Best Practices

VeriSign monitors 300 million retail transactions and delivers more than 200 million mobile-originated messages every single day.

To put the globalization challenge for VeriSign’s web site in perspective, it is important to understand that it protects the majority of secure web sites with digital certificates on the internet – this means more than 750,000 web servers, including 93% of the Fortune 500. VeriSign operates the largest independently owned SS7 network in the world, routing billions of connections from carrier to carrier – across national boundaries and between protocols. The company monitors 300 million retail transactions and delivers more than 200 million mobile-originated, intercarrier SMS messages and more than 1 million multimedia messages every single day.

In 2003, VeriSign had just four international sites, in addition to its corporate web site (France, Germany, Japan and the U.K.), supported by one Global Project Manager. Today, it has 18 international sites organized under a centralized global web operation, supported by five language service providers: Australia, Brazil, Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Mexico, Norway, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan and the U.K. The team has grown to include an International Executive Producer, Developers, Designers, a Localization Team and Project Managers in various geographical regions.

Editor’s Note: You can download a copy of Schlegel’s presentation, Web Globalization – Case Study From 4 to 29 Sites With a Limited Budget, by logging into the LISA web site as a LISA Member and going to http://www.lisa.org/archive/forums/2007sfo/presentations.html/?from=gi. The presentation includes the current team org chart, "before" and "after" screenshots, site metrics and globalization milestones by year.

"Just implement something like any global top 5 company has done!"

When Schlegel arrived in 2004, she was told, "Look at what any of the global top 5 do and implement something similar. And while you’re at it, choose and implement a global content management system (GCMS)." In other words, she had to start from scratch in all of the following areas:

• Global web site strategy
• Team resources
• Simship (simultaneous shipment)
• Budget
• Affiliates
• Leveraging and collaborating with other countries
• Corporate management buy-in and support
• Workflow automation
• Vendor management
• In-country buy-in
• Web site maintenance
• Localization
• Metadata

In a nutshell, the key challenges were to evangelize and obtain upper-level executive support, so that Schlegel could obtain the resources to build her team and execute her strategy. Prior to her arrival in 2004, VeriSign was using an array of consultants and tools to launch web sites with little in-country support or dedicated international developers since the company was not yet fully staffed internationally. Issues such as international tax, customs and legal issues were not being addressed consistently (if at all), so appropriate content definition was a complex issue.

Schlegel chose the “make waves” approach to evangelization.

Schlegel focused on “making waves” as she zeroed in on what worried her executives to align her globalization strategy with their business plans (in other words, What was VeriSign’s CEO saying about globalization?). She attended many, many presentations at the Director level and above, always making sure to ask the presenter how international needs and requirements figured into their plans – many times, of course, they didn’t. She presented executives with visual evidence of current and future pages in order to educate them on what was currently wrong with the various web sites, and how they could be changed to support the VeriSign brand.

The International Product Commercialization Group was out to tame the “Wild West.”

It took 2-1/2 years, some burnout (the workload and strategic planning during this period were handled by just two people, one vendor and no translation tools) and a lot of hard work to clean up everything and to gain management support to build a real team with a real budget. What saved the effort, according to Schlegel, was her joining the IPC (International Product Commercialization) Group. It allowed her to have a voice in creating VeriSign’s global brand in terms of what the company could market and sell legally around the world.

Schlegel created a vision and mission statement for international and continuously shared it company-wide at every opportunity. She set up glossaries and style guides. She recruited as many allies as she could throughout the organization, focusing on the Brand Managers (who were key) and in-country personnel. When she didn’t have headcount, she went for contractor dollars. She built her budget dollar by dollar, until she could finally support the team that was required to carry out an appropriate globalization strategy for VeriSign.

As Schlegel was building her core team, they learned the following:

Test tools before buying, based on your requirements – not those of your vendors.

1. Globalization must be supported by top-level management.

2. Create a Vision and a Mission for International and integrate them with the company’s corporate vision. Share them company-wide at every opportunity.

3. Communicate your metrics through lead generation, chat forums and your company’s support site. Take screenshots of peak volumes and broadcast your successes.

4. Tier your countries to be strategic and to save money.

5. Test tools before buying, based on your requirements – not those of your vendors.

6. Confirm international revenues and plan accordingly. Top management should be clear about the budgets.

7. Ensure that you have only one team in charge of international sites enterprise-wide, and that it remains in-synch with the U.S. web team.

8. Validation instances are key. All VeriSign content must be validated by a VeriSign employee – including all local content.

9. Implementing a process is key at the beginning, i.e., do not let international sites grow without a champion, a vision, a strategy and the necessary corporate buy-in.

The team focused on overcoming the following challenges as they launched more web sites: (1) consistency across all sites; (2) audience diversity; (3) revenue and strategy; (4) defining and communicating what VeriSign actually does; (5) how to measure success; (6) controlled language; (7) regional representation; and (8) how to do more with less.

Centralized web site localization builds the VeriSign brand.

Along the way, Schlegel’s team has been able to effectively demonstrate how centralized web site localization builds the VeriSign brand:

1. It creates consistent positioning, messaging, voice and tone that, in turn, help build brand awareness and recognition.

2. It protects the company’s brand assets through trademark protection by means of proper content translation, and it mitigates risk worldwide by protecting the company’s key trademark assets.

3. It supports international expansion as a core goal at the corporate level through (a) expanding product offerings on a global basis through acquisition and International Product Commercialization approvals on a monthly basis; (b) simultaneous web site launches (Risk Profiling and Proactive Chat are the first two); and (c) support of sales activities worldwide.

Key to the success of Schlegel’s team has been its engagement of the Country Marketing Teams. Team members have done this through (1) creating Service Level Agreements; (2) providing tools/access for each region to request localized content; (3) local training on the CMS (Stellent) system; (4) content cleanup; (5) a glossary repository; and (6) frequent meetings with their colleagues in the Regions.

34% of the traffic on VeriSign’s sales portal is now generated from outside of the U.S.

The following metrics are proof of VeriSign’s maturing vis-à-vis its global web site strategy. Between 2004 and 2006, the number of words processed doubled from 1.1 million to over 2 million. There were no stakeholders in 2003; by 2006, there were 14 major stakeholders actively engaged in the localization process. The number of countries supported jumped from 7 in 2004 to 16 in 2006. Non-core language support now includes Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Farsi, Finnish, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Russian and Turkish. Infrastructure tools include glossaries and style guides in four areas: (1) keywords, (2) web site buttons, (3) products, services and descriptions and (4) a monolingual glossary to support translators. Schlegel and her team are currently in the midst of deploying a GCMS to replace the old system based on email, with full approval from top executives.

VeriSign.com (the corporate site) now has 5.3 million unique visitors and 30.4 million page views. The international sites, including 10 in Europe/Middle East/Africa (EMEA) and 2 in Latin America, have 557,000 unique visitors and 2.7 million page views. While the corporate site has only experienced a 3% increase in visitors and a 1% increase in page views year-over-year, the increases for the international sites have been 74% and 41%, respectively! France was up by 288%, Switzerland by 139% and Germany by 122%. (Refer to the slides for details on localized web sites and their direct effect on marketing campaigns.)

Thirty-seven percent of all traffic on VeriSign’s intranet is now generated from international offices, and 34% of the traffic on its sales portal is from outside of the U.S. In terms of lead generation, 308,000 web leads were collected worldwide last year.

A VeriSign Corporate mandate -- everyone who has "web" or "localization" in their job title must report to Schlegel.

Along the way, Schlegel’s team has taken on responsibility for translation as well. Engineering depends on her team to provide guidance, and they share the same language service providers. There is a corporate mandate that everyone who has "web" or "localization" in their job title must report to Schlegel! This means that she can mandate translation processes, QA processes, etc. and have them executed according to her plan. There are now three Web Globalization Managers based in EMEA and some funding for usability studies in that region, as well as in Latin America and Asia-Pacific.

In summary, as the U.S. market matures, VeriSign’s corporate management looks to international markets as the company’s new frontier for expansion. Building on their success over the past 2-1/2 years, Schlegel and her team are now concentrating on the following challenges:

1. Doing more with less (their budget was recently cut quite a bit, in spite of the fact that VeriSign is doing well, traffic is high and sales are increasing)

2. Contained English, i.e., engaging writers to reduce the amount of content they create

3. Ongoing evangelization and localization training

4. Maintaining a focus on tiered countries

5. Expanding in Asia

6. Maintaining a concentration on quality

7. Training their vendors to find issues and to fix them

8. Allowing a bit more customization to the corporate template at the local level

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As Executive Producer for VeriSign, Inc., Anna Schlegel has built and managed the international web and localization teams since 2004. Before joining VeriSign, she was a Program Manager for Translation for Cisco and a Globalization Manager for Xerox. She is the author of the Spanish-English Telecommunications Dictionary, published by Cisco. Schlegel is a native of Catalunya and has a Masters Degree in German Linguistics from Humboldt University in Berlin.