As part of their research on online social net­works for the recently pub­lished book, “The Vir­tual Hand­shake”, David Teten and Scott Allen posted an arti­cle on French-American Net­works:

“Most French, besides the younger gen­er­a­tion, do not like to net­work online. Cul­tur­ally speak­ing, the French build trust by meet­ing a few times around a table or when they are intro­duced by a close con­tact. Unlike in the USA, where trust is granted auto­mat­i­cally when the par­ties agree on a win-win task, in France, it has to be earned by build­ing a per­sonal rela­tion­ship. As trust is earned mostly through non-verbal com­mu­ni­ca­tion, the French rely on online net­work­ing only when it is an exten­sion of an exist­ing rela­tion­ship or when they assume they share the same val­ues by being part of the same net­work or community.

In other words, online net­work­ing is more effec­tive for main­tain­ing a rela­tion­ship than for start­ing or build­ing a rela­tion­ship. That said, the younger gen­er­a­tion is much more Internet-friendly (and cer­tainly the French are very heavy users of text-messaging), how­ever, we can expect online net­work­ing to grow in impor­tance over time.”

Indeed, online French busi­ness and social net­works (Friend­set, Via­duc, 6nergies) have been grow­ing at a snail’s pace com­pared to their Amer­i­can coun­ter­parts. Tak­ing into account the French attach­ment to long-standing offline net­works and par­tic­u­larly to the ever-important school ties, a bet­ter strat­egy in France might be to bring exist­ing offline clubs online and to build a net­work of net­works along the way.