Social & Digital Media Archives

Why Japanese companies don’t use LinkedIn (but should)

I read in the Nikkei newspaper recently that Panasonic, Mitsubishi Estate and Rakuten are planning to make use of social networking site LinkedIn for recruitment outside Japan, including Europe. LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional networking site, based in California, with more than 270 million users worldwide, so it certainly represents an effective way to identify and attract new recruits.

I have been a member for more than 10 years, not to find a job, but to network with my European contacts in Japanese companies. It has been noticeable, however, that Japanese employees and Japanese companies in general are not very active on LinkedIn, even though LinkedIn launched a Japanese version and set up an office in Tokyo in 2011.

I assume this is primarily because LinkedIn is used for mid-career hiring and job seeking, which is still not a popular activity in Japan. Indeed, many Europeans dislike to display their skills and experience publicly, and signal thereby that they may be “for hire”. Based on my own analysis, the British and Dutch are not so cautious, whereas the privacy conscious (and possibly less comfortable in English) Germans and French hold back.

Many of my German contacts use Xing, a Germany based social networking site instead. However all Europeans (and people in multinationals in emerging markets such as Turkey) are aware of LinkedIn, and will take a look at it when they are considering moving to another company.

In other words, from an employer perspective, LinkedIn is a tool not just for searching for recruits based on skills and experience, but also for the company to present an attractive profile.

I recommend that any Japanese company reviewing their LinkedIn presence first of all ensure that the “official” company LinkedIn page is clearly labelled as official (to distinguish it from an alumnus site page run by an individual), and employees are encouraged to link their personal LinkedIn profiles to this official page.

More often than not, there are several pages already existing for the Japanese company. This needs to be tidied up, so that there is a headquarters page (in English), and any regional company pages are clearly identified as such. It is possible to interlink the regional company pages to the headquarters page, to show they all belong to the same company family.

These official pages need to be managed by someone either in marketing or HR at the headquarters and regional subsidiaries. They need a description of the company, including size, activities and a link to the correct website. The pages also need to be “branded” to look visually appealing and reflect the company image. Use should be made of the facility to add descriptions of products and services and add news about the company.

If this is done correctly, then “followers” of company will swiftly increase, both from potential recruits and also current employees, who will feel much happier now their employer has a clear and attractive LinkedIn presence they can associate themselves with.

(This article was originally written in Japanese for Teikoku Databank News)

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Closer ties between the Financial Times and the Nikkei

I was really pleased to see Lionel Barber, Editor of the Financial Times, announce closer editorial cooperation between the Nikkei and the Financial Times in the Japan supplement published today (well worth checking out particularly for the article by a Nikkei journalist on the controversy in Japan regarding the Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations, which as the journalist rightly points out, has had almost no coverage outside Japan)

I’ve pointed out many times how rich the business coverage is in Japan – not just the myriad of Nikkei group magazines and newspapers, but also the Sankei group, Diamond Weekly etc etc. However it’s all in Japanese, and little of it is translated or covered in English. This puts suppliers to Japanese companies who are not Japanese at a severe disadvantage in terms of understanding their customers.

The Nikkei has been putting more and more of its content into English these past few years, online, but behind a paywall. I tweet links to articles I think are of interest, but I know it is frustrating for those who do not have a subscription – because they frequently contact me to complain!

The Nikkei group is clearly embarking on a new phase of globalization – they have ceased publication of their weekly English digest The Nikkei Weekly (and alas, this means my column for it has been axed too) and are repositioning their online English content as Nikkei Asian Review.

I assume this and the alliance with the FT means that they will leave the FT/Pearson Group to cover Europe. They already feature articles translated into Japanese from the Financial Times and the Economist in their main weekly business magazine Nikkei Business. And presumably their alliance with the Wall Street Journal/Dow Jones will give them access to more coverage of North America – similarly, articles from Dow Jones regularly appear in Nikkei.com.

I guess even global financial publications are struggling to deal with the online era, so collaboration amongst supposed rivals may be the only route to survival.

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Tokyo Olympics 2020 website called “world’s worst”

David Meerman Scott , an American marketing strategist who has lived in Japan, has stirred things up by nominating the Tokyo Olympics 2020 bid website as the worst English language website in the world. Well, admittedly it’s not great – using “unique” twice in one paragraph (without any explanation as to what precisely is unique) in the vision statement got my goat. But there are probably worse websites out there if one could be bothered to look.

The point is of course that this is one of the most high profile “brand” awareness, world class competitions you can get into, and expectations are high. I discussed Meerman Scott’s post with one of the translators we use for our English-to-Japanese articles. She said one professional English editor she uses for her own (excellent) English writing, uses the word “childish” to describe the Japanese websites he is familiar with. We agreed that the base problem is the tendency to insist on straight translations from Japanese to English.

It takes a lot of time to build up trust with Japanese colleagues or clients before they will allow a writer/translator to deviate from word to word translations. It took me six years at Mitsubishi Corporation, and being known to work closely with the President and write his English speeches, to get to that point. Initially Japanese colleagues would even correct my English, because they thought I had missed something out, or their dictionary said something different.

The struggle to translate strategy documents into anything meaningful in English was particularly thankless. Finally, I hit on discussing the intention behind the strategy directly with the people who drafted the Japanese original, then putting the Japanese original into a drawer and writing it in English from scratch. It also helped I knew the company much better by the end of my nine years there, so could second guess some of the implicit, missing pieces.

So, it’s no surprise that Japanese companies are so reluctant to use external professional English copywriters – the Japanese original is often so opaque, deliberately vague, and requires such a deep knowledge of the company to really understand the nuances.

Not that things are going that well for Istanbul’s bid right now, but if you read their vision – “bridge together”, it is unmistakably Istanbul that is being talked about. Let’s hope the “inclusiveness and harmony” of the vision are reestablished soon. Tokyo’s emphasis on “safety” is looking more alluring now. Madrid promises a “responsible” Olympics, but spelling itself Madid on its website is worrying in terms of attention to detail. So, nobody’s perfect, but I think Meerman Scott is trying to say the Tokyo site could be so much better.

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Hitachi’s new vision, identity and brand campaign

Further to my post on why Japanese companies are not as “admired” as Western companies in brand/reputation surveys, I noted a bold one page advertisement in the Financial Times this morning from Hitachi, talking about “social innovation”.　At first I wondered whether this was a term coined by Hitachi outside of Japan to put a bit more flesh on the “Inspire the Next” slogan that they have used in advertisements in The Economist, as some kind of riposte to IBM’s Smarter Planet.

But it seems that this term was used in the Mid Term Management Plan announced by Hitachi in 2010 and has made an appearance again in the 2013 Mid Term Management Plan announced this month which also talks about the new Hitachi Vision and identity and that they have “reorganised” the mission and values.

It’s probably no coincidence that they have also announced that they intend to expand their overseas personnel by 27% by 2015, to 150,000 (and will be cutting their Japan based staff by 8,000 to 200,000). Hitachi is hoping to increase its proportion of overseas sales to more than half of its total sales (currently around $90bn) by 2015, from the current 41%. This looks to be mainly through growing the infrastructure business in emerging markets, however Hitachi has been active in Europe too, in energy and transportation projects, and currently employs around 10,000 people in the region. Nonetheless, I bet if you asked the average European, they will have heard of Hitachi, but think they mostly make televisions.

Hitachi is backing up its Social Innovation brand campaign with a YouTube brand channel and is actively promoting it on Twitter too.

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“Most Japanese companies are doing nothing to communicate in English”

“Japanese corporate websites are mainly just explanations of products, in incomprehensible English translations” due to Japanese companies being overly focused on the Japanese domestic market and consequently failing to communicate in English. So says Paul Argenti, Professor of Corporate Communication at Dartmouth Tuck University, when asked by the Nikkei Business Online (Japanese) to comment on Shinichi Tanaka of Fleishman Hillard’s assertion (see previous post) that Japanese companies are weak at “fighting outside” – outside the rules, and outside Japan.

However Argenti disagrees with Tanaka that a dedicated organisation should be set up to manage the company’s reputation. “It should be the President’s job, not delegated to someone else”, because it covers many areas from corporate strategy to marketing to communication (and, I would add, governance). But of course most Japanese presidents have had very domestic focused careers, are uncomfortable speaking in English and are most of all concerned about their standing in Japan, as they are not part of a global CEO talent pool.

Argenti thinks that Japanese companies became more aware of the importance of their reputation abroad after the 3/11 earthquake and tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Certainly, if Abe and the LDP’s recent visits to UAE, Turkey, Russia and soon Poland, are to be successful in promoting Japan’s infrastructure technology, including nuclear power, there is a lot more work to be done in enhancing Japanese corporate reputations as capable and reliable managers of infrastructure projects.

Argenti’s final advice – again somewhat going against Tanaka’s suggestion that Japanese companies are going to have to fight dirty to defend themselves – is that they should not let the fight go outside the ring, but focus on innovation, being number one in their specialist areas and ensuring that the correct information is communicated.

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Attitudes in Japan to social media at work

As Japanese companies gear up for another round of overseas acquisitions, an additional integration need for 21st century M&A is going to become apparent – alongside the usual headaches of trying to integrate HR systems or IT or procurement across newly acquired companies – the integration of corporate social media activities across the globe.

Social media is deceptive in that residents of the Anglosphere usually mean Facebook or Twitter or Linkedin when they talk about social media, and assume that these social media networks are inherently global, as they are globally accessible. Yet my observation of social media usage in Japanese multinationals leads me to believe that most people’s social networking, corporate or private, is still actually very local.

This shouldn’t be surprising really, as the point about social media is that we use it to connect to people like ourselves. And for most of us, that means linking to people from the same culture as ourselves.
Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook are American companies of course, and their success must surely be in part due to starting in such a large English speaking market, and then being able to access the rest of the Anglosphere from that base, without having to adapt too much.

I am not sure whether American companies are more naturally accepting of social media because of American cultural preferences, or feel more comfortable because the big social media networks are American in origin.

Recent research from Clearswift, a UK based communications security company, shows that US headquartered multinationals are the most proactive in allowing their employees to use social media, but American employees also show the greatest blur between their work and private lives – leading to pressure from employees to access social media from work and also to bring their own personal devices such as smartphones, into work.

Japanese companies, by contrast, showed the least blurring between work and private life amongst employees, so there is less pressure from employees to access social media from work and employers are more reluctant to allow employees to bring their own devices into work. Japanese employers also showed the most concern about data security and least trust in their employees to use social media responsibly. German and Australian employers are more restrictive towards social media use at work than Japanese employers, however.

I believe that Japanese multinationals actually have a great opportunity to develop an alternative global model for corporate social media use. Instead of the giant hub with multiple spokes that US multinationals tend to adopt, not just for social media but for almost any other supposedly global system imposed on their overseas subsidiaries, Japanese companies should think about encouraging the development of multiple hubs of employees using social media.

Each hub would be closely attuned to local customers and local social media networks, facilitated by multilingual employees who are capable of translating messages from Japan headquarters or elsewhere in the network and transmitting them in the way that is most appropriate to the local market.

This article by Pernille Rudlin originally appeared in the 19th September 2011 edition of the Nikkei Weekly

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Last updated by Pernille Rudlin at 2015-06-30.

Social & Digital Media

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