In July O’Reilly organized a Community Leadership Summit in San José. It lasted for two days and around 200 community managers showed up. As it was organized as an unconference, I did myself lead one of the workshops. The subject: cultural differences and communities.

These are the main conclusions from this workshop:

– Even inside the US there are huge differences between the two main social networks. Facebook’s members have higher incomes than those of MySpace. This can be related to the fact that schools and jobs are not so important in MySpace’s profiles. Also, MySpace has more black and latinos than Facebook, so differences between races are being replicated online.

– On the opposite, as Linkedin acts a complementary network, there aren’t big cultural differences in this site. This means that people use one network as their main one, and this is never Linkedin.

– Facebook is the main network worldwide, though it’s having a hard time in some markets: Asia, Germany and Brazil. The Brazilian case is very interesting. The only reason why Orkut is so important over there is that some years ago bandwidth was a scarce resource in Brazil, so that Brazilians did not really notice how bad Orkut’s servers were going. In other countries, people stopped using Orkut because the site was not very reliable.

– Some times, social networks have to attend a very specific request from a single country in which it is getting passionate users. This is what happened to Meetup.com in Italy, where blogger Beppe Grillo was creating meetings even though the site was only in English. This is probably why Orkut was rapidly translated to Portuguese.

– Americans don’t like seeing foreign languages in their sites. They try to avoid this as much as possible, as many people think it looks like spam.

– Americans want to expand abroad but many times don’t do it because they don’t know how to handle it. At the end, they realize that they need local people, which becomes quite expensive. Anyway, they realize that universities are a very good place to propagate social networks.