GlobalWebIndex

In the July-August Issue of the Harvard Business Review appeared a story by associate professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski with an interesting infographic by designer Tommy McCall. The topic: different trends in social media adoption around the world.

Professor Piskorski is currently Assistant professor of business strategy at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration and he’s been Assistant Professor of Organizational Behaviour at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.
He has published papers about the use of power in organizational behaviour and he’s been mentioned on The New York Times with an article about social networks Friendster and Myspace.
On his page at the Harvard Business School  we can find many cases about understanding business and users of social networks.

Today we are honoured to be cited in his latest work which main focus is a cross-countries study on the use of social networks.
Professor Piskorski found a clear divide between East and West of the world usage of social networks.
Surprisingly, Asians appear to be much more engaged in the social web than western users.
“Chinese and Indian users, for example, are three times as likely to microblog, or tweet, as American users. They’re also twice as likely to share videos.”

Another interesting point is about the emerging BRIC countries, where users are just approaching the social sphere and hence they face an already developed panorama of social tools while western users had the time to settle their social behaviour gradually over the past years.
This means that emerging countries are more likely to adopt a balanced use of all available social services, contrary to western users which tend to focus on the more “traditional” and established services.

The original article is at http://hbr.org/2010/07/vision-statement-mapping-the-social-internet/ar/1