Online Communities Handbook: Building Your Business and Brand on the Web

Internationalizing

One way to increase the scope of your community is to make it more international. The Internet is inherently a global medium: a website can be accessed from anywhere in the world. You can take advantage of the global power of the Internet to promote your brand in foreign markets. Let’s say you have a website mainly oriented toward U.S. customers, and you would like to encourage traffic from the U.K. as well. It may be enough to make small adaptations such as prices listed in multiple currencies, slight changes in the copy to neutralize linguistic differences, new discussion threads for products that are available only in the U.K., and links to your U.K. e-commerce site as well as the U.S. one. On the other hand, if there are ...