Part of my job is to create strategies for driving Junos certification. Korea was the first country in the world to meet their certification target in 09, so I was understandably eager to meet this industrious group in person.
As I exited my plane in Seoul I was met with a long series of beautiful HD LED flat-screens from Samsung—a brand giving the mighty Sony a run for its money. This is a country with no shortage of technological innovation or social media adoption.
In fact, the Korean marketing team I spent time with was incredibly eager to embrace social media prior to our meetings; they’d already taken themselves to social media classes, and expressed a keen interest in breaking ground with new marketing opportunities and social media tools.
A core inhibitor of immediate adoption for some of the social networking tools coming out of Silicon Valley aren’t in language, so there’s a need to create analogues. The result has been a wave of parallelisms similar to what I found in China: for search they’ve got NAVER instead of Google—a product that made slight adjustments to the model to suit the Korean market. For youth Social Networking Sites (SNS) they’ve got Cyworld instead of Facebook, and for professional SNS they have Linknow is, instead of, you guessed it, LinkedIn.
Because of a cultural divide between personal and professional life, SNS hasn’t made the leap as quickly from personal uses to commercial uses, and that represents a huge opportunity. With the industriousness I saw in our Juniper Korean office, however, I predict that this time next year it will be a different story entirely.
Case in point: within 24 hours of our visit, the first Korean Juniper Twitter account made its debut: http://twitter.com/juniper_korea. Juniper is in good company, as both Oracle and IBM also have new and reasonably active Twitter accounts in Korea as well.
Is there other social media use within the Korean B2B market I’ve missed? I’d love to hear your experience and opinions.
And please follow our new friends in Korea as well. Way to go Korea Juniper team!
