early Orkut user, and it was not unlike being in a bar with a couple of friends having a quiet drink and suddenly being enveloped by a large crowd of friendly, outgoing, gregarious Brazilians – loads of fun!

Knowing Google’s ability to glocalise (it offers international versions of many of its products already and is gradually opening international offices not just to sell ads but to develop locally-relevant products) Orkut will one day be a big earner for the company.

What does all this mean to TeamCowboy? FIFA estimates nearly 250 million people play soccer regularly, in about 200 countries worldwide. TeamCowboy’s only doing a good job of reaching two of those countries right now, and simultaneously making a mess of its own customer intelligence and market valuation.

*In the US, it’s “glocalization” with a “z” instead of an “s” – providing local English spellings are a simple but important element of a truly glocalised business.

Update: I got an email from Travis at TeamCowboy this morning, not because of this blog post, but because he’d noticed that the team I’d registered overnight appeared to be based in Australia, not in Guam. He wanted to let me know that he’d added the ability to register a team in countries outside the US now.

The greatest strength of an internet startup is its ability to re-engineer overnight, and here it is in action. And his closing question gives me great hope for the future of Travis and TeamCowboy – “If there are any other changes to the site that you feel would help your user experience, please let me know. And of course, if you have any questions about anything at any time, just let me know.” I’ll definitely do that! Web 2.0 startups are able to engage in dialogue with their early customers. Those who choose to, and those who respond, will succeed.