I loved the view over Lac Leman from The Olympic Museum last week.
 I also loved to hear from a number of colleagues that social media is helping to make the communication function more relevant.
According to Prof. Paul Argenti, who delivered the keynote at the Lac Leman Communications Forum, social media is creating a new environment for business and communications. LinkedIn is used by 80% of the companies as a primary tool to find employees. YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine.
 I had a great time conducting a best practice session about Women and Work. One of the participants asked why we chose NING rather than Facebook to create a community around the project. I guess it was because NING allowed us to set up and manage our own social networking site with our own branding.
I found Médecins Sans Frontières’ break-up session on the comms lessons from the Haiti disaster absolutely fascinating.
Traffic to the MSF site went up by 3000% during the crisis. MSF was able to raise 90 million US$ in five weeks thanks to social media. They say that comms is now taken more seriously in the organisation as a result of this experience.
Here are their key learnings:
• Social media turns your press releases into causes.
• Push out a message but let it take a life of its own. Don’t control it. It’s too big brother.
• Keep a balance between social and conventional media. They feed each other all the time.
• Social media is about a reactive-proactive balance. You have to know when to push and when to pull.
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