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!).

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.

“China knocks the ego out of you.”

I love this quote by Christine Lu.

Her talk last week was very inspiring. Christine is not only the founder of The China Business Show. She is also involved in a number of exciting internet ventures in China.

Recently she took a group of venture capitalists and internet entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley to China to meet their local counterparts. She named the tour Geeks on a Plane.

Although she worked in Shanghai and has travelled many times to China, Christine  doesn’t want to be called a “China expert”.

She believes that “the more you deal with China, the humbler you become”. She says that the longer you stay in China, the more you begin to recognise just how huge and diverse the country is.

Christine gets a charge out of those people who spend a couple of years in the country and call themselves China experts. She calls it the “Marco Polo complex”.

I can certainly relate to this phenomenon from my days in Eastern Europe. And something else Christine mentioned made me laugh and took me back to my first months in Prague. She said that she doesn’t do second-tier cities in China because she doesn’t “thrive by carrying around her own toilet paper”.

There was a time in the autumn of 1990, when shops in Prague were out of toilet paper. So… (and here I have a confession to make…) we would go to international hotels…and stock up on toilet paper!

Amazing …  how adventures seem to be about the smallest things!

My co-author Yang-May  and I look very happy in this picture.

Our book has been nominated for the Financial Times Goldman Sachs Awards!

I got the message the other week in San Francisco…first thing in the morning when I turned on my Blackberry. I was rushing …. I had to jump in the shower and almost forgot about it. But in the course of the day, the thought came back to my mind and began to sink in.

When Yang-May got the news, she remembered writing the book in her pyjamas early in the morning…

Awards and pyjamas are such a funny juxtaposition…

Yesterday, we gave a talk at the Institute of Directors together with Giles Colborne on Creating Value through Web 2.0 helped by panel chairman David Wootton.

Many of the questions we were asked dealt with the ROI of social media for small and medium-sized businesses. We used our blogs to provide examples for some of the answers.

I have been blogging on XCulture for over two years. It has been a fascinating journey. One that has taken me in many unexpected directions. The part I enjoyed most has been floating ideas for our book and observing the reactions of my readers.

Click here  to download our IOD presentation.

Tired of talking about Facebook?

How about China’s QQ? It is the largest social networking site (SNS) in the world with twice as many users as Facebook and one billion US$ revenue in 2008.

While everybody in the West is trying to figure out how to make real money with social media, Chinese SNS have developed models that don’t rely on advertising. QQ makes most of its money by selling virtual stuff like avatars and virtual pets.

Great social media solutions are coming out of emerging economies.

I went to a talk yesterday by Sam Fleming of Shanghai-based CIC who has developed a system to track and measure online conversations about products and brands.
The Chinese spend twice as much time online as they spend watching TV. Last year, TV coverage of the milk scandal was banned, while online information about the crisis continued to be available.

Fleming’s first piece of advice to foreign companies that want to use the web to penetrate the Chinese market is “learn to listen”.

There are already examples of brands that have done so.

Instead of hiring an international celebrity like Madonna for the launch of their Moto Q phone, Motorola used Tuzki, a Hello-Kittyish character created by a graphic arts student. Tuzki is a massively popular avatar which appears in many online conversations.

This is what netizens-inspired marketing is all about. There are certainly lessons for corporate communicators in it.

It is June and it’s time to leave for San Francisco again.

At the end of the week, I will be attending  IABC’s international executive board meeting.

I am thrilled that my friend Mark Schumann is taking over as chairman. Mark has a great sense of humour. And we will probably need it in the years to come…

One of the issues we are discussing in California is the direction in which the communication profession is going and where it will be in 10 years from now.

At the moment, it feels like walking through a maze at a summer fair. You can only go forward. You can’t turn back. There is nothing to go back to.

Journalism, as we used to know it, is no more.

And the power of social media is chipping away at corporate communication’s old command-and-control culture.

The more I work with organisations to introduce Web 2.0, the more I realise that it is mostly about relinquishing fear. I believe communicators can play a major role in removing resistance and developing what Kevin Roberts calls “emotional connectivity”.

Now and again, I still meet people convinced that blogging and Twitter are only used for weirdoes who want to upload their frustrations on the internet.

So, it was refreshing to read an interview with Queen Rania of Jordan in which she calls social media “a catalyst for the advancement of everyone’s rights…It’s where people can find and fight for a cause, global or local, popular of specialised, even when there are hundreds of miles between them.”

Who needs to know how to exit the maze?! I just love the “attraction economy”.

I came across a quote by former East German dissident Rudolf Bahro the other day that made me think.

“When the forms of an old culture are dying, the new culture is created by those people who are not afraid to be insecure”.

If you follow the pace of the interactive web and the way in which it is connecting people around the world, you are left with little doubt that we are currently experiencing a major acceleration.

The old forms of relating to other cultures are dying.

Sharing interests on social networking platforms creates new forms of bonding. We begin to relate to people from different ethnic and religious backgrounds in a new way.

They are much closer to us. Somehow our passion for new connections makes us forget the fear.

When you move out of your culture and venture into a new one, insecurity becomes a constant travel companion.

It is there every time you realise that people around you share traditions you are not part of or memories from a school system you are unable to relate to.

What do you do?

You dwell in the experience and let insecurity become a key for exploring that particular culture.

The lessons you learn are unique. I promise.

If you are having the same problem as me, you have to watch this video.

I am talking about being asked at least five times a day about the Return on Investment of social media.

I was delighted to hear Kevin Roberts, the CEO Worldwide of Saatchi & Saatchi, mention that this is actually the wrong question (thanks, Vince, for pointing out the video to me).

People should be talking about Return on Involvement instead.

According to Roberts, the winners will be those who can figure out how to manage emotional involvement, how to predict and value it.

“Measure the new ROI and you are a billionaire”.

Roberts will be talking at my livery in the autumn and I can’t wait.

Everybody is trying to figure out the impact of Web 2.0 on human behaviour.

With the little that we know, at the moment anything goes.

However, I read an article in  The New Yorker the other day that made me scream…

More and more college kids are using cognitive enhancers like Adderall and Ritalin, “drugs that high-functioning, overcommitted people take to become higher-functioning and more overcommitted”.

College chat sites are full of messages about them.

And the habit is spilling over to professionals. In Wired magazine, a reader writes about having to compete with a colleague able to work crazy hours on modafinil who is being help up as an example by his boss.

There are people out there who try to blame this new development on Web 2.0 pressures and our increasingly interconnected world, where a fifty-five-year-old guy in Atlanta finds himself in the position of having to compete with a twenty-five-year-old kid in Bangalore.

I refuse to believe this is what social media is about.

This new technology is much more likely to create connections for a better understanding between human beings. Using it as an excuse for getting hooked on cognitive steroids is an aberration.

Social media are about people not technology.

Communicators are forced to make this point again and again …. in discussions with the IT department or with reluctant clients.

Need an example to convince them?

Chile has a great tradition of citizen activism, which in the past few years has been successfully migrating on-line.

During my recent visit to Santiago, 3 pharmacy chains (Ahumada, Cruz Verde and Salco Brand) were accused of collusion. From November 07 to April 08, they had jointly agreed to increase prices of medicines.

The case caused an uproar in the press. It also prompted an internet user to develop a Google map that would help people identify “safe” pharmacies which had not been part of the collusion scheme.

And Chilean netizens used Facebook to organise an official boycott of the 3 pharmacies on April 7.

Still believe we are only dealing with a bunch of web site????