When I read Jay Alabaster’s article on the Japanese behavior on social networking websites, it made me realise how difficult it must be for some companies to get any customer insight from their customer base.
According to Jay, “the vast majority of mixi’s roughly 15 million users don’t reveal anything about themselves” and keep in tight groups, to which he adds that “fewer than half of Match’s paying members in Japan are willing to post their photos, compared with nearly all members in the U.S”.
Must be so frustrating to sit on so much data and not be able to get any useful insight extracted. I wonder how companies like pixi.jp handle it, considering users have fake profiles, or then companies like match.com considering how differently users behave from culture to culture around the same service.
