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!).

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 think I am suffering from anti-climax.

I believe that’s what it is, because it feels like facing a big blank space and I have this urge to go out and buy myself a teddy bear.

I just came back from Barcelona where I chaired EuroComm 2008, IABC’s annual conference for the Europe/Middle East region.

I worked on this event for about nine months together with my IABC colleagues and the team at La Salle University… and I can’t believe it’s all over now.

We had a wonderful time and I was thrilled to have the opportunity to lead this project.

I have organised lots of conferences over the years … and I always get it… this strange dizziness that comes when everything is over.

So, last night, in order to feel better, I went to a party a client of mine was giving.

With a glass of champagne in my hand, I worked the crowd and gave in to the spirit of the evening. The music and the rhythm of the different conversations were so soothing that my mind started to relax and …. I went back to Barcelona.

I have often pondered over the secrets of conference organising. Some of my best friends are in this business, so this is one of my favourite topics.

It is all about the atmosphere of an event. Conferences are not really about presentations and ideas; they are mostly about the kind of experience you manage to create for the participants.

I am not sure how one does that. I think after a while it comes natural to you.

It has a lot to do with the spirit of the time.

People’s expectations change so quickly in our day and age. You have to be able to step into their shoes and understand what they are really looking for. It might be the opportunity to be away from the office and explore what is going on in their sector and what that means for their career; it might be support from their peers in case they are not getting it from their bosses; it might be inspiration and guidance.

But back to my anti-climax…

One of reasons why I am feeling like this is my schizophrenic relationship with routine. Having been educated in a Germanic environment, I crave routines….but the minute I have to stick to one I start hating them. And again when a routine disappears from my life…I feel like an orphan for a couple of days.

Today it’s Friday and I am already missing the weekly conference call I would always have with my colleagues at La Salle at the end of the week.

I think I am definitely going to go out and buy that teddy bear…

Ramon Olle, CEO of Epson Europe, was on a trip to China. While visiting one of the company’s factories, he noticed that, in spite of the fact that the factory had no work at that moment, the workers were coming to the canteen every day to eat lunch.

“When you in Europe cancel your orders, our workers can’t eat so we have to keep the canteen open,” remarked someone.

That was the moment when rows of figures on elaborated spreadsheets turned into real destinies making Ramon realise just how interconnected we all are.

Ramon was speaking last night at an event organised by IABC Netherlands in Amsterdam.

He talked about the importance of values for corporate leaders and communicators.

Employees have to be perceived as human beings. “I believe that a person has both a material and a spiritual dimension, without limiting spirituality to faith or religion.”

Problems start when we try to solve problems with processes. “When employees come to the office in the morning, they bring with them all their personal desires and worries and those of their families. We cannot pretend these don’t exist. We have to look at people in their entirety.”

Ramon has been noticing that, although marketing efforts are more and more geared towards the individual (with personalised messages and e-mails), we keep treating employees as a bunch, forgetting the complexity of human beings.

“Good communication is one that focuses on messages that people want and need to hear. These have to be short, simple, crisp and transparent.”

If we send out a complicated message in a multicultural corporation, we risk confusion and misinterpretations because employees will use the ‘filters’ of their respective culture to decipher it.

This remark reminded me of something Professor Muhammad Yunus of Grameen Bank told me: we can present what we do in a simple way, one that is easy for others to understand, all the rest is a product of the ego. It is the ego that makes us believe that, if we create something complicated, it will look ‘good’ and people will think it is more valuable.

Ramon believes humility to be a core corporate value, one that should be promoted more strongly. How inspiring and refreshing!

Ramon is the author of ‘Engel bei der Arbeit - Führen mit Werten (Angels at the workplace - Leading with values) published in German by ATHENA. An updated version of the book is about to be published in German, Russian and Spanish.