Written by Peter Ehrhard

Language barriers and cultural differences lead to the need for large, multinational corporations to adopt localized social media strategies. One graduate student at Missouri University of Science and Technology is looking at four companies in two countries to study best practices for building such a strategy.

Yeon Kyung Lee, a graduate student pursuing a master’s degree in technical communication at Missouri S&T, was awarded the C.R. Anderson Research grant from the Association for Business Communication to research the social media strategies of four companies in South Korea and the United States.

Lee will study U.S. companies General Electric and Southwest Airlines and South Korea’s Samsung Electronics and Asiana Airlines. Her goal is to help similarly situated companies in two different countries develop effective social media best practices for producing technical information in a specific language or culture.

“There are marked differences in how cultures utilize social media,” says Lee, a native of South Korea who earned a bachelor of arts degree in economics from Missouri S&T in 2014. “Korean society has a high level of context within the language, while American English needs less context for clear communication.”

For her research, Lee will analyze each company’s Facebook, Twitter and YouTube sites over several months and conduct in-depth interviews with each company’s social media representatives. She will then identify the similarities and differences in the two countries’ business communications via social media and suggest guidelines for an effective localization strategy.

“Social media is a powerful online communication platform for businesses to reach consumers and to analyze market trends, because it decreases barriers between a company and its consumers,” says Lee. “An effective use of social media will decrease the costs and efforts for international market research and localization.”

To kick-start her research, Lee was able to earn a technical writing internship with Southwest Airlines for the summer. She assisted in proofreading and editing various company policies and procedures and writing technical materials.

“While in Texas at the airline’s headquarters, I could apply my writing and editing skills, and learn more from outside of the classroom,” says Lee.

Amruta Ranade, a graduate student in technical communication at Missouri S&T, has published an article titled “Writing for a North American Audience” in the May 2016 issue of Intercom, the monthly magazine of the Society for Technical Communication (STC).

Ranade is the current president of the Missouri S&T chapter of STC. She is also a Graduate Teaching Assistant in the Department of English and Technical Communication and has full instructional responsibility for one section of ENGL 3560 Technical Writing each semester.

In her article, she writes:

A significant chunk of the technical documentation produced for a North American audience is created outside the United States. I know this from personal experience: I am an Indian technical writer
who worked for American companies throughout my career. Overexposure to American sitcoms, movies, and other media has lead us—non-American technical writers—into believing that we ‘know’ American culture. Thus the documents that we create are based on the stereotypes and faulty assumptions about American culture. As a result, our technical documents are plagued with issues caused by a lack of cultural awareness.

Click on the link below to read the rest of the article:

Ranade’s “Writing for a North American Audience”