Sosiaalinen media
Steve Jackson, M&M, 3.12.2009, 8:49Comment: Is Finland Anti-Social?
Finnish people are often described internationally as being anti-social,
stoic, reserved or shy and being imported meat myself I would have agreed in
the first few months of my life in Finland back in 2002. I found it very
difficult for instance to start a pointless conversation with a stranger,
something quite ordinary in my native territory of Sunderland in the UK.
Small talk is not common in Finland.
I pretty quickly found myself looking at my feet in a lift full of people, saying nothing to taxi drivers and believing that if a stranger smiled at me he was a) drunk b) insane c) foreign or d) drunk, insane and foreign!
So when I was asked what I thought about the adoption of ‘social media’ in Finland I was curious to see if the use of social platforms reflected this stereotypical Finnish attitude.
So more out of curiosity than anything else I started digging.
Can you dig it?
The great thing about the Internet is you can usually find answers about anything to some degree if you dig hard enough. Answering whether Finland is anti social or not would require some ground rules.
I narrowed the scope down to two major social platforms, Facebook and Twitter. While this doesn’t encompass the whole online social scene it should give us an indication of the consumer trends, as they are the two fastest growing social platforms worldwide.
Next I’d compare Finlands’ adoption to its Nordic neighbours, namely Sweden, Norway and Denmark.
About Steve
Steve Jackson is a well known web analyst, author and speaker living in Helsinki, Finland. A pioneer in the web analysis field, he established one of the first European web analytics consultancies (Aboavista), later acquired by Satama (now Trainers' House) in 2006.
He now serves as Director of Business Insights at Kwantic a business optimization agency focusing on improving e-commerce, generating more or better leads and driving more engaged traffic to media websites to improve advertising revenues.
In 2008 he wrote his first book Cult Of Analytics published on May 14th 2009.
He also writes his own blog focusing on web analytics and was co-founder of the Web Analytics Association Finnish presence in 2005 and later co-chair for the WAA in the Nordic and International level.
The website CheckFaceBook is an independent site designed by Nick Gonzalez a noted web analyst specializing in social media from the US. His site gets its data directly from the Facebook advertising tool and displays adoption per country as an absolute number and as a percentage of the countries online population.
When I looked (3rd Nov 09) Finland had 1.3 million Facebook accounts equating to 31.62% of its online population. On the face of it this sounds quite high when you consider Finland only has a population of around 5 million people, however when you compare this number to other countries a different picture emerges.
Norway has the widest adoption with 52.16% of its online population having a Facebook page, followed by Denmark that has 49.06% then Sweden has 39.01%. This means that Finland is behind its neighbours.
Toivon, että tässä on tarkoitettu sanaa "asocial" eikä "antisocial". Toisin kuin monet kuvittelevat, merkitysero on valtava. Antisocial tarkoittaa lähinnä psykopaattia.
This gentleman is from Sunderland of all the places and so unfortunetely his analysis about social behaviour could not be more biased. I only ask what have Sunderland and a three pin plug got in common? Well, their both useless in Europe...
Steve - I hope you don't mind if I ask this - in those first months of your life in Finland back in 2002, how many times did you try to crack up a conversation with a stranger in Finnish? Did you know any Finnish back then?
While the stereotype of Finns being shy and asocial does hold some truth, I find that many immigrants in Finland forget that the situation would be different if they spoke the language. When I lived in Finland, I had no trouble at all starting casual conversations with complete strangers (and the strangers weren't drunk, insane, or foreigners) when I did it in Finnish. If you tried to start a conversation with a stranger in the UK in German, what do you think would be the response? ;)
However, if we go with the assumption that in the "offline world" Finns are often of the asocial type, then I would think that the adoption rate of social tools online could actually be higher there than in other places, because it's in some ways easier to "get social" online.
First of all, I'm ashamed on behalf of the other comments so far.
Having an actual insight and analysis, rather than just opinion or gossip, the only things the first commenters took from your article is beyond me.
It's like presenting an great idea and the client focuses on the punctuations.
In short I think yours was well worth the read.
Thanks for the comments.
@V - Yes you're right. Sunderland are useless in Europe.
@Karri - No I didn't try to strike up a conversation because (as I say later in the post) I have no skills whatsoever in Finnish and don't pretend to. 2 year old Finns can still hold better conversation than I can and I've been here for 7 years. I love Finns and Finland otherwise I wouldn't have been here since 2002. I think however you're over emphasizing the point around the headline and opening paragraph rather than the other 1500 words.
@CutCopyPaste: Thanks for the support! Someone who gets what I was trying to say.
