Hallo Welt!
A Hello World! is not a usual post for a blog established 17 years ago, but it’s true. It’s the beginning of the blog in German. I started in July 2004 in Spanish, and in August 2012 in English, but I never mentioned it. It was just two different audience and two channels. But now I do want to explain this mess.
The first tip with social media is not to try to do more than you actually can, keep a regular publication updated. I never recommend generating expectations in a new language until your company has enough resources to achieve expectations. The corporate webpage of TheBizTour, (and all the contents generated under this brand) remains only English.
Today, a blog is kind of “old school” dancing in TikTok sounds more appropriate and modern. But I’m following my initial strategy: I want to write, now also in German. I don’t care a lot about marketing strategy. Even today, I prefer to work on original content, keeping it as new and innovative as possible, more than dancing to somebody else’s songs. At the end, it’s useful for me as a consultant and professor.
Short version: this is personal, and I do what I like. I’m not my own community manager. Let me use it as an excuse not to follow the strategy I normally use to plan for companies I’m working with.
Of course, there are reasons to write in German, it’s a friendly way to communicate with a specific market. For me, it makes sense to write in the language of the place where the things I’m talking about are happening. For now, I’ll be talking about some experiences in Berlin.
Of course, managing three different languages is not easy, and it’s breaking the spontaneity of the blog concept. To be honest, that’s something quite broken here. For the last years, it has been the place to publish some ideas I had been working on in talks and drafts, and I came here with the final and polished conclusions. Maybe it’s something to change.
I don’t want to talk about the same in three languages, and this one is going to be one of the few post written in the three languages. I will only keep updating the biography, contact and main.
- In Spanish, I’ll keep the calendar of events: “agenda de la semana”, a classic publication with nearly 12 years of regular publishing. Just a compilation and curation of information, but I hope it’s still useful, at least for me.
- English will stay as the main language for insights and original valuable content. I think it’s the language we all understand.
- German is an experiment, at least the biography contents will be useful for talks and references. And I’ll start with a series of posts talking about the maker world, the digital transformation of business and the relationships of the industry and the startups. The goal is to write these in English too.
This blog will be in the language of your browser by default, but you can go directly to other languages just by clicking on the flag and be surprised by what you find there.
For the newsletter, the German one will be only German, English one only English, but the Spanish newsletter will have the “agenda” on Mondays and the English insights whenever published. The RSS channels, if anyone still uses them, are nicely differentiated by WordPress.
Currently, I’m not too active in social networks, but I’ll use them to publish some highlights from the topics posted here. It’s easy to differentiate the languages in Linkedin, where I’ll also have the three profiles, but the contents will be mixed. The same applies to Twitter, where there will be a mix of everything.
I hope that these updates will be helpful for you. For me, it’s a challenge, but it’s well-aligned with the main idea of reading, thinking and writing, improving my communication skills to connect with an audience as extensive and wide as possible.
Ah, and don’t expect perfect writing or style here, I’m doing my best, and there is a review process. But a long time ago, I discovered that languages are for communicating with people. The “perfect exam” mentality sometimes creates a self-build barrier for using new languages.
Enjoy! Viel Spaß!
