Germany. Why this country really sucks once in a while.

November 18th, 2009 • Social

It’s never been easy to be German. Four months ago I published a post about why Germany struggles with Web 2.0 with exactly the same words. My thesis then was the same thesis today: Germans love to be whiny, are risk-averse and love big institutions which half-heartedly manage their personal responsibilites. Germans simply don’t like to be individually creative so much. We like to talk about it, but at the end of the day entrepreneurship isn’t our kind of thing. Big media corporations, the state or labour unions will do the job…they always did. And no, that German idea of lifestyle does not fit well with our decentralized concept of a digital world.

The reason for this quick rant is a report which I have watched on German TV yesterday. I don’t really watch TV too often, but I like Political reports. Yesterday’s report was, again, about Social Networking in Germany. We have two big state sponsored media institutions, ARD and ZDF, bound to deliver high-quality political and historical content dedicated to make us smart enough that we’re not becoming Nazis again. That works more or less. Unfortunately these channels seem to be run by editors who either don’t understand or don’t want to focus on the many positive aspects of the social web. The key message of most German TV reports about the social web is about

  • Mobbing on the web
  • Stalking
  • Drunk party photos that leave a profile owner unemployed for the rest of his life

The following German report by ZDF’s Frontal 21 show is absolutely typical (in German unfortunately).

German media does not talk about collaboration, chances, new forms of interaction, knowledge. It consistently pictures younger Germans, engaged in Social Networking, as narcistic hedonists who have no interest in privacy and upload their drunk party photos to any platform they can think of (24/7). And what happens next? Right. Some HR guy finds these images and drops the applicant’s CV off his desk. Unemployment for you, my dear social networker.

The truth looks a little bit different

Funny that a recent study about Germany’s HR and the social web leads into a completely different direction: German HR people obviously don’t even have the slightest clue what this Web 2.0 thing is. According to the new IFOK report about HR and social media our party photos can be found by pretty much everyone…except HR guys. Even though 60% of all German HR professional think that the social web will be crucial for the future of HR, only 15% of all HR guys work with some sort (I wonder which kind of sort) of social media guideline. Only 30% of all companies in this study had any kind of social media strategy in place. And another study reveals: German social networker aren’t at all narcistic pretenders, they are pictured as. Most of them are just ordinary people, trying to stay in touch with their friends.

Dear German TV: Checking out somebody’s Xing or LinkedIn page is not the same as stalking someone personally. Believe it or not, there are different types of networks. And don’t insult my intelligence with this type of campaign against a new way of communication you are simply afraid of. Currently the German HR industry is far, far, far away from any kind of sophisticated monitoring or active engagement of applicants. By the way: The first HR guy* leaving a comment underneath this article will become this blog’s darling of the month. I swear!

And here is my party photo. Do whatever you want with it. Probably you won’t do anything, because you don’t read my blog…umm…no blog at all. :-)


* except the people I sent trackbacks to :-)

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  • Kate
    I'm researching social networking in different countries worldwide. This article along with the previous one you posted and the original one over at readwriteweb have been a help to me in getting an overview. But, not speaking German, I'm having trouble finding recent (2009ish) data about the relative size of different social networking sites in Germany. The best I can come up with is from 2008 from Ethority. Any links to send my way with more recent data and relative size of different social networks in DE? Is StudiVZ still bigger than Facebook?

    thanks for any and all help.
  • ghensel
    Hi Kate, I think.....no...umm....yes. Basically it's pretty hard to come to a conclusion because they use different metrics to prove that either FB or VZ are the biggest to date. You don't speak German, right? Because this article says Facebook has 5.7 million registered users in Germany (http://facebookmarketing.de/zahlen_fakten/faceb...) in Jan 2010. The VZ Group in comparison reports 15 million users on all three platforms combined (http://wiki.opensocial.org/index.php?title=VZ-N...). According to this report from last week Facebook leads in monthly users. We talk about 11 million vs 6 (FB vs Studi VZ) in Dec 2009 (http://meedia.de/nc/details-topstory/article/fa...). To sum it up...Facebook is about to take the lead. And they will probably dominate the German market pretty soon.
  • yes, thats why in Berlin twitter is more fun by night...
  • ghensel
    No comprende

    Sent with my iPhone.

    Am 21.11.2009 um 18:34 schrieb "Disqus" <
    >:
  • I'm a bit too young young and most likely missing the necessary experience to make a meaningful statement about the core of this topic. But I have two little things from my daily little student life:

    I love history. And yes I often watch that sort "historical content that should make us smart enough that we're not becoming Nazis again". Guido Knopp and friends.
    After watching them for a long time and reading many "real books" about the different topics I don't think they'll actually make us "smart" as in "intelligent".
    They give us the facts and "tell the story" BUT they don't really urge us to "think"!

    Same thing in school, we learn stuff from textbooks & teachers, get grades and so on.
    I was in Australia for half a year and I went to school there. They gave us books, too. But they were' not full of "informations" they were full of "sources".
    Other than in Germany the teachers didn't teach us about the "content" of the sources but rather how to interpret and analyze them.
    Me and my German lack of "individual creativeness", to quote you article, were quite disturbed by that.
    "Causeless paranoia" had made me "paranoid of everything new and different" ( straight from @jkleske in the comments)

    Back here in good old Germany I now learn that all this knowing and "smart-ass" talking, also known as "Klugscheißerei", is especially common on the internet- often suddenly causing my to "fremdschäm".
  • jayzon277
    Wow, this reminds me of a big discussion I had before going to a job interview for an internship at a quite well known agency. Some of my friends just couldn't understand why I wanted to go there without wearing a suit or at least a jacket. I wanted to wear quite appropriate clothing for the interview and the barcamp I attended later that day ;) – which resulted in a pullover, jeans & my converse shoes.

    They were really afraid I might get out of line & hence won't get the job. I told them that I wouldn't want to work at a company who values clothing over abilities – but they didn't agree at all. Anyway, they wished me luck but were still sceptical. After all, I had a great interview & got the internship ;) German Angst. Pfff.
  • ghensel
    German Angst in perfection. Correct.
  • True. Sad but true. But the good thing: the internet is international. So we have to adapt to this new behaviour. Some do sooner, some do later. :)
  • ghensel
    Well, we will adapt but leadership...?
  • The crazy part is that all these fears are not based on bad experiences but fictitious expectations about what might go wrong. If we had an exceptional high number of real cases of people losing their jobs because of social networks, it would be understandable to have this reluctance. But we are scared shitless by plain mind games. This is part of a very German characteristic. If we keep it under control, it makes us go deep on stuff. But most of the time its out of control and makes us paranoid of everything new and different. And that's why this country is constantly falling behind on everything connected to fast innovations.
  • ghensel
    The German Angst is to lose control. Its almost a fixation. Gotlieb Daimler wouldn't have invented anything in the 2000's because no bank would given him any money.
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Hi, I am Gerald Hensel and I am your host tonight.

Davaidavai is a blog about the stuff which drives my professional life. Digital ideas, social media, advertising in and beyond the 1s and 0s that seem to have taken control of pretty much everything… I work as strategic concept developer for Neue Digitale / Razorfish in Frankfurt, Germany. If you wamt to check out what I do beyond davaidavai, simply follow this link. And don't forget to send me a message...

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