International Communications: How to Illuminate Your Organization’s Impact? One Case-Study from China

By Michael J. Jordan

?SHENZHEN, China – During my recent visit to this high-tech hub in southern China, I had a chance to meet one of my Communication clients – to discuss the successful first stage of our collaboration, and brainstorm additional ways to burnish their brand.

Briefly, the client is the Shenzhen-based company, HelloTalk – a language-exchange app that, within a few short years, has already surpassed 10 million users, around the world. An impressive figure, for sure. That said, HT’s popularity has created a unique challenge, which I discussed with the HT marketing chief, Joseph Derflinger (photographed here). With more and more English-learning members in need of ever more native-English partners, how to attract plenty of the latter – to satisfy demands of the former?

I view this as a Communications challenge: For any native-English-speaker who visits the app – and considers whether to join this community – how to prove to them the potential benefits for an individual user? My conclusion: by somehow illuminating the positive impact on existing members.

My rationale is that our target-audience are not like sheep, mindlessly trusting our lofty words or possibly empty promises. Instead, we’re striving to influence a foreign audience of critical-thinkers – who are smart and curious, but skeptical. Whenever we aim at this audience – on behalf of a company, an organization, a government agency, or for ourselves, peddling our own “products” (perhaps as a freelancer, like me) – we all face a monumental task: prove that we mean what we say. Moreover, that we’re as good as we say we are.

That’s true when communicating with any audience. But as I teach, too, International Communications requires its own specialized skills – many of which mirror the skills of an International Journalist. Out of respect for this audience’s intellect, we must “work hard” to convince them, which we can only hope to achieve with persuasive proof. That means we should always “show them,” not just “tell” them.

That’s why with HT, I suggested we start with a series of three profiles – stories of three separate users. In journalism, an old adage for detecting stories is “Three makes for a trend.” One experience may be an aberration, or unique situation. Twice, perhaps a coincidence. But three times? Now a pattern is emerging.

This trio of stories would itself serve as a piece of “evidence” – to, as I say, can “touch the mind” of a skeptical consumer. Likewise, if we “humanize” that individual in a feature-profile, especially to identify an organization’s precise impact on that beneficiary, well, that itself is a Communications strategy: it can “touch the heart” of your audience. Thus, this approach packs the one-two punch I preach, to touch the heart and mind.

So, with the help of HT colleagues, we reached out to three willing members. I interviewed them, and wrote their story as if in their voice – following my own “Fork in the Road” technique. I developed it in southern Africa, during my communications-storytelling project on HIV Orphans, for this E-book. (More recently, in Beijing, I’ve applied this method to my communications-advocacy project for Chinese environmental activists – whom I trained to tell their own story of awakening, inspiration and activism.)

For HelloTalk, this series of three “impact” stories is now published on the HT website:

https://blog.hellotalk.com/hellotalk-preserves-chinese-past/

https://blog.hellotalk.com/teaching-english-changes-lives/

https://blog.hellotalk.com/motherlode-spanish-speakers/

Feel free to judge for yourself how effectively they reveal impact – then let me hear your thoughts!

Meanwhile, Joseph and I discussed a second topic, vis-à-vis HT branding: ways to position their product to break into the more exclusive international market of Educational Technology. To me, that’s another question of Strategic Communications, yet driven by the same core principle: Show, don’t tell.

If you yourself are curious to learn more, feel free to contact me!