George Dearing is a marketer and technologist with more than 15 years of experience helping businesses identify, adopt, and sustain solutions that drive growth and brand visibility. As Corporate Evangelist for Telligent Systems, George works with customers, partners and industry analysts to ensure the Telligent portfolio continues to be the top choice for global companies seeking to transform their business with social computing software. George also writes about how companies of all sizes are affected by emerging trends in technology and new media. He is a former InformationWeek blogger and has written for Social Computing Magazine, Social Media Today, Content Management Connection and The FastForward Blog. George is a panelist at the upcoming The World at Your Fingertips event, produced by Lois Paul & Partners. The first 2 people to post a thoughtful comment to this blog entry will win a free pass to the event.

Q: For many emerging technology businesses in Austin having national adoption would fulfill their wildest dreams. What steps could they take to begin thinking globally?
The pervasiveness of the internet has no doubt made the business world a heck of a lot smaller. If you’re a technology company, it’s sort of a double-edged sword. On one hand, your software is now instantly available to any Web 2.0 hungry user or organization. On the other hand, your product or service now competes on a global scale where the hours are 24/7. If those two things don’t get you thinking globally, you might be behind. Here’s a couple of things you can be doing now.

• Research your market and figure out who’s using the types of services and applications you’re selling. Digital tools and social media have added a new dimension to market analysis. Scour the blogosphere, forums, social networks, and other online communities to learn about your market segment. You may find it makes more sense to do targeted product launches than global rollouts. Add in the fact that everything is measurable, and you might even be able to justify the investment to the CFO.
• Find some strategic alliances in the global markets you’re targeting. Many times you can align with solution providers or distributors that have a complementary offering. If you’re a CRM or Business Intelligence vendor, there’s plenty of customers that would love to incorporate your offering into their content management or collaboration package.

Q: Is social media as prevalent around the globe? Is the U.S. a leader in adopting social media, and what countries should we be looking to for great ideas?
A recent McKinsey survey of 1988 executives from around the globe (“Building The Web 2.0 Enterprise”) underscored how different adoption can be in various parts of the globe. Perhaps not surprisingly, the U.S. showed the most success and adoption with social networking, while other countries touted web services as their biggest ally in Web 2.0 and social media deployments. I think the mobile market is a good barometer for things to come and we could see many U.S. companies playing catch-up to European and Asia-Pac countries. Whether mobile spawns the next hotbed of great ideas remains to be seen, but it’s becoming more and more apparent that smartphones will consume a large part of our media diet.

Q: What is your top piece of advice for an Austin-based emerging technology company to consider about the global markets?
I think the top things that would be on my mind as an emerging technology company would be human capital and digital investments. People will always be your number one asset, so make sure you have a recruitment and retention strategy that attracts top talent. Gen Y and younger workers have grown up with social networking and consider newer communication tools as old hat. And if you don’t have a way to retain your knowledge, the older workers that leave will take your IP right out the back door with them. As far as digital investments go, I challenge you to think about how much time you spend in front of your PC or mobile phone. That should be enough to sway you to invest more in digitally building your brand. You can’t just market to a global audience or customer base, you have to actively participate in the discussion. That means you need digitally savvy employees that know how to plan, deploy, and measure online programs.