Going Global is about being local

I have been working on internet field for 18 years. I have been building web sites, ecommerce and online software for thousands of companies at W3 Group Finland Ltd. In many projects we create local sites for international multi nationality companies. Going global is about being local in each country.

I am co-founder in Suomikauppa.fi Finland Shop, that sells Finnish sweets, food and 3000 more products to more than 100 countries including UK, USA, Australia, China etc all around the Europe and all territories. There we need to localise payment terms, product descriptions in many languages, currency, payment terms and even customs are different in many countries. Being global is not easy task.

My book is going to be for sale in about 100 countries. My main sales partners are Amazon, Apple and Ingram Spark. There I need also localise. I updated today my Author profile for the book project on Amazon USA last week. Now I need to update local pages on Amazon UK, France and Germany. In Finland we don't have local Amazon page (yet?).

In US you speak and write American English. In UK you speak British English. Every other area in Europe speaks International English and most of us in Europe don't speak English very well - some don't even speak english. In Finland we have a joke that some Finns speak Rally-English.

Going Global is about being local. Being local is about understanding local jokes, culture, payment terms, linking and language.

In Finland we don't speak rally english, we speak Finnish. Our second official language is Swedish but we don't use it much. If you localise your website into Finnish, you need to be careful with translators. Finnish people realise very easy if translator is not native Finnish speaker or reader.

Remember that going global is about being and understanding local culture.

You can be unstoppable, if you want to.
Have a successful life!

Ilkka O. Lavas

unstoppable entrepreneur
Twitter: @lavas