Tell Hetrick

As businesses have become increasingly global, they’ve learned what pitfalls to avoid in advertising, from wrongheaded translations to insulting gestures. But as more companies and organizations are using social media to promote their products and services, they have to avoid cultural pitfalls online as well. This week and next, we’ll look at online communications across cultures.

One key factor in cross-cultural communications is whether the culture is high context or low context. Knowing this will help you decide both the medium and the approach you take with your audience.

China, Spain and England tend to be high-context cultures. People in these countries say less and mean more. They often rely on the situation and context clues to communicate and understand messages. People in high-context cultures appreciate direct back-and-forth so they can relate the current message to what was said previously.

In high-context cultures, relationships build slowly and are based on trust and knowing the other person. High-context cultures appreciate that Facebook filters people through friend requests, so you can only view someone’s information with his or her permission. On Twitter, a high-context person would not follow everyone who follows him.

Once a social media relationship is established, high-context people would expect continued engagement in the relationship. For example, they would invite followers to retweet information and ask bloggers to leave comments and questions.

At the other end of the spectrum are low-context countries such as the U.S., Germany and France. Their citizens’ conversations—whether online or not—are more public, external and accessible. When people in these cultures communicate, they are direct and to the point with their information.

Low-context users of social media like its immediacy. They appreciate the short and sweet of Twitter: get the information and get out. They blog frequently on whatever topics interest them. They don’t mind who listens in. They are open to allowing strangers to follow them on Twitter and becoming friends through Facebook.

Knowledge is very transferable in low-context cultures. People there like to follow others’ blogs and retweet information, and they don’t wait for an invitation. They frequently link to news or other information that is relevant to their topic. Low-context people simply want to exchange information, ideas and opinions. They are not using social media to pursue or build long-term relationships.

Of course, these are generalizations. And we can’t overlook that the online community is developing its own cultural context. But until that culture matures, the best approach is to treat users from all cultures as individuals who are passionate about what they do.

Is your company or organization modifying its messages to better communicate with various cultures? Or is the Internet the one place where we should set aside those differences?

Next week: polychronic versus monochronic cultures, and what those mean to your social media efforts.