For our clients in the PR industry, FOMO—Fear of Missing Out—is very real, particularly when it comes to monitoring global and multilingual coverage. In a world where news cycles are measured in minutes, rather than hours or days, missing out on a key news story or viral social media post can greatly hinder a company’s international brand-building efforts.

By working with TransPerfect WorldView to craft a best-practice strategy for keyword adaptation and worldwide monitoring, PR professionals can shed their FOMO and sleep peacefully at night knowing their global clients are fully covered. Here’s how we do it:

Keyword Adaptation

TransPerfect will work with your team to identify relevant keywords and determine the target markets outside of the US where your coverage predominantly originates. In addition to setting up monitoring logic for your English keywords, we employ an adaptation approach for localizing these keywords into different languages.

Rather than a literal translation, we adapt your keywords in each target language to effectively convey the same meaning as the English source. This ensures that we are tracking all of the different variations that will be used outside of the US.

Brand Names

Oftentimes people think that as long as they are monitoring the company’s brand name, then the global coverage will automatically be pulled into the monitoring platform, regardless of whether they have adapted keywords for foreign languages. While this may be true for some company names, it’s not the case for most global brands. Some of the biggest brands in the world—Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC), Abercrombie & Fitch, Vaseline, and Olay, for example—go by different names in global markets. It’s important that your brand names are adapted and transliterated into different languages to ensure that you’re picking up global coverage.

Results

As an example of the power of keyword adaptation, TransPerfect adapted and transliterated the brand name for one of the world’s largest ice cream and frozen treat chain restaurants for the Japanese market. Utilizing professional linguists with expertise in the food and beverage industry to adapt the company’s English keywords, we identified over 500 missed hits over a 100-day time span, compared to running the exact same search with solely English search terms. This demonstrates that tracking keywords in English alone will not produce the most accurate volume and quality of global media coverage.

The challenges that PR professionals face in this diverse global market are vast and complex. Don’t let your monitoring strategy get in the way of your goal to spot trends and business opportunities faster than your competition. To learn more or to request a demo of TransPerfect’s WorldView solution, please email WorldView@TransPerfect.com.