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.

“Your true ‘land’ is the place where you are going not the place where you are now.”

I love this verse by the 13th century Persian poet Rumi.

I came across it the first time in a catalogue I bought in Berlin at an exhibition of Shirin Neshat’s art.

This Iranian director has a unique way of portraying women in her country.

I just went to see her latest movie, Women without Men. It portrays the lives of five Iranian women against the backdrop of the American and British-backed coup that brought down Prime Minister Mossadegh and reinstalled the Shah in 1953.

The photography is superb. My favourite part is the story of the prostitute Zarin. The sequence showing her in a hamam, buried in a frantic effort to scrub away destiny from her anorexic body is a masterpiece. 

Women without Men is unsettling in a unique way. And so intriguing.

Greg Mortenson embodies something I have been feeling all my life but I have had trouble articulating.

The former mountaineer and founder of the Central Asian Institute (CAI) has dedicated his life to building schools and promoting education in the most remote areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Since 1993, CAI has established 131 schools serving more than 58,000 students, most of them girls.
Before embarking on a project, Greg works with the local communities, including their tribal and religious leaders, to gain their friendship and to make sure that their hopes and expectations are respected.

He writes in his new book Stones into Schools: “When you take the time to actually listen, with humility, to what people have to say, it’s amazing what you can learn.”

This sentence is the best lesson in cross-cultural communication I have ever come across.

Greg and his colleagues have built schools in some of the most troubled regions of Afghanistan like the Wakhan Corridor and the notorious Kunar and Nuristan.
They believe in the Afghans’ hunger for peace after 30 years of war. They want to support their dream of educating their children.

More and more people are waking up to the importance of Greg’s message. I was delighted to read that his previous book Three Cups of  Tea, has been made required reading for all officers enrolled in counterinsurgency courses at the Pentagon.

There is something special about Greg. And again…  something I can’t describe.
Stones into Schools is a journey into the realm of hope. I keep it on my desk now…. will some of Greg’s incredible ability to bond with people in the darkest places rub off on me…?

I spent an entire evening reading this book that took me back to Central Asia.

That night I went to sleep with a deep sense of peace. As long as there are people like Greg around, I know the world is in safe hands.

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.

“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.

It has been so exciting to be asked by the European Training Foundation to identify and mobilise women bloggers from EU Partner Countries in preparation for Women & Work .

For all of us who believe in digitalising women issues, this has been a unique opportunity to put women and social media on the map of international opinion leaders and decision makers

As EU Commissioner Viviane Reding said at the conference, “the global labour market can no longer do without the creativity of women.” Although 60% of university graduates in the EU are women, they still earn in average 18% less than men.

“Women should have long hair but short intelligence.”

That’s what the grandmother of Wild Swans author Jung Chang was told while growing up in early 20th century’s China.

I heard Jung Chang speak at ETF’s conference, Women & Work, in Turin yesterday. Her energy and beauty are mesmerising.

Over the past two days, I have also been mesmerised by the  commitment and wisdom of the 22 women bloggers who got together with me and ETF to work on a series of recommendations for EU policy makers in the field of women and employment.

I met most of them on Twitter. That’s how I connected with them.
On a gray winter day in December I sent out a Tweet, left for a meeting, came back 3 hours later and realised that it had already been retweeted  9 times… and mostly by people I was not following!

So, you can imagine my excitement, when on Friday night, I walked into the lobby of my hotel in Turin to “meet” our community of women bloggers for the first time.

The moment when the virtual and the physical worlds meet is a magical one!

You first try to recognise the other person based on their Twitter photo… but then you realise that you don’t need that reference… you have known them all along… you know their thoughts, you know what moves them, you would be able to recognise them anywhere!

To those who think that Twitter and social media are gadgets… we would like to say… think again!

ETF Madlen Serban mentioned at the conference that power is never given…”you have to take it”.

Social media offers a unique way to empower women. Our Women & Work project is the living proof of that.

Click Here to see photos of the event.  Read about Women & Work in Egypt’s Al-ahram, Hia magazine, Communication World and Live&Learn.