This week, I mainly did translation work for the e-book. Now the first draft is finished. This is a very detailed job and needed much patience to do it. At first the speed of translation was a bit slow, because I am not very familiar with some terminology in this field and I needed to look up some terminological dictionaries and some related Chinese books as well. But gradually I got used to it and started to increase efficiency. However, there is one thing that always haunted me from the beginning to the end of the translation. When I translated English into Chinese word by word, sometimes it made no sense because different languages may have different logics when referring to deeper meaning. If I do it by free translation, it will be more in line with the Chinese habit of using language. However, I prefer keeping it as original as possible, therefore you get a sense of how these experts think. You always have to make a choice.

After two weeks hard work, I finally finished the first draft of the Chinese version of the e-book. I read this e-book for several times and find it’s a good book to read, not only for marketing guys, but also for people who are interested in social media marketing or online marketing. The six experts from ICT companies have lots of experiences of product management and product marketing, and most of them are actually VP Marketing. They have done lots of traditional marketing such as trade shows, big events, etc. However, they are making use of more and more online ways and benefit from them. All of them have positive attitude towards online marketing stuff. I think it’s a trend.

Online marketing in China is just at the very beginning stage, Chinese companies really need good examples set for them, especially those who would like to expand their business to European and American markets. In this e-book, the six experts all talked about the differences of doing marketing in Europe, US, and Asia. Even for different regions in Europe, the style could be totally different. For those Chinese companies who have already succeeded in Chinese local market and also want to win in international markets, there is a gap between them. For me this is natural, because we do have different culture, which leads to a different way of doing business.

Mark and Alice

Hi everyone, my name is Mark and I’m the newest addition to the blogging team here at extendance.com. From now on, I’ll be regularly posting how we get on publishing and promoting our upcoming e-book “How to market in ICT today”, a collection of interviews with representatives of seven leading European ICT companies.

So, what’s this e-book really about? That’s what I asked myself when I first heard of the project. I’m a graduate student of business and economics at the University of Zurich, and though I’ve had a solid education in marketing theory, taking it to a hands-on level is something else. Especially when it comes to the Internet, there seem to be a huge amount of possibilities, of which some are better then others and some are no good at all.

Alice, my little puppy dog, is sitting on my lap as I write, trying to help me make a good impression with my first post here. And she’s also reminding me that it’s OK for me to get a little confused about the endless possibilities of Social Media Marketing: the blogosphere, Facebook, Xing, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, or what not. Her take on it? I think it would be: you can only chase a ball for so long before it becomes pointless, and then you need to think about dinner.

So, for me, that’s what I’m getting from working for Extendance, finding out what people are really doing in marketing and actually using these tools. Putting meat on the bones, rather than just playing in the park. And that’s what this e-book does, too.