I presented Targeting and Profiling Customers and Vendors Online for the second time, this time at the American Translators Association (ATA) ATA 46th Annual Conference in Seattle on Saturday. The presentation was well attended and well received. Among the members of audience where my friends, Beatriz Bonnet, president of Syntes Language Group in Denver and Christine Egwuonwu, senior project manager of Commgap in Salt Lake City. I also met Christine’s husband for the first time.

Two members of the audience who came to the front of the room to introduce themselves after my presentation really stood out: Sandra Alboum, owner of Alboum & Associates in Arlington and Natalia Jimenez, managing director of Eurologos in San Jose. Both of them noted my need for Italian-English and Italian-Spanish translators by looking closely at the screen grabs of my social networking software (SNS) profiles during the presentation and each of them came forward to recommend one. They’re either naturals at networking or quick studies!

Another member of the audience, Virginia Anderson of Canvas Dreams in Beaverton, Oregon, pointed out, during the customer relationship management (CRM) portion of the presentation, that her husband, David Anderson, had built ContacTracker, hosted CRM solution.

After the presentation, I had the pleasure of dining with ATA Translation Company Division (TCD) assistant administrator, Ellen Boyar, translation manager of Thomson Scientific in Philadelphia, past ATA TCD administrator Linda Gauthier, COO of BG Communications International in Montreal and Greg Churilov, president of Effective Translations in Buenos Aires. We talked about money, politics, religion and sex. We are now closer than ever. Remember, networking is about building relationships and building relationships is personal.

To top off a great networking weekend, on my way home, I met up with the same Southwest Airlines flight attendant I first met on my trip home from the ATA TCD 6th Annual Conference in Philadelphia where, coincidentally, I first presented Targeting and Profiling Customers and Vendors Online last April. I recognized her first and reintroduced myself. She remembered me, my book, Vacation Spanish, and the flight we were on when we first met.

On my flight to Seattle I had met a linguist, author and speaker, Don Richardson (who was also traveling to Seattle to speak,) who, as a Christian missionary in far flung places across the globe, has documented types of Christ woven into the languages and cultures of the peoples among whom he has lived and worked and has written a number of books on the subject. Don told me a couple of compelling stories that aroused my curiosity. I now look forward to reading one or more of his books. I hope to stay in touch with him and his lovely wife, Carol, who was traveling with him to give a solo singing performance in Seattle.

For those of you who missed my presentation, and for those of you who would like to review it, I’m sorry I didn’t consent to have it recorded on the DVD the ATA made of this year’s conference presentations. I promise I’ll do it next time. In the meantime, you can download Targeting and Profiling Customers and Vendors Online.ppt or read Targeting and Profiling Customers and Vendors Online, the first in a series of articles on the subject published in the ATA TCD newsletter (the second one is due out later this month.) I also recommend reading CustomerCentric Selling by Michael T. Bosworth, author of Solution Selling, and The Virtual Handshake by my good friend, online business networking guru, Scott Allen, and Never Eat Alone by master networker Keith Ferrazzi. See also: Blogger, Bloglines, Ecademy, FreeCRM.com, Hoovers, LinkedIn, openBC, Plaxo, Ryze, Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, TypePad and WordPress.

My proposed presentation for the ATA 46th Annual Conference in Seattle, Targeting and Profiling Customers and Vendors Online, was accepted, and is scheduled for Saturday, November 12, 2005 3:30-5:00 p.m.

This is a repeat of the well-received presentation I gave at the 2005 ATA TCD Annual Conference in Philadelphia on Saturday, April 16, 2005 and the subject of a series of articles by the same title, the first of which was published in Volume 5, Issue 2 of the ATA TCD News.

Saturday, April 16, 2005, I had the pleasure of speaking to an audience of my esteemed colleagues at the American Translators Association Translation Company Division 6th Annual Conference in Philadelphia on Targeting and Profiling Customers and Vendors Online. Download Targeting and Profiling Customers and Vendors Online.ppt.

Tegic’s T9 Text Input version 7.2 offers enhanced multi-lingual support, which makes it easier for users to alternate between languages when texting. It is not uncommon for users to switch back and forth between languages when speaking or writing to friends and family. Yet mobile users currently have to manually select or change the language in which they want to text in order to do so. The new multi-lingual enhancement changes this by recognising the language a user is typing in and automatically predicting the word in the language the user is most likely to want.

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In the globalization, internationalization, translation and localization (GILT) industry, where responsiveness and timeliness are a must, mobile customer relationship management (CRM) and project managment (PM) become a must also (unless, of course, you like being chained to your desk). This attention deficit disorder (ADD) GILT industry CEO must be free to roam. The answer: Gadgets. Lot’s of ’em! That and GSM, GPRS, Bluetooth, WiFi, smoke signals, etc. Whatever it takes to stay connected with customers. I call it “High Tech/High Touch: Using Technology to Stay Connected with People” (High Tech/High Touch is a term I borrowed from Megatrends author Naisbitt). My customers call it customer service. They don’t know where I am when I answer their phone calls and e-mails and they dont’ care either. All they know is: They call or write, I answer. This morning, I wrote the following succinct reviews: My 3 newest gadgets.