Localization 2.0

This is a very interesting development in a very emerging solution. Ultimately it shows a first sign of a maturity process emerging which despite the negative output for LinkedIn is a great sign for the community translation model overall.

One last note before I discuss the specifics – the story involves quite a lot of anger and outrage which often leads to very unfair but very funny and accurate commentary and this is no exception. One image I just loved and sums up the perils of miss judging your community was the one below which I stole from Matthew Bennett’s great blog on the subject, – click here for the original context.

The long and the short of it is that LinkedIN offered ‘honor badges’ or the chance to declare ‘translation is so fun I will do it for free’. No money option, worse still the request was done by way of a general survey about improving the user experience and not as a direct ‘need your help’ approach. It is all too easy to draw hindsight best practices out of this and to be fair it was not a terrible idea in essence, at least to ask.

However despite trying to give the generally clever guys at LinkedIN a chance somethings are clear – FREE translation from a value perspective is a massive mistake – there has to be a value exchange on the table. An internet gamer or internet socialite might well want to be visibly cool – a professional linguist is not going to be swayed in quite the same way.

Secondly – if you are going to ask, ask straight and clear and allow a individualized response – just adding “cold hard cash’ to the request would have probably removed the entire issue – don;t ask for community input and then confine it to the two outcomes you want.

Finally don’t underestimate the power of the community – this is the core reason you approach the resource – you can not manipulate a community into a specific action – it has to be something that the community wants to go with. at best it seems less than 2% are super users in any event so your take up will be small no matter what – if you create a negative, angry mob the ‘2%’ers’ who might sign up are massively less likely to. No one like to go against the group feeling.

The take away? Good old fashioned honesty and respect is still the best way to deal with any group of people – post or pre 2.0 (and even 1.0 for that matter!!)

With all of that said I still feel “LinkedIN’ was really just asking (even if it was badly done)- I think they wanted to test the idea out and given it was a request rather than a demand I still think they are getting a bit of a beating. In reciprocation of the advice to LinkedIN I think a clear, honest “Please pay us, this is not free work” was all the lesson LinkedIN needed. Still I guess everyone loves a good fight against the ‘Big man and his blood thirst for cash.’