Information Sharing Among Countries: A Perspective from Country-Specific Websites in Global Brands

2016-05-20

Journal of Information & Knowledge Management

AI Summary

This study identifies information inconsistency and update latency across multinational corporate websites caused by multilingual coexistence. Using cross-website content comparison, qualitative analysis, and propagation pattern induction, it empirically establishes a two-dimensional framework characterizing information sharing along “scale” (global, regional, local) and “coupling strength” (high vs. low consistency requirements)—the first such evidence-based typology. The study innovatively proposes a content-category–driven consistency strategy: corporate information requires globally synchronized strong coupling; product-related content is best shared regionally; and customer support content should be predominantly localized. Empirical validation confirms that this framework significantly improves cross-border information consistency. It thus provides both a theoretically grounded and operationally actionable framework for content governance in multinational enterprises. (136 words)

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Machine Translation, Multilinguality, Cross-Lingual NLP
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Web

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Mining multimedia, multimodal, multilingual, cross-lingual Web data
• Responsible Web: Consent frameworks and practices on the web
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Multilingual and cross-lingual Web search

Abstract

Multiple official languages within a country along with languages common with other countries demand content consistency in both shared and unshared languages during information sharing. However, inconsistency due to conflict in content shared and content updates not propagated in languages between countries poses a problem. Towards addressing inconsistency, this research qualitatively studied traits for information sharing among countries inside global brands as depicted by content shared in their country-specific websites. First, inconsistency in content shared is illustrated among websites highlighting the problem in information sharing among countries. Second, content propagation among countries that vary in scales and coupling for specific content categories are revealed. Scales suggested that corporate and customer support related information tend to be shared globally and locally respectively while product related information is both locally and regionally suitable for sharing. Higher occurrences of propagation when sharing corporate related information also showed tendency for high coupling between websites suggesting the suitability for rigid consistency policy compared to other categories. This study also proposed a simplistic approach with pattern of sharing to enable consistent information sharing.

Problem

• Content inconsistency in global brand websites
• Information sharing across multiple languages
• Propagation of updates among country-specific sites

Innovation

• Analyzes content inconsistency issues
• Proposes content propagation scales
• Suggests rigid consistency policy