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 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”!  

We communicators often end up upsetting somebody.

Whom  do you upset?

In my current job, I upset those people who think that using Web 2.0 to talk with employees and journalists is the equivalent of turning the comms function into the online version of Animal House (…. I would still like the Toga Party though).

In a job I had years ago, it happened when I was trying to convince management of the importance of treating CSR  as a core component of their message and not like a pet project.

Hearing Seth Godin speak at TED about the importance of challenging the status quo was immensely refreshing.

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.

I braved the anti-G20 demonstrations and ventured into the City of London yesterday to attend the installation of my friend Gina, who was admitted into my livery.

While I walked around the Bank of England and past the smashed RBS windows, I began thinking that the world is changing. It was an unseasonably chilly morning. The streets were empty, apart from a few nervous policemen. One of them redirected me and Gina away from an area that had been cordoned off.

“How funny,” Gina remarked. “A Chinese policeman”. An omen for the new era that is about to begin…??? I believe so.

Gina was installed at a beautiful ceremony at Carpenters’ Hall. During the lunch that followed we discussed the future of marketing and communications with a fellow Marketor.

We all agreed that our professions are finally leaving the flaky section. It will be difficult in the future to continue to talk about us as maters of spin.

Social media and the internet are doing the trick. Any piece of information we produce today is viewed by thousands of different audiences simultaneously. We can only win if we are authentic

Another reason why our professions are moving up the food chain is the level of sophistication of today’s publics. The financial crisis has taught people the importance of asking questions and looking behind the scenes.

In the months to come, corporations and public institutions will need communicators more than ever before to rebuild public trust.

The message is simple.

So why are so many employers still not getting it?

The national government of New Zealand has just announced a plan to reduce its public relations staff.

Would somebody please spell it out for them…

Photo: thanks to cpcml.ca