Global Neighbourhoods: SAP Global Survey: Japan's Nob Seki

According to Technorati, there are more Japanese bloggers than English-speaking bloggers, which seems surprising to me because there are so many more people who speak English than Japanese. When I interviewed Nob Seki's Six Apart Japan's EVP & GM two years ago, he enlightened me to the significance of culture on influencing social media. I used some of his comments from June 2005 as a starting point for my interview with him for the SAP Global Survey.

1. When we last chatted, Japanese blogging was taking a different path than in the US. There were more women than men blogging. Business was using blogs as a direct sales tool. No one was using the Comments feature Instead everyone linked through their own blogs. Have these trends changed or stayed the same since that conversation?

Basically, those trends have continued with some notable changes. More business users have blogs for marketing and communicating with customers. According to Internet Whitepaper 2007, published earlier this month by Impress Group, 13.8% of companies have their own blogs, and in particular, 27% of companies who have nine employees or less have blogs.

Companies are becoming more accustomed to responses from the Internet. More business blogs have opened up Comments.

2. What about the other social media tools, such as social networking, wikis, podcasts, online video, etc? How is adoption coming?

Social networking and video sharing are two big services in Japan. Social Networking Services (SNS) are widely used. The leading SNS mixi attracts more than ten million users, bigger than any other blogging service. However, it does not seem to me that SNS in Japan is the same as that in the US, because people use SNS to share diaries, which is essentially "blogs" in the US. The big difference is that mixi and other Japanese SNS can control access over diaries for greater privacy. Remember, the reason why business blogging used to keep comments from end-users because companies fear attacks by end-users. Personal bloggers have very similar concerns. That is why, I think, mixi has become very popular.

3. How are businesses using social media tools, either internally or externally?

Businesses are using external blogs and SNS very aggressively and positively. Blog marketing is one of the MUST items if you consider promotion on the Net. Not only do companies prepare their marketing blogs for consumers, but they try to make use of the power of bloggers, especially what we called "alpha bloggers" (A-listers). In the past 6-12 months. companies have started hosting "blogger conferences" that are very much like press conferences for bloggers.

Internal blogging, or "intrablogs," as well call them have started up more recently, since Winter 2006, after people started saying "Enterprise 2.0," many companies are now interested in deploying blogs (and other social media tools). Intel's SuiteTwo (blog, wiki and RSS reader) was recently introduced and NEC is selling into the enterprise market as well. It appears that in the past year more Enterprise 2.0 type solutions have been deployed into Japanese corporations.

Blog tools have been used as corporate Content Management Systems (CMS) here for a few years. According to the Impress Internet White Paper 2007, Movable Type is ranked as the #1 Corporate CMS tool (27.2%), and other blogging tools as #2 (22.1%) whereas traditional CMS tools are ranked #5 or lower with single digit percentage market share.

4. Are there many social networks?

Yes. I mentioned mixi already, but I should point out that social networks in Japan do not look like those in the US. Mixi, is not the place where people meet people, but rather where people invite their existing friends to share diaries (and other information). Actually, these social networks still maintain "invitation only" policies to ensure safety and privacy rather than blogs, which are fairly public.

Probably, many Japanese people feel more comfortable with "closed"social environments and in the Japanese language, SNS is perceived as a service where only invited people can read your diary.

5. Do Japanese people continue to keep their personal and professional personas firmly separated or has social media begun to blend the two as is occurring in the US?

Yes and no. I do not have any quantitative figures, but I usually see both.

6. Has social media impacted communications between Japanese people and people in other countries? Why or why not?

No. Only selected people feel okay to communicate with foreign people in English. For many Japanese people, communication in English is not a comfortable experience - they usually feel ashamed of their poor English skills, so they hesitate to communicate in English.

7. Western perceptions of the major Japanese enterprise is that it is very top-down in its structure. Has social media had any impact on that or is it pretty much the same?

It seems to me it needs some more time. Social media inside the corporation is being adopted in the last 6-12 months and we hope it will change aspects of some corporate cultures that slow down innovation.

8. What advice do you have for a Western enterprise wishing to use social media to do business or build relationships with Japanese people?

Do you assume, by this question B2B use? If so, making use of social media should help Western people get along with Japanese business people.

First, many Japanese business people hesitate to speak English, but usually are comfortable in written form (they tend to prefer emails/IMs/blogs to conference calls for that reason as well).

Asian people are generally much more "context" oriented (if you would like to know more, please read "The Geography of Thought : How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why"), so social media is the perfect way to get along, because you can understand not only "what do you want" but "how/why do you want to do this," which makes Japanese people more comfortable.

10. Additional comments?