While thinking, we are continuously creating images in our mind. Modern neurologists even think that thinking is the ability to display images internally and to order those images (this is what António Damásio thinks – a professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California, in: Descartes Error. Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, 1994, p 89 – what might be his images with this thought?). These images are linked to emotions, which can be deeply stored in our subconscious mind and triggered through situations we encounter.

Marketing (and not only marketing) makes use of this phenomenon by evoking images intended to move the observer into a specific direction. And what happens with these ad-images in us? …

A master of evoking images is Carl Warner, an English photographer who became famous with his “Foodscapes” – impressive landscapes created by food arrangement (I blogged about it in 2008). You find many videos about his foodscapes on the web. Of course, these images attracted the advertising industry and they used them in campaigns for various food based products and brands.

Some days ago I got an e-mail from an Indian friend with photos of the new series of Carl – fascinating “Bodyscapes” created by arranging (living) human bodies to landscapes. When you look at them, feel the images these bodyscapes create in you – is it warm human togetherness or more a feeling of inside a sardine can? Nevertheless – impressive impressions.

Thank you Carl for the publication permission. He is also on Facebook.

Shin-Knee Valley

Valley of the reclining woman

An American friend sent me the link to the following viral video with the words:

“The Rijksmuseum in Holland had an idea: Let’s bring the art to the people and then, hopefully, they will come to see more – at the museum. They took one painting of Rembrandt from 1642, Guards of the Night and brought to life the characters in it, placed them in a busy mall and the rest you can see for yourself!”

A great flash mob marketing campaign by the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam – “Onze helden zijn terug!” (Our heros are back!) One of the comment says: Creativity is intelligence having fun.” ― Albert Einstein

Scene from the video (c)

A worthy topic for the 1000th blogpost of Flowers on the Wayside:

USA Postage has published a series of 7 stamps with pictures of Hindu gods. These spiritual designs are targeted to the Indian community in the United States, which makes up 1% of the total population. For the first time, USA postage depicts Sri Krishna, Shiva-Parvati, Sai Baba, Murugan, Lord Venkateshwara, Vinayaka and Lakshmi on beautiful 20-stamp commemorative sheets.

By the way: I started blogging on 31st March 2006 – at it still gives me joy posting about all the many flowers I find along the wayside.

Stamps of USA Postage

Today I was on a staff excursion into the Swiss Jura, which I had organised together with a colleague for the team of our Marketing and Communication department. About 30 persons came for the tour. As the train entered the mountains the clouds dispersed and gave way for a beautiful clear autumn sky. We stopped at Saint Imier, where the world-famous watch enterprise Longines is located.

The Longines building

We had the good luck that the “patron”, the director of Longines himself gave us the presentation – thanks to the good relations of my colleague who knew him personally. A very impressive presentation about how Longines has worked over 160 years building up not just a watch empire, but emotions about watches. He showed us the many stars and sports-people working as “ambassadors of elegance”, high-ranking names from the fields of cinema, sport, adventurers (Lindbergh proposed to Longines the development of a special watch for his first transatlantic flight in 1929…). So glamour is not just a casual emotional result, but the outcome of long-lasting and highly directional strategies.

Later we had a guided tour through the Longines museum – fascinating watches and insights into how chronometers developed over the last 150 years.

A watch-angel from the beginning of last century in Art-Deco style

A golden pocket-watch with masonic symbols and a diamond in the cover

An Art-Deco watch with birds

Every watch since the beginning carries the same logo, a number by which it can be identified, and the details are registered in books with the name of the seller, the date and the price – hundred-thousands of watches – a unique library.

The guide in the room with the watch-registries

Later we had our lunch in the village and then proceeded to the “funiculaire”, a funicular railway driven by solar energy bringing us up to the “Mont Soleil”, the sun mountain – and really, it was very sunny today.

The Funicular

After a 20 minutes walk we arrived at the solar energy park, where they are testing different kinds of photovoltaic systems as per their efficiency.

Two guides gave us insights into the technologies and difficulties of creating energy from the sun.

A beautiful reflection on the surface of a sun collector

In the background and farther away on the mountain there was a park with wind turbines – the only one up to now in Switzerland.

We had a 30 minutes walk along the mountain and stopped at a barn, where a farmer woman had prepared for us a little picnic with different kinds of cheese, bread, water and wine from the area. A bus then picked us up and brought us to Biel, from where we returned by train to Berne.

A very beautiful YouTube video story about a beggar and an unconventional help with the power of words.

A friend from Canada sent me the link to this inspiring video of a flash-mob singing a Hallelujah. It was a surprise for the shopper having their lunch in an Ontario shopping mall food court. The recording was arranged by a photo agency to wish a Merry Christmas.

A friend sent me an amazing TV commercial video from Honda, done already in 2003. It shows a domino-effect of things moving and is a symbol of the inter-relatedness of events. It is done without digital tricks, happening like this. It took the team 606 time to try and 3 month before it was ok – just for this 2 minutes video. The recording costs were 6 million dollars, but it was a great success. Enjoy.

Photo: From the video (c) Honda

I was today at a Social Media Marketing conference in Zurich. Marketeers and web-consultants spoke about using social trends for your website with different tools, platforms and strategies, for increasing one’s presence in the communities. While most speakers gave very interesting presentations, others weren’t much relevant for me or seemed to give an exposure of the portfolio of their agency, spicing it with slogans. As usual you had to filter yourself to get the nuggets out of the sand.

I was much interested in the way the dialogue between business and users is being orchestrated and in understanding better the strategies and technologies. It was fascinating to see how the mechanics of human curiosity and gossiping are being used in this. Most relevant is to understand the users and what they want. This is often not so clear, and easily the gap causes miscommunication.

As expected at such a conference, people were busily twittering the whole time. There was a feeling in the room of keeping oneself in a state of excitement and continuous communication. The last speaker even highlighted this as a kind of telepathic inter-relationship between all participants. I thought I don’t want this kind of permanent interconnectedness. Inter-relationship is not just in talking, but, more so, in silence and in subtle linking through meditative work – this not particularly being the sphere of social media marketing.

So I didn’t join the conference with twittering or linking in, trying to keep the everyday information overkill with some inner filters at a distance. I had some talks and took some good inspirations back home. I now ask myself if I shall nevertheless do a step into the twitter-world after some steps into Face-Booking. I saw interesting vistas, but time is scarce…

One’s own website is just the top of an iceberg where the sphere of social media networks like facebook, twitter, flickr and the like offer fields for extension of the scope of influence.

The last weeks in my office had been filled with a lot of intense new developments. Last Tuesday I was in the management board of my office (Red Cross) together with a colleague presenting ideas for launching social web activities for making our activities better known besides the main website. Three years ago, at the time I started this blog, I had tried to convince the officials to open up for blogging, but there had been a lot of reservations. Now the time had changed. The International Federation of Red Cross Societies has given out recommendations to the national societies to actively take part in Web 2.0 and they just had run a campaign around the celebrations of 150 years of Red Cross (Solferino) accompanied by a lot of activities  in blogs, Facebook, and the like. Our management board was now very open, and the new director very much in favour. So we got a green light for starting activities, of which I’m now in charge. Wednesday I set up a blog at the Google blogger platform, but it only will become more active in the later part of the summer. Then I started a Facebook account for my office.

Personally I’m very reluctant about using such a platform: a month ago I got an unrequested invitation by Facebook – spamming me – to join them. The wrote: “Hi… The following people recently invited you to be their friend on Facebook: (and there were six names of persons from my mailing list contacts all over the world, who had sent me invitations in the past, to which I had not responded)…

And then: “Other people you may know on Facebook:” and there were 6 names I all know, from South America, who never had contacted me about Facebook. So they are profiling my contacts, though I never had entered into any contact with Facebook. A very aggressive web 2.0 marketing strategy. Of course they mentioned, nearly illegible, in grey letters: “This message was intended for xxx@good-will.ch. If you do not wish to receive this type of email from Facebook in the future, please click here to unsubscribe.” I never had asked them to subscribe me.

On the insistence of a colleague from the ICT of my office I had joined some weeks ago the professional contact platform Xing, because there is a Swiss MS-SharePoint community and I’m in charge of the SharePoint-based intranet of my office and document management. Hardly had I registered in Xing that I got a phone-call from a web agency offering me support services. And a information technology courses provider contacted me several times to get me into their mailing lists or on some courses. I declined these contacts…

I’m very much interested in good, relevant contacts, but at the same time very selective as per what is relevant. Friends are not gathered the fast way the social webs promise with “friends” and “followers”.

Last Wednesday I was at a presentation in our office about the latest Microsoft Fast data search technology. Fast had been acquired by Microsoft in 2008 and will be part of SharePoint from 2010 on. A specialist from Munich gave us an introduction into the working of this most modern search engine with a lot of fascinating features. Since I’m just running a pilot project about document management together with an external agency to implement a new system, this was particularly thrilling for me to see. The ways we had been searching up to now require quite a lot of work from the staff to relate the documents with so-called meta data. Now this new search engine promises to extract the meta data automatically. We will set up in August/September a test environment to compare the different solutions envisaged. By October we will decide which way will be the most viable…

Reflections on the globe in the court of the Cité des Sciences at Paris, photo by a friend.

Two days ago I was at the University of St. Gallen for the final presentations of the term papers of a seminar on Web 2.0 communication strategies. A project team had elaborated an issue coverage with communication and fundraising proposals for my office. I had several preliminary talks with the professor, coming from Berlin, and the team and was now curious about their proposals.

Two students of the team picked me up at the station and accompanied me to the campus. In the seminar room a young person said hello, presenting himself. I first thought he was a student, but he was the professor from Berlin. 4 teams were presenting their issue coverages for 4 different NGOs. The presentation of my team was the first.

They had analysed that we are only partially using the possibilities of the new social media instruments and that networking between different platforms like blogs, Wikipedia, Facebook and YouTube would enhance the effectiveness of communication activities, making proposals for the next steps.

The students did a good job, in view of the fact that they still have little experience of the professional world and its mechanism. There was quiet an optimism about the possibilities these social media offer. In my office there is more scepticism around, as per the real use for our purposes, though the intererest is rising in the management. A collegue and I are working on doing experiments with social media platforms. Maybe together with the inputs of the students and some more discussions the management will decide about a “go”.

The way to the university