Powerful stories are the life and blood of communication.

And this particular story is about the life and blood of a tormented society. It is an incredible one. One that gives us hope. One that proves that it is possible to transcend violence.

12-year-old Ahmed Chatib was shot by Israeli soldiers in the Jenin refugee camp in 2005. Despite this horrible tragedy, his father Ismail decided to donate the organs of his son. Today, four children from different corners of Israel’s diverse society are alive thanks to Ismail’s compassion.

One of the beneficiaries of Ahmed’s organs, featured in this powerful video, called Ismail’s decision “not a normal thing”.

How refreshing it is to hear about people acting in a different way when confronted with hatred.

I decided to blog about Ahmed’s story today because the Mideast peace talks are about to resume in Washington. And because I want to believe that there might be more people out there like his father. After all “not normal things” do happen.

There is an expression in German I often use: Ein Tropfen auf den heiβen Stein.

Which means something like “a drop in the bucket”.

That’s how I feel, when, after having worked on a human rights project, I hear about the ignorance and prejudices that are still affecting the communities we were trying to help.

I was venting my frustration with a former colleague before the holidays. He managed to cheer me up by telling me that many drops do fill the bucket. His comment put a smile on my face.

Unfortunately, that smile disappeared last night.

I was reading about Bundesbank’s board member Thilo Sarrazin and his recent remarks about minorities and integration into German society.

In a series of interviews for the launch of his book, Sarrazin said that “All Jews share a certain gene”. He went on to add that ‘Muslim immigrants don’t integrate as well as other immigrant groups across Europe. The reasons for this are apparently not based on their ethnicity but are rooted in their culture of Islam”.  

What a nightmare for reputation managers at the Bundesbank!

A central bank needs board members able to represent a country at international level and inspire confidence in its democratic values. It doesn’t need someone running amok like Sarrazin. His remarks are shocking and shameful.

I know what I am going to tell my former colleague next time we meet. We do need to keep filling that bucket…. only we might have to start closer to home.

All it takes to introduce social media in a somewhat conservative organisation is a communicator with a real understanding of publics and a passion.

Ian Andersen, External Communications Adviser at the European Commission’s Directorate-General (DG) for Interpretation, has both.

His part of the EU administration runs an army of 4,000 interpreters who provide heads of state and experts from all over Europe with 250,000 interpreted days every year in 18,000 meetings and 23 languages.

The Interpreting for Europe page on Facebook, has more than 8,000 fans.

It was a presentation at IABC’s International Conference a couple of years ago to convince Ian to embrace this social networking site. That’s where he heard about Generation Y and realised that it was time to engage with this group on their terms.

DG Interpretation’s public is aged between 18 and 28. “You have to hit them after high school when they are looking into studying languages or right after university when they can enrol in a program for interpreters”, says Ian.

The purpose is to create an awareness among young people that they can do fun things with languages, they can get a good job while doing something for the future of mankind. “We need to attract people to the profession”.

DG Interpretation is facing a challenge.  A wave of interpreters is scheduled to retire in the next 10 years (a massive amount of hiring went on in early 1980s) and universities are not able to keep up with demand.

Cultural Specificities

Ian’s first professional encounter with social media was a short video posted on YouTube in 2008. It portrays the life of a Latvian interpreter in Brussels. DG Interpretation had problems finding interpreters from this country and wanted to encourage young people to enrol in language studies at universities in Riga. The result was immediate. “The number of applications quadrupled! And their quality was twice as high”.

One thing Ian realised very quickly is that YouTube videos meant for a certain country have to reflect its cultural specificities. “You first have to look at the issues and get a good feel for prejudices”. 

In the UK for example, DG Interpretation had to fight the misconception that interpreters have a posh English accent and are always bilingual. It had to go beyond the class barrier. That’s why it showed interpreters playing football in its video  (44,200 views) for the British market.

French Glamour

The approach used for France was completely different. “You had to show that interpreting is a high-flying job, at the center of things, otherwise you were not going to attract quality”.

The French video (21,500 views), which is somewhat more glamorous, was launched at the EC representation in Paris. This time, DG Interpretation used the alarmist card, arguing with the press that French might disappear from EU meetings if French people stop learning languages. 
Imagine the reactions! DG Interpretation got coverage on an influential Liberation blog, while Le Monde and Le Figaro continued writing about the impending threat to the future of the French language for 6 months.

Building a Community

After YouTube, it was time to graduate to another platform. “YouTube is not sufficiently participatory. We wanted to conduct conversations and create a community.”

Interpreting for Europe was launched in November 2009. In the first few months, it attracted an average of 50 fans per day. Ian has been using a combination of messages posted on the page, Facebook ads and conventional press relations. He also uses the Twitter page @euinterpreters as a “radio station” to broadcast news to some 300 followers.

Ian has an intern manning Facebook, but still spends 20% of his time answering questions and producing content. “We check every reply with the head of unit responsible. We keep our answers light but not too humorous… and we use smileys and winks to show that we are normal people.”

Measuring Success

DG Interpretation is planning a survey in the autumn to measure the impact of its social media campaign. “We will be surveying people who apply with us after university and will ask them where they first heard about the profession.”

The signs look promising… applications at the Institut Supérieur d’Interprétation et de Traduction in Paris went up by 140% since the beginning of Ian’s campaign…

I am confident the cover of this week’s issue of Time will enter the annuals of PR as one of the most obscene attempts to use women for promoting wars.

The face of Aisha with her nose cut off by the Taliban in Uruzgan for running away from her abusive in-laws offers a strong and devastating image. I don’t doubt the horrors she and many other women in Afghanistan are going through.

But I do agree with The Guardian’s Priyamvada Gopal, who wrote that “… invoking the condition of women to justify occupation is a cynical ploy and the Time cover already stands accused of it”.                                                                 

From my contacts with women organisations operating on the ground in Central Asia, I know that the less publicity you get for your work with abused women, the longer you can help them. If you want your work in troubled regions to be sustainable, you need to remain under the radar screen.

So what is Time trying to accomplish?

… apart from marketing the war with lines like “for Afghanistan’s women, an early withdrawal of international forces could be disastrous”.

One of my favourite movies is The Fog of War, a documentary in which former Secretary of Defense under President Kennedy Robert McNamara talks about the link between the human psyche and war. He believes wars are so complicated that our judgement and understanding are not adequate to comprehend all its aspects and implications. Our natural tendency therefore is to oversimplify.

The fog sorrounding Time must be particularly thick at the moment.

If you write a blog, you know how addictive statistics can be…

I am so thrilled… I made it! This blog registered 16,480 unique visitors in July!

Exceeding the 16,000 mark is an exhilarating feeling.

I am so grateful to my co-author Yang-May for convincing me to start  X-Culture in 2007.  This blog has enabled me to find my voice after years of practicing financial journalism and hiding behind mergers & acquisitions and derivatives.

Two years ago, it became a lifeline during the many long days I spent in isolation writing our book. I used X-Culture to float ideas. The comments I received were like a bridge to the world outside my study… which seemed so distant to me at the time.

And …it’s always exciting when someone I have not met before tells me that they feel they already know me because they have read my blog.

X-Culture is really the closest you can get to a window into my mind and soul.

By using Feedjit, I can check the countries where my visitors are located. It is such a strange feeling to know that thousands of people from Hawaii to Pakistan are reading what I think and feel.

I would like to thank my family, friends and colleagues for inspiring many of my posts over the past three years. I am also grateful to my fellow social networkers for linking to my blog and spreading its messages on Twitter and other platforms.

And of course I would like to thank all of you for reading me and for travelling with me on this incredible journey.

When budgets are tight why not use your employees to sell your brand?

That’s what Cathay Pacific is currently doing with its new campaign: “Meet the team that goes an extra mile”.

The Asian airline has interviewed about 100 of its ethnically diverse staff and their short biographies are available on its site.

Nothing new about that… I can hear you say. Corporations have used employees again and again to portray their values and reach out to customers.

However, the tone of Cathay’s ads is different. Gone is the glitzy glamour usually associated with airline advertising. The photos of Cathay’s employees are like a series of snapshots into their private lives. The tone is candid and refreshing.

Take, for example, Irene Concepcion from the Philippines. In her profile, she writes about standing up to her father who didn’t want her to become a flight attendant. She is portrayed in the lotus pose wearing her yoga outfit.

The spirit of “Meet the team that goes an extra mile” reminds me of the tone used by Asian bloggers. Social media in this part of the world often serve as an outlet for discussing topics that are not openly talked about in society.

Whenever I go and visit my parents in Italy, I always manage to run into the same uninvited guest…

Time with its invasive personality ends up dominating my thoughts and many of the things I do.

I can’t open a drawer in my old bedroom without stumbling into an object whose life has been sucked dry by the passing of time… Take an old bottle of perfume… its content lost its soul long ago and no longer brings back memories from my last year in high school… 

The day I arrived, an old friend called. We had not talked in 27 years. After hearing my voice and a few minutes on the phone, she said she was overwhelmed… it had been too long and she needed… more time.

I had had enough… That’s when I decided to look for something that would help me tame time.

So I drove to Verona to visit my 102-year-old grandmother… who, I figured, might know one thing or two about keeping time at bay. I asked her if she could give me my grandfather’s watch, one he used to wear over 40 years ago.

May be I have fallen for the endless series of Swiss watch ads that embrace me every time I land at Geneva airport…

May be I am a sucker for their tag lines…  But something in me desperately wants to believe that my grandfather’s watch was built for the generations to come.

At the jewellery shop where I took it to be polished, they told me that normally watches of this brand last for 100 years.

Who knows… I might have finally found a way to bridge time!

The Czech media have a special place in my heart.

I have been following their evolution ever since I left Prague in the mid-1990s.

That’s why I was delighted to see an article in the weekend magazine of Hospodarske Noviny about children with disabilities… a topic which used to be taboo in Czech society… an ugly hangover from the previous regime and its tacky iconography of proletarian heroes with perfect bodies.

Unfortunately, my delight did not last for very long…

My jaw dropped as soon as I began reading the subheading:”…Jaké to je, když se do normální rodiny narodí někdo nenormální (What happens, when someone not normal is born to a normal family).

I couldn’t believe the language. The fact that it is still being used is a slap in the face of people like my friend Milena Černà, who since the fall of the Berlin Wall has been campaigning for the acceptance of the rights of disabled children and adults.

Milena manages Vybor dobrè vůle, a foundation originally set up by Olga Havlova (Vaclav Havel’s first wife) and has been doing heroic work for the integration of the disadvantaged.

The article I read is a sign that something is moving… but we are clearly not there yet.

May be we should drop the word “normal” altogether…

I can highly recommend “The Four Walls of My Freedom”, a book in which Donna Thomson offers us a new perspective on being human… one that goes beyond “normality”.

If you have worked in communications for some time, you might be used to schizophrenic scenarios…

The findings of the European Communicator Monitor 2010 will come as no surprise to you then.

The majority (72%) of comms professionals in Europe believe that their function has become more important since the recession.

However… only 22% have been able to increase their resources. 37% have lost compared to other functions.

What is it that business leaders still don’t understand about communications? What do we need to do to educate them?

The communication departments that have fared best are those with strong focus on supporting organisational goals  (for example engaging employees).

68% of the respondents believe websites and intranets are important tools for addressing different publics (compared to 59% in 09). But less than 1/3 of the organisations have already introduced social media. Open dialogue without control and the ease of spreading information are still perceived as threats.

And yes… in case you were wondering. . The glass ceiling in comms still exists. The average salary of women is still lower than those of their male colleagues… on every hierarchical level.

I knew this would happen… it was just a matter of time.

I am talking about my father joining Facebook and commenting on my posts.

Over the weekend, he and a former high-school friend of mine were congratulating me on an article I wrote… and this is so surreal.

Interacting with my family and old friends in the same space as we used to do 27 years ago (before I left Italy) is just so strange.

It feels like continuing the conversations we were having every time my father would pick me up from school… on hot June days… before we would all part for the glorious Italian summer.

Is someone out there studying the space-time dimension of Facebook?

This social networking site is certainly doing something to the psyche of people like me… who, after being gone for years, all of a sudden, are invited to sit again at a table they thought no longer existed.

Reconnecting with my high-school friends has been like being washed by a wave of emotions. It’s like having my little private group of cheerleaders. The other day before giving a speech, I closed by eyes and thought of my friend Paola, who used to be my best friend back then and who wrote on my wall that she had always known I would do great things (whatever those might be…).

May be what’s happening to me is just one of the many examples behind the success of Facebook, which has now grown to 500 million users worldwide (up from 200 million 15 months ago).

70% of them are outside the United States. While the number of users in the US doubled in 09 (to 123 million), it more than quadrupled in Germany (to 19 million).

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg expects the company to reach one billion users. It is the stories behind this figure that I long to hear some day.