Cruising around I came across a report from Burson-Marsteller (a PR firm) that took the Forbes 100 list of companies and analyzed it to see what degree they were involved in Social Media. That data was then taken by iStrategy who created some very eye-catching charts that I’ve repeated below.
It’s interesting to note that for Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, corporations based in the US and Europe lead in terms of adoption. However, Asia-Pacific companies clearly outstrip the other regions in terms of corporate blog adoption (as a percentage).
I wonder why that is - on the face of it, it appears counter intuitive. Blogs were around before the other 3 primary forms of Social Media, and US/EU companies were thought to be “leading the charge” in Social Media. So you would expect adoption to be greater amongst the early adopter set.
The blog statistic busts the stereotype in another way. Consider that the greater the freedom of expression the greater the trust that must be placed in the wielder of the tool. Does this mean that Asia-Pac companies trust their employees more than US and EU companies? Or does this mean that Asia-Pac companies provide more training, or stricter processes?
Does this statistic reinforce or reflect cultural stereotypes? Cultures that have an ideographic written language (Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc.) are much more comfortable and expect data to be presented in a written form. Why use graphics when the language is itself graphical? (A Yahoo! Example.) (As single characters communicate complex concepts, data absorption in ideographic languages is considered to be more efficient than for those languages using the roman alphabet, for example.)
Do the statistics reflect a different stereotype - The US has the attention span only for 140 characters?
What do you see in the statistics?
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