Release Notes: 9/28/2011 – GOING GLOBAL: Multilingual Search Now Available

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The Customer Intelligence Center can now help our clients expand their global influence by providing five additional languages from which to create searches. This means that, in addition to the millions of English blogs, forums, and news sites we already index for powerful searching, we now scour French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish sites as well! As a standard feature, Multilingual Search enables social media managers to focus on language-specific social media so they can make smart decisions about their communities, regardless of which language they speak.

With Multilingual Search, you will see the five new languages added to your Choose language dropdown menu. In the example below, let’s select Italian and then search for “Versace” (because who doesn’t like some good looking loafers?). In the right panel, you’ll see a Results preview showing samples across the sites we’re now able to track per language. You’ll see quite a few sites with the “.it” domain extension to help you get a sense of the Italian sites you’ll be searching.

Let’s now click Save and head over to the Mentions area, where you’ll do all your monitoring, sentiment analysis, and other workflow tasks. You’ll notice plenty of mentions coming from Italian sites with the extension “.it”, but take note that we also deliver Italian mentions on sites that don’t have the “.it” extension. This means you’ll have your bases covered for anyone speaking Italian on any blog, forum, tweet, etc., out there! As an example, in the screenshot below, you’ll see the fourth mention comes from a blog called “davideikon.com”. When we click on the “Versace DV One Cruise” link and go to the originating mention, we find that the originating site is primarily in English and serves as an aggregator of fashion-related news, regardless of language. As such, we find Italian content as well as Italian comments, both of which we can analyze in our social media monitoring platform.

And that marks the happy ending of my first blog post. In the future, we’ll be adding more languages and features surrounding multilingual functionality, so stay tuned. Thanks and see you next time!