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.

Once you get over the slightly annoying voice…  this video is great at explaining the transformation the publishing industry is currently going through.

I had been looking for something like this. Something that would describe how publishing might be dying unless we change the way we look at the reader.

Have we entered an era where content is more important than packaging? Say goodbye to good old glossy annual reports!

“We are not dealing with a recovery from a recession, but with a reframing of the world. Our world has changed for ever.”

I heard Kevin Roberts, CEO Worldwide of Saatchi & Saatchi, speak at my livery  yesterday.
He believes that brands are dead. They have been commoditised. These days what communicators need to create are lovemarks, able to command loyalty beyond reason.
Social media are here to help. If our message is strong enough, consumers will spread it over the interactive web and do all the work for us.
I know it’s difficult to give up control of our brand but – Roberts is convinced - it is the only way.
Think of Obama and his election campaign. Roberts believes that he was not elected by marketing but by the creation of a “viral movement”.
Lovemarks  are built on respect and love. To create them, you have to use:

• Mystery: keep it fresh, collect compelling stories
• Sensuality: in our world our 5 senses are engaged simultaneously not in sequence (think iPod and what makes it irresistible)
• Intimacy: show audiences that you really understand them and care about their problems.

Communicators these days are asked to deliver sight, sound and motion simultaneously. Kids are the best example of an audience that lives in a sisomo world.  And mobile phones are still hugely underused. Roberts calls them the “emotional landline”.  Are they going to be the future of corporate communications? Will Web 3.0 be entirely about them?

I remember a time when word of mouth used to be this highly esoteric thing everybody feared and nobody could really describe.

Not any longer.

According to this new version of the “Did you know” video, social media is the connection between word of mouth and real money.

25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content. 34% of consumers trust peer recommendations, while only 14% trust advertising!

In the future we will no longer search for products and services…. they will find us through social media, similarly to what is already happening to news.

And if you still have doubts about the power of online word of mouth… check out this wisdom from the # 1 internet content creator in the world (China!).

Interbrand’s Chairman Rita Clifton believes that good branding is the only way of generating sustainable value.

I heard Clifton speak at my livery last night about the winners and losers of the international brand world.

US brands account for 51 of the world’s leading top 100 brands, Germany for 11, France for eight and the UK for only four.

The most dramatic entry into this league has been Google. Clifton attributes its success to the consistency between external messages and internal culture. “It’s no longer possible to look nice on the outside and have an axe-murdering culture on the inside.”

Apple is another winner. Its design has brought humanity to technology. “You just want to lick their products!”
If you are a brand owner, you have to remember three key points: clarity (as to what you stand for), consistency and leadership (to rally people around brand values).

Yang-May and I believe that the interactive web has made it possible for the man/woman in the street to promote their personal brand online the same way celebrities and products do. Web 2.0 has levelled the playing ground. This is one of the main points we will be making this evening as part of our guest lecture at London Metropolitan University.

When I was little, I invented my own foreign language that I would speak when nobody was around.

It was such a long time ago that I had almost forgotten how it sounded.

The other week when I was preparing for the “Brand New You World” Global Telesummit, it came back to me. I am glad I mentioned it in my presentation because one of the participants found it really intriguing.

I wanted to share this childhood memory because, sometimes, it is through little things that we discover our passion.

At the Telesummit, I spoke about my passion for understanding other cultures. And I explained why I believe the corporate world is in desperate need of cross-cultural skills.

As Thomas Friedman writes in his book ‘The world is flat’, the traditional economic and political structures of nation-states are disappearing. This can be incredibly disruptive to those traditional institutions that have been doing business for decades and are slow to make the transition.

To this phenomenon we have to add another destabilising factor: Web 2.0. Culture these days is not only about the culture of nations, it includes on-line cultures created by clusters of people, who use social media and come together in new groupings.

Bernadette Martin, who interviewed me during the Telesummit, asked what we need to do in order to develop a sensibility for other cultures. I answered by quoting an article published recently in a magazine I have the great pleasure of co-editing, IABC’s Communication World. Genevieve Hilton, senior vice president of Ketchum in Hong Kong, writes that what we need to develop is cultural proficiency: Cultural proficiency doesn’t mean memorising every cultural nuance of every market. It’s knowing when to listen, when to ask for help, and when finally to speak.

This is not only sound advice but also a convincing way of defining what our multicultural business world needs today.

I had a great time speaking at the Global Telesummit.

Many thanks to those of you who listened in. And thanks to Susan Guarneri for referring to XCulture as “a must-read on cross-cultural communication”.

I read in Business Week last summer that we are at the “crossroads where globalisaton meets Web 2.0″ and we are witnessing “the demise of the one-way globalisation” the Western world has been driving.

The need to understand new cultural contexts has never been greater.

I will be speaking about this and more at “A Brand You World”, the Global Telesummit that will be held on November 8th in the form of a free Teleconference that is expected to draw more than 100,000 professionals from throughout the world.

I will share the lessons I learned from my years in post-communist Eastern Europe where I had to tune into a complex society. Working as a reporter in a place where speaking openly to foreigners had been tabu for 50 years, I had to learn to listen very carefully instead of asking questions.

I still use the “tricks” I learned then every time I have to operate in a culture I am not so familiar with.

In my session I will cover how to:

* Develop the kind of sensibility needed to operate in a cross-cultural context
* Identify and nurture the skills required to build an international career
* Relate to the needs of employers/clients/investors/etc. in the global village
* Use international networks, both on-line and off-line, to promote your personal brand, jump-start your career or grow your business

I am delighted to be able to contribute to an event that is encouraging participants to make a donation to Kiva, an organisation that provides microfinance loans to enterpreneurs in developing countries.