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Social & Digital Media

Home / Archive by Category "Social & Digital Media"

Category: Social & Digital Media

Learning from lockdown: What entertainment at a distance taught me about teaching at a distance

I’ve often felt that what I do as a trainer was similar to a stand-up comedy routine. Not so much that I try to make people laugh (although I do) but that I use the same tricks of the trade as a stand-up comedian – a core idea running through, the seemingly irrelevant anecdote that ends up making a key point, the call back at the end that reassures me and the audience they’ve been paying attention.  I know I’ve had a good session if I’ve hit my marks – not in the literal meaning of standing in the right spot, but getting the rhythm and timings right, covering all the material, sensing the key messages have chimed with participants.

Watching some of my favourite entertainers cope with social distancing has been illuminating.  It has shed light on the dirty secrets of how far entertaining or teaching at a distance can replace getting together in germ filled rooms.

The five dirty secrets of education and entertainment

I knew, but had not articulated, these dirty secrets to myself. I have struggled for around 20 years to make online learning and knowledge sharing work, believing it to be the future, but at the same time I kept having misgivings.

One of my favourite stand-up comedians, Stewart Lee, toured a show a couple of years ago called Content Provider – the brutal digital term for entertainers and teachers. As Lee pointed out in that show, the main way entertainers make money these days is by going on tour delivering the content in person, not from digital or hard copy sales. TV can be a steady earner of course, but Lee was never mainstream enough to attract consistently big bucks.  He even supplements the revenue from tickets by buying up second-hand copies of his CDs and DVDs from charity shops and eBay and selling them in person at a profit in the auditorium after the show.

But, as he acknowledged in his most recent show, touring is exhausting, particularly as you get older. My fellow trainer in Germany in a recent Zoom call said she felt more relaxed than she had in some time, despite the lockdown, because she no longer had to travel so much for work. It’s not just the physical but also the mental exhaustion – you wonder if the same old shtick is going to cut it anymore.

So our training team is now discussing what the best way is to deliver our content, without so much travel, resilient to any social distancing, but still make money and stay fresh.  Which is why we need to confront the dirty secrets head on.

My recent career has been in providing training to adult learners, but I come from a globally extensive, long line of teachers of all age groups. From talking with them about their experiences, I’m pretty sure that most of these dirty secrets apply to children’s education too.

The good news is that there are plenty of technologies when teaching or entertaining online that we are being forced to adopt which are worth continuing with even after we can all be in the same room again. The future is going to be a blend of online and offline presence.

The biggest dirty secret is that it actually costs quite a lot in terms of effort, time and therefore money to create good learning and entertainment that works at a distance. And yet the expectation is that it should be cheaper.

Why distance costs so much is due to the other dirty secrets:

1. We feed off an audience

This is why teachers are struggling to respond to the current crisis. They know that just slapping up slides online with your notes, or teaching a normal lesson via a webcam and providing a recording of it will not create effective learning experiences.  But they don’t have the time to do much else.

The issue is not just participant engagement, but that bouncing off an audience is where teachers and entertainers get their energy from. You can spot when an audience is not engaged when you are in a room with them, and adjust accordingly.

When TV entertainers like John Oliver or Stephen Colbert initially tried to do their shows without live audiences, the result was very flat. You could see the desperation in their eyes.  It was easier for team chat shows that transmitted live like Channel 4’s The Last Leg. They had already made use of Twitter in real time pre-COVID-19 to get audience suggestions and jokes from beyond the studio, so they made even more use of this to spark off their own interactions in the studio.

Even non-live shows are finding ways to use online tools to engage with their audiences – Graham Norton’s Red Chair stories are now delivered by audience members from their own homes, via their webcams.  Many comedy chat shows have found that doing short interviews via webconferencing with celebrities, in their pyjamas, with pets, kids and other props, showing human frailties, can recreate at least some of the warmth and humour they crave.

For teachers and trainers the most obvious online tool to create engagement is polling. Polls can make sure people are paying attention, but also create a connection between participants and give the host a flavour of the needs and views of the audience. Webcams, Q&A and chat functions all help put the life back in to webinars – and yes, why not bring in props and pets too.

If you are creating learning that people consume in their own time, it still needs to be interactive – I’ve incorporated polls, quizzes and self-assessments into our online learning modules.

2. But they’re not that into you

If you haven’t got a live audience you can interact with, you need to keep it short, and break it up. Graham Norton’s TV chat show used to be 45 minutes long pre-Covid, but is now a tightly edited 30 minutes of a monologue, a brief interview, some music, funny clips and the Red Chair.

I view the online equivalent of our 3-hour classroom-based training course as being a 1.5 hour webinar – and I put a break in half way just as I would for a classroom based session. Similarly, our 6 hour, one day course can be delivered as two 1.5 hour webinars on separate occasions. The online modules can be taken in the meantime, allowing the second webinar to be more of a review and discussion.

It’s generally considered that 45 minutes is the maximum you can expect an adult to pay attention.  I’d assume it’s even less for children and for those of us who are used to consuming social media in short videos and 280 character chunks.

But schools do seem very wedded to the idea that a lesson should take 35 to 45 minutes and that it’s an important life skill that children stay still and quiet for this time. I really resented being called into school to be told off for the fact that my son refused to sit nicely on the story mat for half an hour aged 5 or that he’d yell out the answer to a question without waiting until the teacher called on him. My suggestions that it was unreasonable to expect children of that age to stay still without some kind of interactivity, and that they would be better off asking open ended rather than factual questions did not go down well.  But then I regularly got thrown out of my Japanese school aged 7 for talking in class. Japanese schools are even more one-way information teaching machines than British schools.  Ironically, my son’s school reports now complain that he’s too quiet.

So 10-20 minutes for an online “class” is surely more realistic than expecting children to sit through a teacher talking on a webcam on Microsoft Teams for 40 minutes.  This seems to be what my husband and his fellow teachers are now doing – everyone logs in, the teacher asks how they are and has a chat, explains the assignment and then lets everyone log out again and do the assignment in their own time. Getting them to hand the assignment in seems to be a whole other problem, however.

Realising that my audience is not that into me either, I recently re-edited all our online e-learning content so no video/screencast that I have narrated is more than 10 minutes where possible.  The most popular YouTube video I have narrated is “Japanese Business Mysteries explained in 5 minutes”, so I will be doing more of those in the future.

3. They are paying for the certificate, not for the love of knowledge

But that brings me to the third dirty secret. Not only are they not that into you, they’re not that into your content either. They’re either learning because it’s compulsory or to impress their employers.  If they’re school children or students, the main motivator is passing the exam.

This is where the analogy with entertainment ends, I suppose – we consume entertainment for insights, emotions and to know we are not alone.  There is no certificate for this but therefore there is a limit to how much a person will pay to be entertained, and they are always looking for ways to get their kicks for free. Which is why I sympathised when Stewart Lee confiscated a mobile phone from an audience member trying to film his routine at the last gig of his I went to.

Teachers at my son’s school have been dutifully setting further reading, challenging maths problems and suggesting resources to prepare for university for the year group affected by the cancellation of the UK national A level exams. Only work before March 18th will count towards the final grade, to ensure that children who are not able to access online learning are not penalised.

Despite the teachers’ efforts, I believe most engagement from that year group is through an app that one of them developed which automates logging in to Microsoft Teams – and occasionally they edit the message so it looks personal.

The only pure online training courses that sell are the ones that relate to compliance and are compulsory, or certify that you have acquired IT skills. This is the kind of knowledge acquisition that can be proved through online multiple-choice tests or online exercises. These courses generate a certificate for the learner and lots of lovely data on the company’s Learning Management System, to show what percentage of staff have taken the courses, passed the tests or said their work efficiency has improved, and then they can generate some kind of Return on Investment on training budgets to keep the CFO happy.

Individual learners are willing to pay for a certificate they can add to their CVs but otherwise expect content to be free.  Massively Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, have a very high dropout rate. Coursera, an online learning platform mainly for university courses, has a business model based on exactly this understanding of the learner mentality. The University of Tokyo course on Japanese art and literature I took was free but they send you guilt provoking emails if you don’t complete each module within a certain time. If you want a certificate of passing and completion which you can load onto your LinkedIn profile, you have to pay. And so, although I took the course for the love of acquiring knowledge – reader, I paid.

4. It’s the stupid technology, stupid

Coursera have done a great job of making the user interface as easy as possible. This is where some of the benefits of being online come in. So long as firewalls and bandwidth do not intervene, it should mean greater accessibility to knowledge for people all around the world. Coursera videos are no more than 10 minutes long, each with a short quiz at the end to make sure you were paying attention. As well as the slides and a video of the professor giving the lecture, there is a transcript with a cursor indicating where the professor has got to in the lecture underneath the video. So if you haven’t quite understood, or your attention wandered, you can check back, rewind and pass the test.

Non-native speakers of English have been far more enthusiastic about e-learning and webinars than native speakers, in my experience. They like the multiple ways to absorb the information – slides, transcripts, aurally and offline. Native English speakers can help during live webinars by summarising key points in the chat function.  The host also has far more control over shutting up domineering fluent speakers and making sure the shyer people are brought into the conversation – including through private chat if they’d rather not speak out publicly.

But – not everyone has the technology, bandwidth or budget to participate equally. Teachers at my husband’s well-funded private school have apparently broken down in tears from spending hours marking work online, only to see it disappear into the ether.

Maybe it’s their fault for not backing up, maybe the school has terrible connectivity, who knows. But it brings it home that things must be a hundred times worse for schools and homes where good technology and connectivity is just not affordable or people don’t have the technological knowhow to find solutions.

I realise this article may attract a lot of snark from specialists who have been studying interactive learning design for years, and know way more than I do about how to design learning paths and interfaces. In my defence, I did actually manage a team of people with that knowledge and AI programming skills, way back in the day.  Our aim was to get away from directed learning and move towards self-directed learning. That is still my goal.

I attended various learning technology conferences too – where all too often a seminar entitled “making xml work in a corporate learning environment” or some such would end in a spectacular technology fail and blue screens all round. So yes, properly designed learning experiences are available online, but we are still a long way from the user or the technology being smart enough.

5. Fear of eating ourselves

This is the deepest darkest dirty secret. We worry that if we do too good a job with online content and the technology does improve enough, we will no longer be needed. Teachers and entertainers want to be needed, even loved – and this is what we get paid for.  This is known in business as self-cannibalization – making a cheaper version of your product or service, which then kills your lifeline.

But we should not despair, there are reasons why eating yourself doesn’t work.

The social experience

If audiences can get the same experience from a CD, DVD or book, why do they continue to go to gigs, concerts, shows?  Partly it’s the social experience – the thrill of being in a crowd of people who are going through the same emotions. The closest I have seen during lockdown to recreating the social experience of a concert is TimsTwitterListeningParty – where Tim Burgess of the 1990s group The Charlatans sets an album for everyone to listen to and tweet about in real time – but the real joy is that the original artist also tweets about the making of the record or photos of the band, in synchronicity to each track being listened to.

It’s also for the social experience that people still want to attend classes, despite moaning about being away from their real work. Even if children say they hate school, they want to be with their friends – and it’s usually because of a bad experience of being with others, such as bullying, that makes them hate school the most, rather than the teaching.  And of course the teacher can do a lot to set the tone and clamp down on bullying.

Squirrel!

Preferring to be in a room with others in order to learn is also an acknowledgement that if you’re not trapped in a class, you are very likely going to get distracted.

Also, in the corporate world, I have found that even when I was on the receiving end of poor-quality training, just being away from the desk and having time to reflect had a value in its own right.

The best concerts, exhibitions or plays are where you feel fully immersed – “lost in another world.” It’s not so easy to do that at home where daily chores and worries intrude.

Applicability

A close second to being bullied as a reason for hating school is that it’s “boring and pointless”. In other words, children cannot see how what they are learning applies to their own life.

Many of the TV shows that have done well in the UK during lockdown are ones which allow us to live vicariously (and maybe thereby learn about) cultural experiences – Race around the World, The Repair Shop, or Grayson Perry’s Art Club

But not all teachers or subjects translate well to video, and learners still need to be able to interact with the teacher so that they can understand how to apply the knowledge to their individual situation. You can give individual attention and co-create online, but again numbers need to be limited to about the same as a classroom size, to allow proper 1:1 interaction.

Authenticity

The audience or learner wants authenticity – they can spot a mile off when a teacher or entertainer is phoning it in. This is why a lot of e-learning is so dry – actors voicing narratives about how to be a leader just do not resonate. The most popular YouTube videos are where the person is narrating in real time as they play a game. The first video that came up when I was searching for help on how to cut my son’s hair was a hairdresser in a barber shop cutting hair while explaining his technique.

We insist at Japan Intercultural Consulting that all our facilitators have authentic experience of working in Japanese organisations and also have lived in the counterpart culture. We also encourage our facilitators to tell stories from their own experiences during the training. Our participants need to feel that we have “been in your shoes”.  But the only way we can be sure this happens is to interact with participants, to understand their experiences.

Apprenticeship

Parents are struggling trying to do home schooling and work at the same time.  Schools were invented partly so people could go to work. Before universal education, only rich people could afford home tutoring, which then perpetuated the professional elite path of going to university to become a lawyer or clergyman.

The only way to work from home and teach your children at the same time if you are not rich enough to afford a home tutor is to teach them through the work you are doing. This was how craftsmen in the past educated their children – they were apprenticed to their parent or to another “master”.  The modern-day equivalent would be getting your children to alphabetize your files, or helping you design a spreadsheet for your sales data – or in my case, getting them to edit and add subtitles to my videos.

Japanese companies are still resistant to classroom-based learning and even more so to working remotely, particularly for soft skills. The reason for this is that most Japanese companies are family style in mentality – learning is done through apprenticeship and on the job learning.

Extreme cleaning

I admit I already loved Tidying up with Marie Kondo on Netflix, but it wasn’t just because it added to my Japanese cultural expertise – my obsession with TV decluttering shows stretches back to House Doctor in the 1990s and lockdown has impelled me to binge watch Call the Cleaners. There is something very cathartic and inspiring about watching other people confront their fears and phobias, purge and then move on with their lives, and this is what I needed to do with online learning.

Although we may have a sick feeling in our stomachs about the threat of technology, teachers and trainers will never have to eat themselves. So long as we are authentic and know what we are talking about, then we can help the learner apply the knowledge for themselves, and recreate experiences. We can set scientific experiments, maths problems and history essays to be done away from the classroom, in the knowledge that they need a teacher to guide them and check the result.

If, like now, we can only teach online, then rather than trying to dump a mass of information online or learn how to build an interactive module, we should focus on creating good offline assignments that guide the learner as they explore, apply their new knowledge and recreate experiences for themselves. But learner numbers will be limited if this is to be supervised and checked properly.  Ultimately, the cost per learner in terms of time and salaries is not going to be much cheaper than a classroom-based experience if the assignment is well framed and resources are properly curated.

A teacher or entertainer in a germ-infested room full of people is still the most cost effective and emotionally impactful way of transmitting knowledge, insight and experience. Our enforced isolation as teachers and entertainers should be a time to declutter, focus on what sparks joy and maybe add one or two new gadgets into the freed-up space.

For more content like this, subscribe to the free Rudlin Consulting Newsletter. 最新の在欧日系企業の状況については無料の月刊Rudlin Consulting ニューズレターにご登録ください。

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GDPR

The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into force on May 25th 2018, after which date, organizations which hold personal data on EU citizens which are not compliant with the GDPR may face heavy fines.

Many small companies like mine are struggling to comply. The regulation is clearly aimed at the larger business-to-consumer companies who hold a lot of very personal data about their customers, such as their age, sexuality, political affiliations and so on, and could use this to target them in a way that could be seen as intrusive or offensive.

I have decided, however, to make sure the personal data we hold is compliant, partly because I want my customers to feel confident that their suppliers are trustworthy, but also because I see this as a chance to improve the service we provide and slim down our customer database and mailing lists.

Japanese companies in Europe are undoubtedly feeling particularly nervous about the GDPR, as Honda Motor Europe was already fined by the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office in 2017 for violating a UK regulation which has very similar requirements to the GDPR regarding consent.

Consent is the key issue with GDPR.  There needs to be informed, positive consent by the customer for their data to be processed.  The nature of the data (what kind of personal details) which the company will hold, and what it will be used for (emails, newsletters, postal mailing etc) have to be clearly explained.  A double opt in is recommended – whereby people fill in the form, and then receive an email asking them to confirm that they do want to share their data.  A clear process for them to ask to be deleted from a database also needs to be in place.

It is not possible to “grandfather” (allow old conditions to continue even if they are against the new rules) previously held personal data, so it might be safest to reconfirm with people on your database that they still consent to you processing their data.  Of course, the risk with this is that many people will not consent and your mailing list will shrink.

But this brings me on to my second reason for deciding to comply as thoroughly as possible with the GDPR.  I want to make sure that my newsletters are really valued by my customers.  Our newsletters are not marketing our training so much as part of the after-service we provide.  They help our customers refresh and add to what they learnt in the classroom.

Manufacturers are also moving away from just selling a product, to selling a solution – hardware plus surrounding services such as maintenance and support, using the Internet of Things and Big Data to provide a more customised product.

Which is of course why the GDPR has become necessary.  Personal data can be used in a good way, to meet customer needs more completely, but, as we know in Europe, particularly in former dictatorships and communist regimes, personal data can be abused.

This article appears in Pernille Rudlin’s latest book “Shinrai: Japanese Corporate Integrity in a Disintegrating Europe” available as a paperback and Kindle ebook on Amazon.

For more content like this, subscribe to the free Rudlin Consulting Newsletter. 最新の在欧日系企業の状況については無料の月刊Rudlin Consulting ニューズレターにご登録ください。

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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 the 9th April 2014 Teikoku Databank News, and appears in Shinrai: Japanese Corporate Integrity in a Disintegrating Europe, available as a paperback and e-book on Amazon.)

For more content like this, subscribe to the free Rudlin Consulting Newsletter. 最新の在欧日系企業の状況については無料の月刊Rudlin Consulting ニューズレターにご登録ください。

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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.

 

For more content like this, subscribe to the free Rudlin Consulting Newsletter. 最新の在欧日系企業の状況については無料の月刊Rudlin Consulting ニューズレターにご登録ください。

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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.

For more content like this, subscribe to the free Rudlin Consulting Newsletter. 最新の在欧日系企業の状況については無料の月刊Rudlin Consulting ニューズレターにご登録ください。

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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.

For more content like this, subscribe to the free Rudlin Consulting Newsletter. 最新の在欧日系企業の状況については無料の月刊Rudlin Consulting ニューズレターにご登録ください。

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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

Cross cultural communicationsAs 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 2021-10-11.

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