The Sika Experience

I will start my story by telling you a fiction on how kangaroos get their name. Fiction has it that early European explorers were intrigued by the variety of unusual wildlife they saw when they set foot for the first time on Australia. One of them reportedly asked the indigenous people what the hopping creature was called. The native replied ‘kangaru’ which, in his language meant ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I don’t understand’. The explorer mistook this word for the name of the creature, and so the name has been kept. An Australian legend to show us how funny things can become when we don’t speak the same language and don’t try to understand our interlocutors.

Surprisingly, in this ere of dictionaries and of no-new-land-to-discover, this fiction still happens quite often, at least in the world of SEOers, like me. Since I started working for Sika, opened up before my eyes a whole new world of totally strange things: “epoxy baseplate grouting system”, “aromatic polyurethane base coat”, “one-component, thixotropic, high modulus, structural, polyurethane-based adhesive system”. I got an A in chemistry some 10 years ago but it didn’t help me much in discovering this new world, and I bet that I am not the only one who got terrified reading those engineer-dedicated descriptions.

Now you see, the fact that we speak the same language doesn’t guarantee that we can understand each other, and even less when we don’t try to understand each other. I am talking about all ordinary internet users who count on google as the most time-saving way to find an easy answer for every question they have.

Imagine such an ordinary guy, one day googles to find a small bottle of glue to fix his window. He, of course, will have no motivation to understand what “polyurethane-based adhesive system” means. All that he needs is something cheep, non-toxic, applicable on glass and wood. Now he’s the native and we are explorers. We have to understand him instead of telling him “idiot, wiki it and find what it means”.

That is what SEOers do: with Google Keyword Generator and some others tools, we try to learn our customers’ language, what they need, how they search on Google. We do the necessaries so that our products appear right in front of their eyes in Google research, on the first page. There we persuade them that what we make is exactly what they need. Forget all the technical terminology, we approach them with simple presentations: this is glue for glass, wood, metal, non-toxic, easy to use.

Now you may ask us: why we have to do so much to sell just a small bottle of glue. Yes we are B2B, our main clients are enterprises and big distributors. But let me tell you: for Sika France, every client needs to be treated equally. The volume of one’s buying does not deprive him of the right to be informed correctly in an understandable way. We treasure every single client and we are striking to satisfy them to the maximum. In Sika France, we SEO for the equality of client rights, and we are proud of being among the first Sika companies to care for our clients in this way.

For those who are curious: SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s “natural” (or un-paid) search results. SEOer is the one who carry out this process as his daily job.

I am studying in the second year of a master course on electronic commerce. As in all “professional masters” in France, an internship at enterprise is required for all students in order to graduate. This time for me it’s a six-month internship, during from June to November. Because this is the longest and the last internship before graduation, so needless to say, me and my friends, we were all looking forward to earn a contract with a big company where we could apply our theoretical knowledge and learn as much as possible from our work.

But when I told my friends that I was working as admin of social networks in an enterprise which produces industrial glues, they all looked at me, somehow worried: “hey” they said “what do you think you can do with the facebook and twitter of a glue producer?” “Who will spend their time visiting the facebook of such a company”.

I was worrying, like them, but that feeling did not last long. Because I realized that Facebook is not necessarily the place to talk about only the products of a company, or its daily activities… as in a newsletter. Facebook was born to make people UNDERSTAND more about each other and to show up their EGOs. So, the question is: what face should we show up to the world? The products, that’s not ALL our face, because the products can change with the time. What’s more long lasting, that’s company culture, the spiritual values treasured by that company. And here in SIKA, these values are: the perseverance, the innovation and the respect to the environment and the humankind.

And that’s what we are doing now. Every week our group prepares some little stories, some pictures, some nice quotations or some videos, etc. for the facebook of Sika France. Whether they are about Sika or not, they have to transfer the one core message: SIKA love the innovation and the perseverance, we look up to the people who are working, studying with all their efforts in order to reach up higher and higher targets, and we are trying each day to make this world a better place to live in.

Our stories may be about the people or the inventions that changed the world, about a city rising up from a disaster, or about an effort of Sika in protecting the environment. Each day a small story to help people forget all the politic or economic crises out there for some minutes, and to give them more strength to believe in the power of good values and of the science.

Joining us on the facebook of Sika France and sharing with us some moments. We are looking forward to seeing you there.