Building Our Own International Community

There, I just added US$1,000,000 to the value of my company — we’re building a “community!” But in the case of RightSite, we actually are trying to get groups of people to work together (and any additional investor attention this may bring is purely coincidental).

Perhaps the biggest challenge that this company faces is not learning to develop a site or struggling to operate a company from my living room, but trying to bring together Chinese property owners and international property occupiers and have them all identify as being part of a RightSite community. This accomplishment has been key to Alibaba’s success as a B2B portal and will be the deciding factor in whether RightSite becomes a cover story for BusinessWeek or just another great place to pick up used office furniture.

This week we are encountering some of the technical and strategic challenges presented in trying to build this international community as we design Rightsite’s bilingual capabilities. When I was in the world of publishing I shot down nearly every proposal I ever saw for a bilingual magazine. But for the purposes of a narrow industry vertical like industrial property, there are some real advantages to having a bilingual website. The issues facing the industrial property community go something like this:

• Property owners are often in second or third-tier areas and may have limited second language skills
• Manufacturers looking for properties are often foreign nationals, and may not be in the same country as the properties they are looking for
• Agencies may lack staff who are both biingual and conversant in industrial property issues

So by having a site that allows users to use an interface in English or their local language, as well as read all listings and editorial content in more than one language, we should be able to start bringing both locals and foreigners to the site.

But it won’t be easy.

Some of the technical challenges that I am throwing at my faithful Indian companions as they piece together a plan for RightSite include:

• Search Engine Optimisation for both Google and Baidu (they don’t work the same way)
• Allowing users to switch between languages on any page without changing the content of the page
• Permit the language choices to be expanded to include traditional Chinese, Vietnamese and Thai
• Decide if forums should be bilingual or monolingual (this is harder than it sounds)

Oh yeah, and neither my development team nor myself can read Chinese. (Guess we’ll be searching everywhere for a one-eyed man to lead us).

In any case, am reading a lot of posts on the Web about Chinese search engine optimisation (even found this American professor who blogs about it). Will keep all of you posted on what we decide to do about all of these issues and if any of you have experience with bilingual sites or related issues, we would love to hear from you.