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Enterprise 2.0

Thanks to Cindy King's site as mentioned in the previous post, I have found a company - Thoughtfarmer - that seems to be aware, and is doing something about, the cultural differences in using social networking in multinational enterprises. They talk about the lessons they have learnt so far here, confirming my own hunches regarding use of colour, and also avatars. One Russian guy I met at Sony in Europe told me he had been given a Shrek avatar by his Japanese boss for the virtual team development site he belonged to. He wasn't too offended, as it made him feel his counterparts in Japan felt close enough to him to do this, and, to be honest, there was a certain degree of truth in the choice!

I see that Thoughtfarmer is installed on intranets, which makes me think there is still an obstacle to recommending them to Japanese multinationals - the ultimate goal for me. Most Japanese multinationals, if they have intranets at all, tend to have locally developed ones in each country, and major technical problems if they try to roll out a global intranet, or get the intranets to be compatible with each other.

Back after two years!

So nearly two years has passed since I last posted on this blog and in the meantime social media has developed further with Twitter appearing and Facebook maturing and now much talk of Enterprise 2.0. And this Typepad version is seriously out of date!

What has finally sparked me to blog here again is the discovery that people are finally answering the question I was asking - how should communications technologies and in particular, social media software, be adapted for cross cultural use, and more specifically, how they be effective in multinational corporations.

It looks like Cindy King has been ploughing this furrow for a while now. And I have to confess, despite my own supposed cross cultural sensitivity, when I first followed a link to her site, I did indeed fall into the trap of supposing her to be fluffy and not serious, purely because of the colours and design of her site. She turns out to be well aware of this