Referrals Are (Sometimes) Great

I was recently referred by someone I know from one of the groups to which I belong to a potential client. That's wonderful, isn't it? Well, it turns out the potential client needed languages in which I don't work.

Obviously, I didn't communicate clearly enough to my networking contact what exactly I do - and in which languages. This led me to thinking about how I approach networking. Basically, I attend events, try to have something useful to say and hope for the best. Not the best way to go about this and apparently not well directed, either.

In his The Marketing Plan Handbook: Develop Big-Picture Marketing Plans for Pennies on the Dollar, Bob Bly talks about crafting an "elevator pitch" -- a very concise, yet compelling, statement about exactly what I do. My attempts to come up with such a statement seemed rather forced and "marketingy". I hate being marketed to, so how can I inflict this on others?

But marketing - especially marketing through networking - is the name of the game if I ever want to work with end clients (and get paid accordingly) rather than agencies. Since I attend both events within the translation community and those in the larger technical and business community, I probably need more than one such "elevator pitch". I don't need to explain to translators the difference between translation and interpreting or the fact that I only work with a very specific language. On the other hand, contacts in the technical community will know that working with technical material doesn't mean one is equally adept at marketing copy.

So what's your "elevator pitch" (or pitches)?

A LinkedIn Company Account

Lindsey Pollak spoke this afternoon about LinkedIn and its use as a business tool. During the Social Media Business Forum at the New York Xpo for Business, Ms. Pollak explained that in addition to a personal profile page, members could also set up company pages on LinkedIn. She explained that these are similar to Facebook fan pages and could be used to market oneself as a business, rather than an individual.

When I got back home, I tried to set this up on my own LinkedIn page. So now I have a company page. The next step, of course, is using that page to market my services.

This raises the question of upgrading my LinkedIn account from the free "Basic" version to one of the paid ones. For me, the main difference would be that I could contact people on LinkedIn who are not already connected to me through a mutual acquaintance or shared group. I'm not sure, however, whether being able to do so 3 times per month is worth $25 a month. Another benefit is additional profile information about people who are not in my network. That might come in handy when research companies to target as potential direct clients.

Are you on LinkedIn? If so, what do you think?

ATA Conference + Translation Industry Study

As a child I had always admired the hotel concierges in old movies who dispensed advice and critical information along with mail and phone messages. At the recent American Translators Association conference here in New York I got to be something of a concierge. I, along with a number of other members, volunteered at the hospitality desk set up by ATA's New York chapter, the New York Circle of Translators. We could even use a "real" receptionist's area, complete with chest-high countertop and little cubicles behind the countertop. We volunteers not only helped out-of-towners find their way around New York City, but in the process we met conference attendees from a number of different places. This being a conference of language professionals, the information could even be offered in a number of different languages (although the printed materials - some of which came from the New York City tourist office - were only in English).

The most valuable part of the conference for me were the contacts I made with both other translators and purchasers of translation services, such as translation agencies and organizations with translation departments. I am heading for Vienna in the end of the month and will meet with some of these contacts there. ProZ, one of the larger translation websites, is holding a regional conference in Vienna, which I will be attending before visiting family and meeting with some business contacts in early December.



The ATA conference also included a number of interesting presentations. One of these was a study from Common Sense Advisory suggesting that the translation industry in the U.S. is poised for significant growth, particularly in the national security, international affairs, public work and public safety sectors. That's great news for translators working in Middle Eastern, Eastern European or Southeast Asian languages who are willing to work for the U.S. government. Not so great news, though, for those of us who work with Western European languages and won't work for the U.S. military or "homeland security". According to this study, the next-biggest industry in terms of translation and localization potential is IT. That would be great for me, since I specialize in IT documents, but the language most needed in that sector is Chinese. Since I don't speak Chinese, that doesn't really help so much ...

How have you translators of Western European languages who do not work for the U.S. government fared in terms of assignments received during the last 6-9 months? Has the volume decreased, increased or stayed the same? Have any of your regular clients cut back or stopped assigning translations altogether?

Either post a comment here or write to me at blog@reliable-translations.com.

Until next time,
Barbara