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Tony Byrne

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Social Software in Europe

30-Dec-2008

Tags: Enterprise Collaboration & Social Software, Building Business Case, Implementation, Marketplace at Large, Facebook

After spending a good amount of time talking to technology customers in Europe during the last quarter, I've concluded that attitudes towards enterprise social computing tend to be quite different on the eastern side of the Atlantic, which seems doubly significant since most (though not all) social software vendors hail from North America.

Of course, it's dangerous to make continent-wide generalizations, and to be sure, customer adoption and approach does appear to differ from southern Europe (e.g., Italy) versus the Nordics and UK. Nevertheless, here are some of the qualms I picked up in Europe that simply don't get voiced as frequently in North America:

• There is greater concern about social software such as blogs introducing new silos of information and compounding information overload at a time when findability and compliance represent greater IT challenges than participation
• More pervasive union regulations circumscribe what employees and enterprises can do, and what employees can share
• The broader issue of personal and professional privacy -- which is hardly unique to Europe -- looms larger and carries more legal weight
• There feels like less inclination to meld personal and professional topics and personae (as so many social networking tools do), which has come up when global companies have experimented with using Facebook and the like for intra-enterprise networking

None of this has stopped European enterprises from experimenting with social computing as their peers elsewhere have done. But there is greater skepticism, and we are already seeing that European customers sometimes find North American suppliers overly zealous and insufficiently sensitive to different legal and cultural barriers.