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Des Walsh recently wrote a blog about our book, Communicating the American Way; I appreciate his comments (and I don’t know him) and for his taking the time to write a thoughtful review. He certainly is correct with some of his criticisms and I appreciate him pointing out items that don’t work for him. I don’t agree with his point, however, that when we talk about networking, we should have included Facebook, LinkedIn or other types of social networking – Web 2.0 – sites.
Networking in person still seems to resonate more with people, I think, maybe because it is a recognized good way of doing business in the Silicon Valley. I didn’t include online networking in the book, as I think that while social networking sites may often come from the US, it is not THE American Way and is popular around the world.
I had his whole review on this blog, but as I learned, it is against blog etiquette to post a whole blog taken from someone. So in the spirit of fairness, I will link to his blog, http://deswalsh.com/2008/01/31/communicating-successfully-in-corporate-america/ and hope that readers will visit his blog, leave a comment and help me make good on the blog etiquette I violated.
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Professional Business Communications Blog 
Thank you for responding to the observations in my post.
My point about social networking online was not so much about specific services such as Facebook or LinkedIn as with the point that “I looked in vain for any advice on online networking”. I’m sorry you chose to dismiss this observation so summarily. Given your thesis that, if I may paraphrase, anyone wanting to be effective and successful as part of corporate America needs to accept that the dominant and effective culture is male WASP, I simply don’t understand how business relationships online with Americans can escape completely the challenges you set out so persuasively in terms of the offline world.
I accept that it’s your view that in-person networking is more efficient than online networking, but I wonder where the evidence is.
On another note, I was disappointed to see, with reference to “international etiquette of (online) politeness”, that you chose to lift my whole blog post, rather than, as is both accepted practice and more appropriate in terms of copyright, quoting selectively from the post and linking to it (as you have admittedly done) so that others can read the full post on my blog. I would appreciate it if you could edit the post accordingly.
It’s true that social networking sites do tend to help bridge cultural barriers, and some sites do not have a distinctive nationalistic flavor. However, having observed the space for five years now, I have seen significant cultural communication issues on Ecademy, Xing and Orkut, each of which has a distinctive tone based on its country of origin (or in the case of Orkut, its country of heavy early adoption).
I think the bigger issue in online networking, though, is that online environments have their own form of etiquette and other cultural standards that people not familiar with it need to learn in order to be effective in it. Perhaps we need a “Communicating the Online Way”! 😉