I have been pitching for the UK B2B PR account for a company based in Germany, and while my main contact is open-minded about the potential of social media it seems that view is not yet shared by many of her fellow Germans. The title of a ReadWriteWeb blog post – Social Media in Germany: 5 Years Behind – Still Lots to Learn – kind of says it all.
Apparently, blogs are still considered suspect and have almost no influence, while the mainstream media likes to describe the internet as dangerous, full of malware, porn and scammers, Facebook and the home-grown FB clone StudiVZ are under-utilised, and Twitter hasn’t become a mainstream phenomenon yet.
Accordingly, I am having to tailor my proposed strategy carefully and explain that the UK trade and technical media – plus a (slowly) growing proportion of their professional readers – are embracing RSS, blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media tools. It’s been an interesting experience as I hadn’t previously realised that there was such a marked geographical disparity in adoption of Web 2.0 tools and techniques.
