I often come across brilliantly creative ideas and today I decided to share with you another great campaign that managed to change people’s behavior in a fun, new and unexpected way.

The Fun Theory, an initiative of Volkswagen, performed an impressive experiment to find out if people would choose the stairs over the escalator if there were a fun way of doing so. They succeeded. And they made people laugh.

What’s astonishing is that even after 3 years people are still talking about the campaign (I saw it in a tweet last week) and are commenting daily on YouTube, where it has ca. 18 million views. This only proves what an impact it has.

Enjoy the video! 

I finished reading one of the books from  my summer reading list and I thought I'd share with you the quotes that impressed or impacted me the most. I am talking about William Zinsser's classic guide to nonfiction writing "On writing well" - an absolute bestseller. The book is easy to understand, its content flows and the author gives brilliant advice. As Zinsser puts it, this is a 'craft book' and I can only recommend it to anyone who wants to improve his or her writing. 

Below you'll find the notes I made for the first 12 chapters while I was reading book. The quotes I wrote down for chapters 13-24 I'll share with you in another post soon :)  

Chapter 1: The Transaction

“Ultimately the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is.”

For the past two months at my new job I have heard the questions  “How would social media prove useful for my business?” “Why should my business be on social media at all, what are the advantages?”; “Why should we put that required effort and what would the results be?” like a hundred times. Small as well as large, B2B as well as B2C companies want to know the answers.  

For every one of them it is of course an individual case – what one might benefit, the other might not. There are however some very sound ‘generic’ reasons that any business should carefully consider when making the decision whether to use social media for marketing or not.

To help you what to start with, I want to show you this infographic by Carousel30, which summarizes some of the findings of the 2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, conducted for the fourth time by Social Media Examiner (one of my absolute favourite social media experts that I eagerly follow and fully recommend).

A lot of research and reports about the PR industry and social media have been published lately. The newest one I came across is Burson-Marsteller's Global Social Media Check-Up 2012.

Burson-Marsteller is one of the leading PR consultancies in the world and this is their third annual study into how the Fortune Global 100 are using social media and adapting to the always changing online landscape. 

The findings show that companies have learnt a lot since 2010 and they now feel more comfortable around social media. The Fortune Global 100 are also engaging much more and are creating a lot more digital content. 

Here are the top 5 results of the study: 

The results of this year's European Communication Monitor have been published and there are some intruiging insights into the public relations and communication management practice I am about to highlight here. 

With almost 2,200 practitioners from 42 countries this is the largest and most comprehensive transnational strategic communciation study worldwide that has been conducted annually since 2007.  

Again this year, the opinion that top management doesn't understand the communication practice has been shared by the majority of all participants - 84%. Furthermore, 75% admit that they are having difficulties proving the impact of communication management on organisational goals. These are the main barriers for the furher professionalisation of the industry. This in turn is fascinating as according to 82% of survey respondends organisations are nowadays interacting much more with stakeholders through various media outlets and have many more touchpoints with them in comparison to five years ago.