It is only the 3rd time it happens since 1900 and it won’t happen again till after 2030.

I am talking about Valentine’s Day and Chinese New Year being celebrated this year on the same day.
My friend Emma wrote that both celebrations are filled with the same intentions: sharing love and good fortune.

 
On Sunday, I will be sending love and good wishes to my Chinese friends who are so close to my heart: my co-author Yang-May, Felicia in Hong-Kong, Emma in Toronto and Xiuwei and QiQi  in China’s Hebei province.
I wish we could all sit around the same table and eat some wonderful Chinese food. I am sure we will in our thoughts….

Once a journalist always a journalist.

That’s why my loyalties are sometimes split between journos and bloggers.

But last week, I had this incredible urge to hide my journalistic past…

I am talking about the FT article discussing… the internet in China (did we have time to talk about anything else last week!?). I have the feeling there are a number of things Westerners are not getting quite right.

The Kitten Killer of Hangzhou is one of them.

The FT has thrown this interesting internet phenomenon into the aren’t-the-Chinese-weird- and-a-little-primitive section and spewed the following sentence:

“Uncritical adoption of information from unchecked sources makes it easier to create a herd effect on the internet in China than elsewhere.”

Well, it’s not quite like that…

The video of a woman killing a kitten with her stiletto hills is no trivia. As my co-author Yang-May wrote in our book, the difference between this video and others of this kind on the Chinese web is that it became “the icon of a rallying call across China to stop animal abuse”.
As Paul Littlefair, senior programme manager in the International Department of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), mentioned in an interview with Yang-May, “this video was a turning point for animal welfare in China.”

The woman’s actions were discussed on blogs all over the country. As a result, an increasing number of papers were published in Chinese universities on the subject of the use of animals and its ethics. Searches for the words “animal welfare” on Baidu reached 1 million pages (up from 100,000 in 2005).
And in 2008, the RSPCA and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Institute of Law teamed up and hosted an international conference in Beijing to discuss animal welfare legislation for China.

So disappointing none of this was mentioned in the FT …. 

Would you believe there are still people out there who criticise social media for not being as accurate as print media….

Wild Swans, the Chinese family saga, has always been one of my favorite books.

I am really excited I will be meeting the author in Turin in March. Jung Chang will deliver the keynote at the Women & Work conference, organised by the European Training Foundation.

I am afraid… I will have to do the tacky thing and… ask her for an autograph for my father who also loves Wild Swans.

Preparations for the conference are going at full speed. We have just launched a discussion platform on ning.

If you care and blog about women in education and employment or if you do projects/research/policy work/etc. in this area, you are welcome to join us at Women and Work 2010.

You might also be interested in two White Papers the European Training Foundation published on women and work in Egypt and Jordan.

We have just started a discussion on women in the informal sector and the need for an inclusive definition of work. Do you have one? Would you like to share it with us?

For the first time, a report published by Community Business and Cranfield University looks at the representation of women on the corporate boards of Hong Kong’s top companies as listed on the Hang Seng Index (HIS).

Out of a total of 585 directorships on the HIS, 52 (8.9%) are held by women. This percentage is comparable to Australia (8.3%) but lower than the UK (11.7%), US (14.5%) and Canada (15%).

Twenty-eight of the 42 HIS-listed companies have women on their boards. At the top of the list is China Construction Bank Corporation with 5 women on a board of 17. Bank of China is second with 3 women out of 15 board members and Cheung Kong Holdings is third with 4 women on a board of 21.

The women interviewed for the study were surprised by its finding: 8.9% is a lower percentage than they expected.

The reasons mentioned for this result were the limited talent pool, Hong Kong’s male dominant society and the fact that women tend not to be as well networked as men and don’t get considered for board positions.

What is Web 3.0 going to be about?

I gave a talk yesterday together with @fusionview and @simplygroup about social media in Asia and the lessons for the UK.

One of the questions we were asked was about the role of mobile phones and the future of the interactive web.

In 2000, one-quarter of all mobile phones was in the hands of people in developing countries. By the beginning of 2009, this figure had risen to three-quarters of a total of 4 billion phones.
In the developing world, mobile phones are being used for all kinds of transactions from money transfers to the distribution of agricultural information and farming tips.
Experts believe that Africa and several parts of Asia will leapfrog PCs and go straight to mobile phones as a means of interacting online.

Are emerging markets going to lead the mobile revolution in the Web 3.0 era?

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!).

Is it for real or not?

Every time I discuss the interactive web with fellow communicators, one of the first questions on people’s mind is “how are we going to convince senior management of the importance of introducing social media”.

I had a great time last week talking to IABC Belgium about International Communications Strategy and the different case studies contained in the book.

My advice to Cheryl who asked me the famous question is to use the information and data available to make the business case for Web 2.0.

While in the West we are still desperately trying to measure the ROI of social media, China has been able to figure out a way to track online conversations and link them to purchase decisions.

According to CiC, the Chinese internet community supports the “most expansive and developed participation architecture in the world”.

The influence of user-generated content (blogs, discussions on bulletin boards, etc.) on the decisions of Chinese consumers has been estimated at 58% while it is less than 20% in the US.

There are lessons to be learned for communicators.

For example, the same method could be used in internal communications to track employees’ interactions on online forums and assess their attitude towards different corporate initiatives.

(in the photo with me from left to right, Sung-Joo Kim, CEO of MCM Holdings and PAWA Founder & President, Betty Yao MBE, PAWA Co-Founder & Chair of the Management Committee, Mei Sim Lai OBE, Diane Morris, TIAW President and Yang-May)

Did you know that 2/3 of the world population live in Asia and half of them are women?

Yang-May and I attended the launch of the Pan Asian Women’s Association (PAWA) last night at Asia House.

PAWA is creating a platform for women from across Asia – from Japan to Iran – to share ideas, talk about common concerns and mentor the next generation.

A number of highly accomplished female business leaders these days come from Asia. Thirty five per cent of the 50 top women in world business featured on Saturday in the Financial Times come from the region.

At the launch, I enjoyed listening to Sonia Lo. Sonia was born in Korea and has worked in international finance for Google and United News and Media. She is the founder of London-based Chalsys Capital Partners.

Her advice to professional women is that “pushing a closed door sometimes is not the answer”. Sonia uses self-esteem as her strongest motivator.

I was watching the comedian Lee Evans over the weekend (I am a great fan and … we were born on the same day!).

He was saying how he always prepares tons of notes for his shows only to realise later that they don’t make sense.

I know how he feels…

No matter how often I give a presentation… the Germanic part of my upbringing always forces me to spend hours at my desk rehearsing again and again…

When I’ve had enough, I switch off and start thinking of my audience. I once heard that the secret of presenting is loving your audience.

I know it sounds corny…. But it works!

It’s not difficult to look forward to my audience this week.

On Thursday, I will be giving a presentation about International Communications Strategy for the Belgian chapter of IABC.

It was in Brussels that I joined IABC 12 years ago. I served on the local board for a long time. So I am really looking forward to seeing my former fellow board members Lyndon, Sam, Ilze and all the others.

I have started to discuss ICS’s main points on IABC Belgium’s Ning.

As usual, I was asked about the development of internet marketing in Asia. Part of my talk will be about the interactive web in China and how its communities are changing the relationship between people and brands.

You can read more about what Yang-May and I think of internet marketing at DMI online.

The WB expects the global economy to contract for the first time since WWII in 2009 and world trade is to decline to the lowest level in 80 years.

A trade dispute has just exploded between Washington and Beijing following the imposition of tariffs on Chinese tires imported into the US.

China’s internet community has gone viral on the topic. And many in the West are thinking. “Isn’t this type of reaction a bit out of date? Given China’s economic power, if they want to sell tires in another country, they can just go ahead and buy a tire manufacturer there. The West has enough broke businesses.”

With the G20 summit opening tomorrow in Pittsburgh, people are wondering what kind of world the aftermath of the financial crisis is likely to produce in the years to come.

The tendency, as we have seen, is to go tribal.

Forbes is heralding the end of Thomas Friedman’s “Flat World” and the beginning of a new “era of decreasing trade”.

I can’t help sensing a strong feeling of hysteria around the whole thing.

Yes, the world is changing. May be much faster than Friedman or anybody else had predicted. But the answer is not to find refuge in protectionism.

Times call for much more creative solutions. Let’s see what comes out of tomorrow and Friday.