According to Elting, e-commerce merchants who are determined to go global should not rely on social media to direct their marketing efforts. International marketing efforts require time and resources since multilingual social media is something that cannot be automated. She cites the example of using Twitter or Facebook. Elting notes that for this scale of social media marketing campaign, there is a need for human experts to take charge of the translation process since “appropriate idea expression” is more important than transliteration. The lady chief further notes that “effective localization and translation requires more than plugging words into a bot that spits out literal results.” She highlighted the increasing importance of connotation as the communication process becomes more compact. Once again, she uses Twitter as an example. “Crafting those short texts and broadcasting them frequently takes ongoing local support, since the basis of social media is not one-way communication but many-to-many conversation.” Elting points out a special feature of social media. It is not the solution for businesses that are looking for a marketing tool that will need to be worked on once and then used as a template solution for everything else especially if the business goal is to become global.
