Meryl.net Home About Blog Clients Services Contact

Meryl's Notes Blog

Things wordy, geeky, and webby

la internet francais

Saturday, December 8th, 2001 at 9:52 AM Category: Meryl's Notes Blog No comments

Susan Clot de Broissia, leader of DigitalEveDallas, took a trip to France and shared some of her experiences in talking with a handful of French people. She wrote, “While there, I spoke with a few people about their experiences with the Internet. The 10 to 12 of those with whom I spoke do not own home computer. They access the Internet mainly at work or at one of the CyberCafes. This is not a picture of Internet usage in France, just what I experienced.

I met my sister-in-law’s fiance. He wants to correspond with me in order to practice his English. I gave him my email address and received a look of confusion. He meant write “with pen and paper.” I explained that I don’t do that as often as I used to, but I could try. When we passed through Paris on our way back to the US, he told us he had visited a CyberCafe to secure a free email address. We’ll see if he follows through with it. I can’t live without my email, so I was fascinated to talk to a Parisian who isn’t (yet) hooked on email.

I was, however, amazed at how many people are using WAP-enabled phones. I had heard it was popular, but got to see firsthand just *how* popular. I didn’t see the great number of advertisements (print, TV) with URLs that you see in the U.S. Instead, companies still advertise their MiniTel [number]. The MiniTel was around *way* before the Internet.

But one merchant in a small town where we stayed was very excited about his one page Web site that he just launched. He proudly handed us a business card with the *very* long France Telecom ‘yellow pages’ URL and explained how he will ship his products anywhere in the world. With a little online marketing help, he might be able to take his business to new levels.

From my perspective there seems to be a lot of opportunity for entrepreneurial bilingual Web experts, especially those who have marketing expertise. That was the biggest thing I came away with, especially with the small town merchant who sold Provencal fabric. My mother *loves* that fabric and if she knew a place to buy it online (I found a few sites last night), she might do so. If the merchant had a multilingual site with online shopping [capabilities], and [conducted a comprehensive] online marketing [campaign] in the countries [where] he [would] most likely to sell his goods, can you imagine what kind of business he might get?”