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!).

“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!

I used to find index charts soothing.  

You might think I’m strange. But when I worked as a financial journalist, they would stimulate my thinking….

Like a mandala, I would look at them and they would give me a sense of clarity…. After a while, sentences would start flowing in my mind.

I haven’t found financial charts soothing lately.

But yesterday, I was glad to hear at a seminar that markets are showing signs of normalisation. Which doesn’t mean that the recession is over. But markets have at least stopped to be out of control and are experiencing some sort of stabilisation.

 However, analysts believe that the UK and Europe will not be able to attract significant investment for a while.  

The spotlight has moved to the East.

Most Asian countries already had their financial crisis in 1998.  It enabled them to clean house and left their banks with strong balance sheets. On top of this, they were able to create high levels of self-generating demand.

China and India are continuing to grow, and most importantly, their middle-classes are growing. International capital is being lured by the prospect of huge sales volumes.

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Communications  and marketing are right at the core of this trend.

With little growth to be expected in the West, many of the companies we are working for are increasingly looking at China and India.

One of the first tasks they will have to master is reaching out to audiences and engaging with consumers in these markets.

The ability to write is such a mixed blessing.

It is an integral part of who you are and you can’t do without it. A friend of mine who edits a magazine in the US told me once that only when she writes she feels that she is doing real work.

I have this nagging feeling sometimes when I am in meetings that I should not be there… I should be at my computer instead….writing. As if I had to report everything I experience… every day… ever minute.

To complicate the matter, the business communication profession is often misunderstood. Why do companies need professional writers and story tellers, given that everybody can more or less knock a couple of sentences together?

Next time you are asked this question, you can quote Colonel David Scott.

Scott was the commander of the Apollo 15 mission to the moon. Ever since his lunar landing in 1971, Scott  spent much of his time talking to people who wanted to know how it was like to walk on the moon. He slipped into an unexpected role and became the mission’s story teller.

Scott realised that flying to the moon had been such a pivotal experience in the history of humanity that it wasn’t enough for people to see a couple of minutes of filming on TV. They needed to hear the story from somebody who was there. They needed another human being to tell them how it felt. It was important for them in order to be able to integrate this event into their consciousness.

This is why Scott is calling for the crew of future missions to the moon or Mars to include non-scientists, people able to describe the splendour of the cosmos. “It could be an artist or a poet or a writer - or even a songwriter”.

What a great endorsement for our profession!!!

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.

I believe that if you live long enough in a place, it becomes part of you.

This is why I was really excited to hear about an interesting experiment with citizen journalism in the Czech Republic.

I spent the first half of the 1990s in Prague working as a reporter. What made the job so interesting was not only the historic time (only two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall) but also the stories ordinary people would tell me when I was researching my articles.

Czechs have a unique way to relay facts. A fascinating mixture of magical realism and sobering analysis.

These are ideal components for the new venture launched by PPF Media. The group has set up a network of cafés in a number of Czech towns where people can go to surf the web, drink coffee and chat about local events with journalists who work there. The product is new type of reporting, which mixes the skills of professional journalists with those of the readers.

The network is coordinated by the “Futuroom” based in Prague, where seasoned editors work, adding national and international content to the local stories. The “Futuroom” also serves as a multi-media training centre and has already attracted the support of partners like Google  and the World Association of Newspapers. 

If I close my eyes and think back of the days when I was working at the English desk of a Czech news agency, I can see myself typing on a keyboard in the early morning in a semi-dark room with the snow silently falling outside.

Were we all working at an experiment? Did we contribute a least a little to the amazing progress that Czech journalism has made in the past 20 years?

I am humbly hoping for the answer to be “yes”….

Our spirit cannot travel as fast as our body. That’s how someone explained jet lag to me.

I just got back from San Francisco and my spirit is all over the place. Although I have been desperately trying to tie it to the cup of Ghirardelli coffee on my desk,  my mind keeps replaying many of the conversations I heard last week in California.

One bit keeps coming back again and again.

Sir Ken Robinson, the innovation expert, was talking at IABC’s conference about the ability of human beings to learn foreign languages.

His take is pretty much that if you don’t learn a foreign language at an early age, your chance to be able to do it in your 20s is slim.

What a sad and elitist view…

And this coming from an otherwise inspiring speaker.

If Sir Ken is right, this would mean that only those children who have the fortune to travel or live abroad or grow up in a multicultural household, will be able to speak other languages and function in a multicultural setting.

Luckily, this is not how the world of tomorrow is likely to turn out.

China will soon become the number one English speaking country in the world. I believe not all the Chinese who are studying English today have learned it from their parents or by travelling abroad.

The ability to develop a passion for communicating with other cultures and learning foreign languages is not a prerogative of the more fortunate and has never been.

Take the example of Billy Wilder who grew up in Austria-Hungary speaking German, had to escape first to France and then to America in the 1930s, learned French and English in his 20s and went on to write the screenplay of what is considered an icon of American film making.

Thank God for “Some Like It Hot”!  

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.

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.