U.S. Commercial Services: are they reaching us?

By: Juan A. Salva, Owner Il Esportatore, LLC

The federal government continues to promote exporting, and its expansion, as an alternative for the U.S economy to expand. The president of the United States has even pushed several trade agreements to the congressional floor in order to facilitate trade in hopes of possible job creation (http://www.kansascity.com/2011/09/09/3130427/politics-on-trade-trumps-common.html).  It is the contention of this article that although there seems to be an ever increasing call for a more active U.S. exporting presence the services provided by the federal government, while slowly improving, seem to be disjointed and not easily accessible to the majority of small and medium sized businesses, which can potentially be hindering the ability of these potential exporters to heed the president’s call. In this article we will analyze two services provided by the government the Small Business Administration platform and the U.S Commercial Services platform.

U.S Commercial Services Platform

By its own mission statement the U.S Commercial Services is the trade promotion arm of the U.S Department of Commerce with a specific goal of helping companies getting started in exporting (http://trade.gov/cs/). The Service provides a variety of programs and a wealth of information. But how is the service reaching its audience? It has a Facebook, Twitter and blog but is this enough? There are a variety of issues concerning this outreach which could improve performance.

                First, the information provided is static. The web page contains a wealth of information but if the users are not familiar with what the service does, it is hard to find it on a search. Additionally the Facebook and Twitter pages are again static. The main role seems to be to communicate press releases as seen in the current Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/TradeGov) and Twitter (http://twitter.com/#!/TradeGov) pages. There is no exchange of information, no input from the users, just press releases in a digital format. Evidenced by the number of “likes” and “followers” the results are less than impressive.  This service could benefit from an exchange of information with business owners rather than a supply of static information to business owners.

                Second, the information provided is also confusing.  The use of industry specific terms and academic jargon is evident thru every page. How are we communicating with the hard working small business owners who want information presented in a plain and simple way? BLUF- Bottom Line Up Front. A small business owner who wants to export to “X” country needs to know information that is readily accessible and useful to him, reading the 17 page white paper “Developing Countries’ Regional Trade Agreements: Overview and relation to U.S. Trade” (http://www.trade.gov/mas/ian/otpahome/index.asp) rarely qualifies as a BLUF assessment of what the business needs to do to get exporting and the businessman/woman does not have the time to discern actions from that document.

                Lastly, and sadly, how are we communicating with business owners from other ethnic backgrounds? The Service seems to assume that every business owner is not only college educated but completely fluent in English. How are we reaching those owners with limited English capabilities, which are definitely a presence in U.S. businesses? The Chinese, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese, etc. speakers who do not have the time to learn college level English in order to read the information from the Service? This is a huge gap in communication which the Services do not seem to address at all.

                This is article is not intended to accuse the U.S. Commercial Service of not doing enough; it has a variety of programs that are beneficial to business owners. The US Commercial Service is also actively attempting to reach out to businesses. This article is based on suggestions, the service is implementing new ideas and fine tuning this implementation, by adopting some of the ideas presented in this article could be beneficial to the service.

What do you think?

I look forward to your replies and an exchange of ideas.