All it takes to introduce social media in a somewhat conservative organisation is a communicator with a real understanding of publics and a passion.

Ian Andersen, External Communications Adviser at the European Commission’s Directorate-General (DG) for Interpretation, has both.

His part of the EU administration runs an army of 4,000 interpreters who provide heads of state and experts from all over Europe with 250,000 interpreted days every year in 18,000 meetings and 23 languages.

The Interpreting for Europe page on Facebook, has more than 8,000 fans.

It was a presentation at IABC’s International Conference a couple of years ago to convince Ian to embrace this social networking site. That’s where he heard about Generation Y and realised that it was time to engage with this group on their terms.

DG Interpretation’s public is aged between 18 and 28. “You have to hit them after high school when they are looking into studying languages or right after university when they can enrol in a program for interpreters”, says Ian.

The purpose is to create an awareness among young people that they can do fun things with languages, they can get a good job while doing something for the future of mankind. “We need to attract people to the profession”.

DG Interpretation is facing a challenge.  A wave of interpreters is scheduled to retire in the next 10 years (a massive amount of hiring went on in early 1980s) and universities are not able to keep up with demand.

Cultural Specificities

Ian’s first professional encounter with social media was a short video posted on YouTube in 2008. It portrays the life of a Latvian interpreter in Brussels. DG Interpretation had problems finding interpreters from this country and wanted to encourage young people to enrol in language studies at universities in Riga. The result was immediate. “The number of applications quadrupled! And their quality was twice as high”.

One thing Ian realised very quickly is that YouTube videos meant for a certain country have to reflect its cultural specificities. “You first have to look at the issues and get a good feel for prejudices”. 

In the UK for example, DG Interpretation had to fight the misconception that interpreters have a posh English accent and are always bilingual. It had to go beyond the class barrier. That’s why it showed interpreters playing football in its video  (44,200 views) for the British market.

French Glamour

The approach used for France was completely different. “You had to show that interpreting is a high-flying job, at the center of things, otherwise you were not going to attract quality”.

The French video (21,500 views), which is somewhat more glamorous, was launched at the EC representation in Paris. This time, DG Interpretation used the alarmist card, arguing with the press that French might disappear from EU meetings if French people stop learning languages. 
Imagine the reactions! DG Interpretation got coverage on an influential Liberation blog, while Le Monde and Le Figaro continued writing about the impending threat to the future of the French language for 6 months.

Building a Community

After YouTube, it was time to graduate to another platform. “YouTube is not sufficiently participatory. We wanted to conduct conversations and create a community.”

Interpreting for Europe was launched in November 2009. In the first few months, it attracted an average of 50 fans per day. Ian has been using a combination of messages posted on the page, Facebook ads and conventional press relations. He also uses the Twitter page @euinterpreters as a “radio station” to broadcast news to some 300 followers.

Ian has an intern manning Facebook, but still spends 20% of his time answering questions and producing content. “We check every reply with the head of unit responsible. We keep our answers light but not too humorous… and we use smileys and winks to show that we are normal people.”

Measuring Success

DG Interpretation is planning a survey in the autumn to measure the impact of its social media campaign. “We will be surveying people who apply with us after university and will ask them where they first heard about the profession.”

The signs look promising… applications at the Institut Supérieur d’Interprétation et de Traduction in Paris went up by 140% since the beginning of Ian’s campaign…

If you write a blog, you know how addictive statistics can be…

I am so thrilled… I made it! This blog registered 16,480 unique visitors in July!

Exceeding the 16,000 mark is an exhilarating feeling.

I am so grateful to my co-author Yang-May for convincing me to start  X-Culture in 2007.  This blog has enabled me to find my voice after years of practicing financial journalism and hiding behind mergers & acquisitions and derivatives.

Two years ago, it became a lifeline during the many long days I spent in isolation writing our book. I used X-Culture to float ideas. The comments I received were like a bridge to the world outside my study… which seemed so distant to me at the time.

And …it’s always exciting when someone I have not met before tells me that they feel they already know me because they have read my blog.

X-Culture is really the closest you can get to a window into my mind and soul.

By using Feedjit, I can check the countries where my visitors are located. It is such a strange feeling to know that thousands of people from Hawaii to Pakistan are reading what I think and feel.

I would like to thank my family, friends and colleagues for inspiring many of my posts over the past three years. I am also grateful to my fellow social networkers for linking to my blog and spreading its messages on Twitter and other platforms.

And of course I would like to thank all of you for reading me and for travelling with me on this incredible journey.

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 knew this would happen… it was just a matter of time.

I am talking about my father joining Facebook and commenting on my posts.

Over the weekend, he and a former high-school friend of mine were congratulating me on an article I wrote… and this is so surreal.

Interacting with my family and old friends in the same space as we used to do 27 years ago (before I left Italy) is just so strange.

It feels like continuing the conversations we were having every time my father would pick me up from school… on hot June days… before we would all part for the glorious Italian summer.

Is someone out there studying the space-time dimension of Facebook?

This social networking site is certainly doing something to the psyche of people like me… who, after being gone for years, all of a sudden, are invited to sit again at a table they thought no longer existed.

Reconnecting with my high-school friends has been like being washed by a wave of emotions. It’s like having my little private group of cheerleaders. The other day before giving a speech, I closed by eyes and thought of my friend Paola, who used to be my best friend back then and who wrote on my wall that she had always known I would do great things (whatever those might be…).

May be what’s happening to me is just one of the many examples behind the success of Facebook, which has now grown to 500 million users worldwide (up from 200 million 15 months ago).

70% of them are outside the United States. While the number of users in the US doubled in 09 (to 123 million), it more than quadrupled in Germany (to 19 million).

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg expects the company to reach one billion users. It is the stories behind this figure that I long to hear some day.

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.

My first day in Marrakesh last week I woke up at 4:00am to the chant of the muezzin.

I was drifting in and out of sleep. While he was chanting, I was dreaming of how to use social media to call the faithful to prayer…

That’s when I realised just how badly I needed a vacation….

From Marrakesh I travelled to the High Atlas. I took in the stunning views and visited a couple of Berber villages. The peace and silence are incredible. They make you wonder how we can all inhabit the same planet and yet live in such different dimensions.

I am happy to have left a small part of me there. I gave a pen to a pretty young Berber girl who was following us. She took it and held it close to her chest. If I close my eyes, I can still see her tan fingers clutching my black biro. I wish the pen were some kind of magical device that could link me to this girl. So that every time she writes, my dreams and hers would merge.

Writing is such a strange obsession. It drives you crazy. I have the feeling that if I don’t write, I don’t exist. At the same time, that’s what helps me to relive my memories. And blogging helps me to connect with people. I might have already discovered my magical device after all…