
How to market your Web 2.0 application in Europe? - nurall

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jsmcgd
Europe is a pretty big place with little consensus on anything. Perhaps you
should ask, 'How should you market your Web 2.0 application in the UK?', 'How
should you market your your Web 2.0 application in France?' etc etc. The
answers may be mostly similar however the differences could be very
compelling.

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weel
You're right about that, but at the same time, this is also exactly the
problem. If you aren't going to be able to take up the Luxembourg market
without paying particular attention to the cultural and linguistic
peculiarities of Luxembourg (hint: 3 languages), then the conclusion for many
companies is going to be that it's not worth worrying about Luxembourg at all.
Then again, if _nobody_ worries about Luxembourg, that opens up a decent
opportunity for somebody to just copy a bunch of existing ideas for the
Luxembourg market. And that's why people are looking for ways to overcome the
problem of cultural fragmentation and make it profitable, even for a small
company, to target the European market.

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nurall
There was a post earlier on YC about IPTV revolution (
<http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=18996> ) happening in Europe. It
seems to be ahead of the US in terms of marketing of the IPTV medium. This
should obviously mean something -

1\. Broadband is seriously ubiquitous, at least where it matters

2\. TV shows in Europe are boring

3\. People are inherently more lazy, this would mean most users are passive

4\. IPTV companies/providers have done a better job marketing the medium

5\. Internet activity is increasing for all Web segments in Europe. This could
be attributed to 1.

The economics behind this statistic could be debatable. It could be one of
many reasons, but there is reason to believe that, that 'reason' could be good
enough to consider marketing aggressively in Europe.

Based on these possible inferences, how do you think one should market their
Web 2.0 company in Europe? Or should the product/service be such that it
doesn't require any special marketing effort in Europe?

Any thoughts on this one?

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Tichy
I think that post didn't explicitly mention IPTV, though? More likely, people
download their favourite TV series via bittorrent. And that would be the less
lazy people, who are motivated to find the TV show on the web, and watch it in
original language.

Here in germany we see a lot of clones of successful concepts from the US.
Today I saw an ad for a new phone which comes bundled with something called
wubbler (or something like that, can't remember). I bet that's a Twitter
clone...

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gibsonf1
Step 1: Have a version in the native language of the countries you target.

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davidw
This seems obvious, but sometimes I wonder...

If you are aiming for a truly pan-european market, that's... let's see:
English, Portuguese, Spanish, maybe Catalan if you're picky, French, German,
Italian, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finish, Polish, Czech, Hungarian,
Romanian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Russian, Maltese(sp?), etc... etc...

That adds up really quickly. Also, if you are aiming for a comunity, breaking
each little bit off into its own language group might make it take longer to
attain critical mass. Also, most young people speak at least some English
everywhere.

On the other hand, you're never going to be _the_ player in a market if you
don't do the language - oknotizie.alice.it came along far after the likes of
reddit and digg, and is basically becoming _the_ site for Italy.

Even limiting yourself to "important" languages, you have English, French,
German followed by Italian and Spanish, which is a lot to chew on if you have
lots of text to translate and keep up to date.

~~~
lkozma
I agree. Another issue is that if you do a local version as an outsider,
people will be able to tell that something's just not right, and you'll have a
hard time competing with home-grown apps, that understand the local culture
much better.

There must be some reason that in most of the countries you listed, millions
of people still use crappy 10MB e-mail services and social networking sites
that are local to the country, and got the cultural factor right. Gmail and
Yahoo all try to localize, but most people I know who use them are just
annoyed by the translations, and quickly switch back to English.

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ks
Facebook is quickly becoming popular in Norway without local translations.
Other services like Youtube and Flickr is also very popular. We have local
alternatives too of course.

What I would like is if US companies would hire a Norwegian lawyer to write
the Terms of Service. It's pointless to agree to some terms that have no base
in Norwegian law.

You could also try to support a more free form registration form. Not all
countries use the same types of zip-code and phone number...

And support UTF-8 (or at least ISO-8859-1). Most European languages use
characters not found in the English alphabet (Norway has an additional three
characters: Æ, Ø and Å, let's see if this form supports them. Should be
displayed as Æ, Ø and Å)

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ks
OK, this is a good example. The site does not support Æ, Ø or Å :-) It was
only displayed correctly when I entered their HTML entities.

If this page were meant for Europe, it would fail. When you are building a
social site it is important that people can use their own language.

