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.

I have always been a great believer in the communication potential of microcredit.

Today, I was reading about the first leadership course for microfinance executives run by Wharton’s Aresty Institute for Executive Education.

Karim Fanous of Egypt’s  Lead Foundation, one of the participants, mentioned in the interview the importance of communication as one of the main lessons he is taking from the course. “We need to raise awareness about what microfinance is, how it impacts so many people and how it’s absolutely vital.”

I was delighted to read this…The importance of communication for microcredit organisations is one of the main messages of our book.

The reason why communication for microfinance is so exciting is that you get to tell the stories behind the loans, the difference these make to the lives of the borrowers, the impact these have on their communities…

As Mary Ellen Iskenderian, President of Women’s World Banking, said in the article, microcredit is “a high-touch business with high operating costs because of this very deep relationship with the client”. Communicators should use this relationship as a source of stories.

Stories give a voice to the soul of a project. They create an emotional appeal. They are a powerful tool for spreading the message of microcredit.

As Fanous said, “people need to know these are professionally run institutions with a social mission”. That’s what good business communication is for.

Seventy-five million children worldwide are out of school. Educating every one of them would result in 7 million less cases of HIV-AIDS in the next decade.

Queen Rania’s speech today at LeWeb went beyond statistics.

She believes that “digitalising ourselves has heightened our instinct to be selfless”. Because of her active presence on Twitter and Facebook, she is often called the “monarch with a mission” .

She had two questions this morning: Can the real-time web bring real-time change? Can it tackle some of the big challenges facing the global community (poverty, education, disease, etc)?

The time has come to move  from virtual activism to real action. That’s the purpose of the 1GOAL initiative, a project Queen Rania co-founded together with the Global Campaign for Education, in partnership with FIFA.

1GOAL will use the energy and tools of the interactive web to collect 30 million signatures by the end of next year’s World Cup in South Africa. These will then be used to push world leaders to act and make education for all a reality.
Queen Rania has asked bloggers to support 1GOAL by dedicating their sites for one day to the initiative. She is asking for ideas that can be twittered or direct-messaged to @QueenRania.

XCulture is definitely in!

The nuns where I went to school would not have wanted me anywhere near this.

But I have to admit it… in the era of social media, this is exactly the type of ad you want to see.
The Brazilian SOS Mata Atlantica Foundation, which works for the protection of the Atlantic Forest, has developed an ad encouraging Brazilians to save water by…. peeing in the shower.

Children’s voices provide the narration, while cartoon drawings of different sorts of people - including Ghandi and an alien – encourage the viewer to pee in the shower.

The organisation claims that if a household avoids one flush a day, it can save up to 4,380 litres every year.
Don’t get me wrong…. I am not entirely sure how I feel about this…
But the ad intrigues me.

You just have this urge to post it on your FB and circulate it among your friends.  This is what Web 2.0 is all about.

I just learned on Twitter that today is Interdependence Day, the idea being that what one person does has an effect on the entire world.

I guess we really learned that lesson during the subprime crisis and its aftermath, which is still wreaking havoc.

It is not surprising that, with the international banking community still traumatised, microcredit is experiencing a revival.

Given its high repayment rates and social character, the microfinance industry is attracting a new influx of private capital with institutional investors transforming microcredit institutions, previously run like NGOs, into more formalised entities.

Good news for the poor and in particular for women?

Not so sure.

Women’s World Banking (WWB) has been studying this phenomenon and is warning the microfinance world against the dangers of the “mission drift” this transformation is causing.

WWB has discovered that the percentage of women clients served by formalised microfinance institutions tends to decline after their transformation.

In the fourth year after transformation, the average percentage of women borrowers usually drops from 77 to 60 per cent. This is due to lenders migrating from their original mission to serve low-income clients towards generating profits for their new shareholders and maintaining high-interest rates.

Women in the developing world, who are often illiterate and own no collateral, are the most vulnerable client group.

Microfinance works. It provides communities with viable structures. The challenge of the coming years will be to make sure that it remains true to its roots. For multinationals operating in the developing world this challenge represents a unique opportunity to become involved in new type of initiative with the potential of ending poverty.

This is what Corporate Social Responsibility in the era of global interdependence is all about.

We communicators often end up upsetting somebody.

Whom do you upset?

In my current job, I upset those people who think that using Web 2.0 to talk with employees and journalists is the equivalent of turning the comms function into the online version of Animal House (…. I would still like the Toga Party though).

In a job I had years ago, it happened when I was trying to convince management of the importance of treating CSR as a core component of their message and not like a pet project.

Hearing Seth Godin speak at TED about the importance of challenging the status quo was immensely refreshing.

I know it is fashionable to hate banks.

I believe it was always fashionable to hate banks, even well before the subprime circus.

The reason being that banks are notoriously bad at bonding with the public.

In the post-Madoff era, you would think that they would go out of their way to shed off the stiff language of the past and try something new.

This is why watching Standard Chartered’s video “Building a Sustainable Business” made my heart sink.

Actually, my heart went out to the communicator who had to put the video together. Convincing senior management of the need to switch communications style can feel like a Sisyphean task in a financial institution. Believe me, I have been there.

It is time to go beyond worn-out lines like “reshaping the banking industry” and making “a contribution to broader challenges”.

People are too wary of banks these days. This kind of language does very little to comfort them.

So what is the answer?

Listening to the public.

In her latest book “Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth”, Margaret Atwood writes about the collapse of a narrative according to which people for many years understood their lives. People’s trust in a society that encouraged them to incur debt has been destroyed.

How do you recover from that? The wounds are too deep. Banks will have to heal them first before thinking of rebuilding trust.

I did not know that women use 20,000 words every day, while men use only 7,000.

But I did know that half a billion women worldwide are still illiterate and 41 million girls are shut out of school gates because of poverty and prejudices.

I have blogged before about Queen Rania’s YouTube channel. I am a great fan.

This video makes a strong point about the advantages of female education in the developing world.

Educating girls is important and makes a lot of sense in both economic and geopolitical terms. Is the solution to the problem of female illiteracy going to come from governments? Or is social entrepreneurship going to provide the answer?

This week, I will be following the live video streaming of the Skoll World Forum on Social Enterpreneurship broadcasted from Oxford and I’ll be looking for ideas.

There was a time when talking about communications for NGOs would elicit big yawns.

Not any longer.

Check out this YouTube video produced by Avaaz.org, a global campaigning organisation. It features a talking fridge “sent back from the future”. “Coldy” talks about the importance of supporting green technology.

EU regulators in Brussels are expected to decide tomorrow about new efficiency standards for fridges, TVs and other household appliances.

Avaaz.org feels that the strong rules needed to cut Europe’s pollution are running the risk of being weakened by industrial lobbyists.

It is using the video to collect signatures for a petition. It was able to reach its target of 50,000 in one day.

There is something powerful about a YouTube video. It is perfect for bringing the cause of a NGO to life.

Times have changed. Social media have pumped new energy into NGO communications.

The potential implications of this project are mindboggling.

In India, a computer scientist, Dr Sugata Mitra has come up with the idea to give internet access to the illiterate children living in a slum next door to his modern, air-conditioned office.

He placed high-speed computers in a wall separating his part of town from the slum. Within hours and without instructions, the children started to browse the web. They were quick to figure out how to point and click.

Dr. Mitra is convinced that computers can bring prosperity to the world’s poor. It was his Hole-in-the-Wall project to inspire Vikas Swarup, the author of Slumdog Millionaire, the book that became a multi-Oscar-winning movie.

Half of India’s population (1 billion) is illiterate. 350 million among them live on less than a dollar a day. We can only begin to image what would happen to India’s society (and to those of other emerging economies) if Dr. Mitra is right.

Is technology really going to help us make poverty history?

Hole-in-the-Wall is a great example. It is people like Dr. Mitra corporate communicators need to partner with for their international CSR work.

Photo: Thanks to Bill Kerr