doing business across cultures

If you look at the stats below, you get a sense of understanding how important social networks have become in our lives. Interestingly, even more ‘private’ topics such as politics and religion are being discussed, even more so in countries like Tunisia, Jordan or Egypt.

Knowing how to build communities and to nurture them; more importantly, how to communicate across cultures and borders becomes an essential skill in today’s connected world. Relationships are becoming more complex as often people communicating with each other don’t necessarily have the opportunity to see themselves.

But: as I wrote in an earlier post about the components of communication, 55% of the non-verbal aspects actually contribute to the understanding of what your counterpart is saying and 38% of the paraverbal. Hence, when communicating in social networks where usually you cannot see your discussion partner, the tone of your message, character fonts, drawings, diagrams, colours, italics or highlights are extremely important.

Understanding your target audience and their culture plus choosing the right tone and message is a must when building relationships in the business world but also privately.

I am extremely happy to be able to speak about this exciting subject in London on the 21^st of February. Looking forward to seeing you there and if not, please stay tuned as we will be setting up tailored webinars to follow-up on the conference around three major topics:

Social networking across cultures and platforms
How to use social media effectively across cultures for Internationalization, Marketing and Strategic Communication
Using Social Media for Community Management

Jenny

Is the title of the conference I am going to speak at in February in London, UK. More specifically, my topic touches on building a relationship remotely and what cultural etiquette you should employ when using email, LinkedIn and other social networks to build relationships internationally.

Have you ever thought about how you communicate in the online world? As body language, facial expression or tone of voice from your counterparts are missing, how would you know if your message was understood? And more importantly, which rules should you be following when you are using online tools, be it so commonly used ones like e-mail? Not much research has been done to my knowledge on how different cultures are communicating through different online channels.

There is data on the Internet use across the population (click here for more info on Europe for example: ); there is also data on social media use by enterprises (click here for stats in Europe). Precise information on how written language and images are used online analyzing the data by culture and differentiating between the various social media channels are rare. Usually research focuses on the comparison of one culture and one medium to another.

During our workshop in London, Dr. Pari Namazi and myself are going to touch on some interesting aspects, working on concrete examples and speaking about our own multicultural and international experience.

Being mindful about how online communication can be perceived in different cultures is indispensable for multinational companies, governments, charities, NGOs and in fact, for any organization operating in today’s global marketplace.

Avoiding cultural mistakes whilst demonstrating respect and openness for another culture will pave the way to successful interpersonal relationships…

Interested? Register here to get at 20% discount. All you need to do is to click on the speaker button and use the discount code: Jenny3 .

Speakers include:

Andrew Kain, Founding Chairman, AKE Ltd.
Richard D. Lewis, Chairman, Richard Lewis Communications Ltd
Pari Namazie, PhD, Managing Partner, Atieh International GmbH
Nick Hurst Founding Director Burts Potato Chips
Peter C. Pang US China Counsel Dickinson Wright
Jenny Ebermann Freelance Consultant
Bobby D. Butler, Jr., Senior Vice President Global Partnership Management, Universal Weather & Aviation, Inc.
John Smart, Partner, Head of Fraud Investigation & Dispute Services, Ernst & Young LLP
Nigel R Brahams, Head of Legal, EMEA, GFI Group

Looking forward to seeing you there and if you know of interesting research on the subject matter, please let me know!

Jenny

Tag: doing business across cultures

Doing Business Across Cultures