I find this post really interesting. I am in Canada and even between ourselves and our large neighbour to the south there are major differences in how we do things, how we react and what is of primary interest. One of the real challenges we find is getting a message out to our Canadian and even local market and interacting closer to home is often more difficult than a broader discussion with a North American and even UK or Australia audience. Since our country is very big, but relatively small in population the discourse is often with few from Canada and many from other places. This is not bad, just challenging at times.

Great post! I didn't know that Germany is so much behind when it comes to social media. I wonder if they know something we don't :).  
 
I totally agree with your 3 points. If for any reason you are not 100% on those three points don't even bother doing it because it will come back to bite real hard.  
 

Social media is rapidly growing around the world as Nadja mentioned. Facebook, Myspace, YouTube, Friendster, LinkedIn and Twitter are used around the world. With Twitter for instance, 60% of users are based outside the United States and it now provides its interface in French, German, Italian, Spanish and Japanese – with more languages likely to follow. 
 
An important tip to add to this list is that what ever country or language you are targeting, be sure to engage in the local language.  
 
If you are tweeting to users in  
Germany be sure to write in German. Similarly you want to make sure that your content (on your website) is targeting the appropriate audiences and as such make sure you have good (grammar and spelling) for that language.

I've spent last 7 years in pan european roles. The EU is in fact 12 markets, UK and DE being the largest. However, the differences between each all of them are vast. You can probably segement it to UK, southern europe(spain, italy, france) DE(Germany) and Nordic markets. 
 
 
 
Having worked on both sides of the pond, folk in the US are more open to what they share online. 
 
 
 
Great article.

Thanks to everyone for your comments on my article.  
I very much agree with the point about languages. It is key to use the language of the population you are targeting. I think we tend to forget that with social media since everything is so open and fluid.

Great article. There's just not much out there yet addressing the country factor or the language factor in the social media arena. This is a real challenge that most global companies are struggling to figure out. Many of my customers are just now thinking about this. For example, do you maintain a FB page(or on the local SM platform) in every country in the native language? What about blog posts? How can you leverage your English post, or reuse content in other languages for the rest of the world? I work for the largest translation/localization company in the world and translating every post is not feasible or affordable for anyone, including me! Here's a post that I created "8 Considerations for a Multilingual Blog" http://bit.ly/bIMYLV Please read it and send me your comments. I'd love to have a conversation on this. We're all in the early days of not only social media but global socail media and best practices will start emerging as companies test the waters.

I'm originally from Germany and find the Germans represented well in this article. Germans are scared of a lot of things until proven the opposite, this is true for many different areas.  
 
I'm now living in New Zealand and find that although New Zealanders accept Social Media a bit better, they are still overly security conscious as well and make Social Media very complicated. It seems even Social Media consultants here can't ever relax, they are always in "I want to look professional" mode and don't show their authentic selves as easily as US and Canadian audiences. I find that very sad. 
 
I personally network mainly with US and Canadian people online, it's just easier to talk to them. They seem to embrace Social Media so much more and are not suspicious of everybody and everything.

The history and key points you pointed out are valid, however, no matter where you are in the world...to do effective social media marketing is to LISTEN first. You mentioned this briefly at the end of the article, but I felt it wasn't stressed enough. The most common example used all the time is to treat social media like a cocktail party. When you go to a party, you don't run in there and start pitching your product. You listen to what others are saying and become apart of the conversation. Then others will take an interest in what you have to say. The platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Orkut, Blogger are irrelevant. As many other established social media marketers have referenced...they are just tools. It's how you use the tools that matters the most and the most important thing to do is engage. If the country you are in isn't big on Facebook, then use the next "tool" out there that has a lot of users on it where you're from.  
 
This was a good post, but I feel more emphasis needs to be put on the interaction with others than the tools being used.

Your three lessons are spot on, it's important to understand how the "natives" use each social medium before jumping in. I have two twitter accounts and my followers are quite different, what works for group doesn't work for the other. 
 
Nice to see a post that talks about culture :) 

I think Germans are a bit slower in adopting facebook because it's a bit more foreign. The German equivalent to Facebook for students (university and down to highschool) probably is studivz - for everyone OUT of school Wer-kennt-wen.de has definitely earned a place close to Facebook. Nevertheless, I do see folks migrating to FB from WKW but more as a paralell function. 
Happy Mothers Day!

ive recently downloaded a "twitter bot script" i run with a cron job. Im in whistler and dont speak a lick or german (or any other for that matter) i use a translator and tweet in filipino, german and spanish.. and run a cron job twice a day. Not that whese are perticularly large markets, but i am noticing the big impact it has on my website.