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.

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 used to be in love with the inverted pyramid.

It would give a structure to my stories. When I worked as a journalist, it would serve as the scaffolding of my day… organising my thoughts, the results of my research and the quotes I would get from my interviews.

However, may be…  it’s time to move on.

In an article just published in Communication World,  Angelo Fernando writes about how “in the future, every story will need to have a beginning, a middle and a hyperlink”.

Hyperlinks put our texts into perspective and connect them with “the broader universe in which your story will live”.

We have to start thinking of every text as “an opportunity to be woven into a larger, ever-developing story line”.

Angelo also talks about the new print-to-Web experience.

Esquire magazine has just come out with its first Augmented Reality issue. The cover and some of the pages have codes. When held up to a web cam, the codes let the reader interact with the content (as shown in the video below).

It still feels a bit gimmicky to me…. but we might be on to something here.

Where is Augmented Reality Journalism taking us… I can’t wait to find out.

Someone told me the other week that they have stopped e-mailing people. If they want to grab their attention and get an answer, they have to DM them on Twitter.

According to this updated version of the Social Media Revolution video, some universities are no longer distributing email accounts. They hand out e-Readers and iPads instead.

Facebook has added 200 million users in less than a year. And its fastest growing segment is 55-65 year old women!

I was also thrilled to discover that 78% of the 15 million articles on Wikipedia  are now non-English.

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.

The volcanic ash crisis has done wonders for convincing organisations that social media is what they want to use.

I love this interview on simpliFlying.com with Aurelie Valtat, online comms manager at EUROCONTROL, on how her organisation began to use Twitter and Facebook to communicate during the crisis.

The use of social media by airlines during the flight ban will be one of the topics at the Lac Leman Communications Forum on May 6th.

We will also discuss internet governance, the use of video in internal comms, internet comms in the shadow of disasters like the Haiti earthquake, the use of social media by the Vancouver Winter Olympics and more. I will moderate a best practice session on using Web 2.0 for events and will talk about the Women and Work project.

Click here to follow the Forum online. We will be tweeting at #lacleman.

The energy never fails to amaze me.

Whenever I meet with other professional women to discuss the challenges we are still encountering, I am always thrilled by how passionate we all feel about sharing our experience.

I moderated two panels last week. What a wonderful way to take my mind off volcanoes and their ashes…

On Wednesday, I discussed women in communication at the Simply Summit. The panellists were Christina Fee, Head of Internal Communications at BBC Technology, Sandra Macleod, Group CEO of Echo Research, Bieneosa Ebite, Managing Director of Bright Star Public Relations and Nicola Stevens, Executive Coach and former President of City Women’s Network.

Women make up 50% of the workforce in North America and Europe. Two thirds of all employees working in corporate communications are women, but director positions are still held mostly by men.

My panel the evening before on women’s economic empowerment at Chicago Booth School of Business brought together three European-based winners of the 2009 TIAW World of Difference 100 Awards: Kate Grussing, founder and managing director of headhunting firm Sapphire Partners, Mei Sim Lai OBE, founder and principal of chartered accountants LaiPeters & Co and Roswyn Hakesley-Brown CBE, Chair of the Patients Association and former President of the Royal College of Nursing.

Here are the main lessons I learned from these conversations:

• We already have plenty of data about the impact of the female economy (80% of all purchase decisions are made by women, etc.). We now need different arguments to build a stronger business case for women in leadership.
• Celebrate your individuality. Don’t try to be someone you are not.
• Be less modest. Let people know about the good things you have done.
• Stay in the corporate game but at your own terms. Instinct, guts and tenacity will get you there.

Last week, before volcano Eyjafjallajoekull erupted, when we still had a life… I went to listen to Roger Martin present his new book in London.

The Design of Business looks into the lack of innovation in corporations. Roger, who is the Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, analysed patterns of thinking that prevent companies from being innovative.

Design thinking is the result of balancing new knowledge (innovation) with current knowledge (efficiency). It focuses on accelerating the process that enables knowledge to advance from mystery to heuristic (a rule of thumb that guides you towards a solution) to algorithm (a replicable formula).

According to Roger, the main challenge of design thinkers is turning the future into the past. “’Prove’ and ‘if’ are the most dangerous words to innovation.”

I interviewed Roger for my book two years ago and what struck me already then is his ability to delve into human thinking and dissect it like a frog in a lab.

What really intrigues me are his efforts to understand how human knowledge progresses and how, by thinking harder about mysteries, we come to a different level of knowledge.

“The global labour market cannot do without the creativity of women.”

This was one of the main messages of the speech that Viviane Reding, Vice-President of the European Commission, gave on International Women’s Day this year.

Recently, I came across a study published by the Pew Research Centre in the US. They looked into what it takes to be a leader and identified eight leadership traits. Women performed much better than men in three of them. Creativity was one of them, together with compassion and being outgoing.

Creativity is a core skill in communications. Two thirds of the employees in corporate comms are women. So why are comms directors mostly men?

I will be moderating a panel on Weds, April 21 at the Simply Summit that will try to answer this question. If you work in comms or PR, I would love to hear your experiences and challenges. We will be broadcasting the discussion live over the internet and will take questions online. To register, leave a comment on this blog or DM @simplygroup.

I must admit that my first reaction when I heard of the  Heineken’s soccer swindle video was “Oh no…. not again…not another one about Italy and soccer fans!”

But then, the following day…. it was all over my Twitter, and I simply had to watch it!

@corporatecomms has called it an interesting case study in experiential marketing.

An important lesson from this campaign is probably about authority figures and the pressure we can exert through them.

Heineken used 100 girlfriends (because of Italy’s emphasis on family), 50 professors (because of the authority the country associates with academics) and several bosses (because of Italy’s hierarchical and… sometimes borderline feudal management structures) to convince 1,000 AC Milan fans to sacrifice a game on TV in favour of an evening of poetry and classical music.

This case study got me thinking… about how to apply the same pressure to rally support for CSR causes.

After all, the idea seems to work. More than 1.5 million people watched the fake concert on TV. Ten million read about the swindle in the news. And Heineken’s site registered 5 million unique visitors in the two weeks following the event.