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Andrew Shuttleworth
Interview with Andrew Shuttleworth - October 2009
Read more about Social media in Japan:
| A resident of Japan since 1999. Andrew is well networked in the web venture ccommunity in Japan having worked with web ventures in Japan. He established the Tokyo 2.0 community for web industry in Tokyo. Disclaimer: Andrew is not a professional analyst and views expressed are his own observations only. |  |
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| What trends of social/digital media do you observe in Japanese companies? What trends do you foresee in the near future? | Japanese companies can be slow to adopt really new technologies and try to innovate with them. There is usually a second wave of companies who adopt technologies when they hit the mass media. There is a more of a critical ROI approach rather than an experimental, learning approach that you may find in other countries. Reasons for this may be risk adversity and group decision making. |
| A recent report by Lightspeed Reseach has found that only 9% of Japanese consumers would improve their view of a company that befriended them via a social networking platform and 13% of them would improve their opinion of the brand if it had a blog to talk about the company and its products. Should Japanese businesses adopt social media applications in how they communicate and do business? | I think there is still a lot of potential there, but if the above statistics are correct then they need to think innovatively about how to do this in a way that appeals to Japanese people. |
| As social networking sites tend to attract the attention of a younger crowd, do Japanese businesses perceive it as being more of a new toy than something serious? If so, can this perception be changed? | Well the reality is that social networking sites are largely used for fun in Japan. Fun still equates to eyeballs though and so I think from a business perspective it is not fun and businesses are interested in ways to make money from this new channel. |
| In post-industrial societies, young people are growing up in what Henry Jenkins (2006) has dubbed “convergence culture”—an increasingly interactive and participatory media ecology where Internet communication ties together both old and new media forms. What implications will this have on Japanese companies in their methods of engaging Japanese consumers of today? | Well the mobile computing ecosystem is already very mature here so there are innumerable examples of how old and new media are blending. |
| “MySpace is about me, me, me, and look at me and look at me and look at me…In Mixi, it’s not all about me. It’s all about us.” – Tony Elison, Senior Vice President at Viacom International Japan. What do you think makes Mixi stand out to Japanese consumers in comparison to MySpace? Does the collectivistic culture in Japan influence the choice of social networking sites that consumers prefer to use? | Yes. And conversely social networking sites for Japan are designed in ways that appeal to Japanese people. |
| 99% of the Japanese population use the Japanese language as their main language medium. Do companies that want to reach out to the Japanese audience need to master the language or can they use English? | It's not just about the language, they need to understand the culture. |
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, Nov 11 2009, 10:50 AM EST
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