So yes, I work at Procter & Gamble… a company that should be at the forefront of digital marketing given its brands, size, money and amazing staff… but its not…no big secret for anyone inside or outside the company… but we are getting there!

But today my company put a massive Web 2.0 smile on my face that I’d thought I’d share to give an insider example of how social media is being used within a company to learn more about the consumer & interact more with him/her and each other at a level never before possible.

So today, P&G Marketing internally launched an upgrade of its internal marketing site…and in one fail swoop installed all the web 2.0 social media tools that I could ever want to connect better with the consumer, and also with my own P&G colleagues (all 180,000 around the world) – some of which are marketing geniuses.

I was given the option to choose 12 boxes to go on my homepage and was able to select items such as a Twitter feed of my brand (Max Factor) , a You Tube feed of my category (Cosmetics) and links to what I can only describe as internal twitter-ish profiles and groups (similar to Brazen Careerist) which populated in seconds with members joining from all over the world to start discussing marketing trends, brand news and share and reapply items through the forums and streams. Also, we all have our own blogs to post what we want to share with the P&G community.

I find this so exciting because I know that within P&G I am with very good company in terms of expertise in marketing and brand building and therefore can’t wait to read what all the employees are posting and talking about etc…. It is also so exciting to have a twitter/you tube feed constantly of my consumer… although I already had this myself, I think it is awesome that now Gen X + will have this streaming to their screens every day.

Anyway, I love it and all I can hope is that it gives me not only inspiration in my daily work but also for my blogging too…. so Thank You to my 170 year old company for thinking of Gen Y and absorbing social media.

I usually delete forwarded mail as soon as it hits my inbox but I loved this one and thought it was worth sharing in a Gen Y kinda way… how many of these do you relate to??

1. More often than not, when someone is telling me a story all I can think about is that I can’t wait for them to finish so that I can tell my own story that’s not only better, but also more directly involves me.
2. Nothing sucks more than that moment during an argument when you realise you’re wrong.

3. Have you ever been walking down the street and realised that you’re going in the complete opposite direction of where you are supposed to be going? But instead of just turning a 180 and walking back in the direction from which you came, you have to first do something like check your watch or phone or make a grand arm gesture and mutter to yourself to ensure that no one in the surrounding area thinks you’re crazy by randomly switching directions on the sidewalk.

4. I totally take back all those times I didn’t want to nap when I was younger.

5. Is it just me, or are 80% of the people in the “people you may know” feature on Facebook people that I do know, but I deliberately choose not to be friends with?

6. Do you remember when you were a kid, playing Nintendo and it wouldn’t work? You take the cartridge out, blow in it and that would magically fix the problem. Every kid did that, but how did we all know how to fix the problem? There was no internet or message boards or FAQ’s. We just figured it out. Today’s kids are soft.

7. There is a great need for sarcasm font.

8. Sometimes, I’ll watch a movie that I watched when I was younger and suddenly realise I had no idea what the f*** was going on when I first saw it.

9.I think everyone has a movie that they love so much, it actually becomes stressful to watch it with other people. I’ll end up wasting 90 minutes shiftily glancing around to confirm that everyone’s laughing at the right parts, then making sure I laugh just a little bit harder (and a millisecond earlier) to prove that I’m still the only one who really, really gets it.

10. How the hell are you supposed to fold a fitted sheet?

11. I would rather try to carry 10 plastic grocery bags in each hand than take 2 trips to bring my groceries in.

12. I think part of a best friend’s job should be to immediately clear your computer history if you die.

13. LOL has gone from meaning, “laugh out loud” to “I have nothing else to say”.
14. I have a hard time deciphering the fine line between boredom and hunger.

15.  Whenever someone says “I’m not book smart, but I’m street smart”, all I hear is “I’m not real smart, but I’m imaginary smart”.

16. How many times is it appropriate to say “What?” before you just nod and smile because you still didn’t hear what they said?

17.I love the sense of camaraderie when an entire line of cars teams up to prevent a dick from cutting in at the front. Stay strong, brothers!

18. Every time I have to spell a word over the phone using ‘as in’ examples, I will undoubtedly draw a blank and sound like a complete idiot. Today I had to spell my boss’s last name to an attorney and said “Yes that’s G as in…(10 second lapse)..ummm…Goonies”.

19.What would happen if I hired two private investigators to follow each other?

20. While driving yesterday I saw a banana peel in the road and instinctively swerved to avoid it…thanks Mario Kart.

21. I find it hard to believe there are actually people who get in the shower first and THEN turn on the water.

22. Shirts get dirty. Underwear gets dirty.  Trousers ?  Trousers never get dirty; you can wear them forever.

23. I can’t remember the last time I wasn’t at least kind of tired.

24. Bad decisions make good stories.

25. Whenever I’m Facebook stalking someone and I find out that their profile is public, I feel like a kid on Christmas morning that just got the Red Ryder BB gun that I always wanted. 546 pictures? Don’t mind if I do!

26.Why is it that during an ice-breaker, when the whole room has to go around and say their name and where they are from, I get so incredibly nervous? Like I know my name, I know where I’m from, this shouldn’t be a problem …

27. You never know when it will strike, but there comes a moment at work when you’ve made up your mind that you just aren’t doing anything productive for the rest of the day.

28. Can we all just agree to ignore whatever comes after DVDs? I don’t want to have to restart my collection.

29.There’s no worse feeling than that millisecond you’re sure you are going to die after leaning your chair back a little too far.

30.I’m always slightly terrified when I exit out of Word and it asks me if I want to save any changes to my ten page research paper that I swear I did not make any changes to.

31.  “Do not machine wash or tumble dry” means I will never wash this ever.

32. I hate being the one with the remote in a room full of people watching TV. There’s so much pressure. ‘I love this show, but will they judge me if I keep it on? I bet everyone is wishing we weren’t watching this. It’s only a matter of time before they all get up and leave the room. Will we still be friends after this?’

33.I hate when I just miss a call by the last ring (Hello? Hello? Dammit!), but when I immediately call back, it rings nine times and goes to voicemail. What’d you do after I didn’t answer? Drop the phone and run away?

34.I hate leaving my house confident and looking good and then not seeing anyone of importance the entire day. What a waste.

35. When I meet a new girl/guy, I’m terrified of mentioning something she hasn’t already told me but that I have learned from some light internet stalking.

36. I like all of the music in my iTunes, except when it’s on shuffle, then I like about one in every fifteen songs in my iTunes.

37.  Sometimes I’ll look down at my watch 3 consecutive times and still not know what time it is.

38. I keep some people’s phone numbers in my phone just so I know not to answer when they call.

39. Even under ideal conditions people have trouble locating their car keys in a pocket, hitting the G-spot, and Pinning the Tail on the Donkey – but I’d bet my ass everyone can find and push the Snooze button from 3 feet away, in about 1.7 seconds, eyes closed, first time every time…

40. I wonder if cops ever get pis*ed off at the fact that everyone they drive behind obeys the speed limit.

41. I think the freezer deserves a light as well.

42. The other night I ordered take away and when I looked in the bag, saw they had included four sets of plastic cutlery. In other words, someone at the restaurant packed my order, took a second to think about it, and then estimated that there must be at least four people eating to require such a large amount of food. Too bad I was eating by myself. There’s nothing like being made to feel like a fat ba*tard before dinner

How many tribes are you a member of?

I am currently reading Seth Godin’s book on Tribes and its got me thinking.

I have joined many tribes without knowing and some tribes with knowing. I am a member of….the apple tribe, the gen Y tribe, the Geneva ex-pat tribe, the 2 many DJs band tribe & the thesis tribe….to name but a few.

Seth describes the difference between a crowd and a tribe as the ability to communicate up, down, with each other and with the outside. Social Media makes it easier for us all to be tribe leaders and some people like Penelope Trunk, Jamie Varon & Matt Chevy have done it very well.

But what makes a tribe last? If you asked Seth he would probably say – the leader and the dialogue – which links to the point that Kevin Roberts made on the role of social media in building lovemarks.One of the best examples of such a tribe is Apple- where the Leader, Jobs, communicated directly with the tribe to announce new products – result – record sales and lovemark status.

To build the tribe and the lovemark, the leader needs to maintain the dialogue – in the social media world, through blogging, tweeting, commenting and encouraging comments on their blogs -  and I am interested to see where some of these social media tribal leaders go, will the tribes grow or move to the next leader? Jamie Varon has tweeted about losing her blog motivation (0.2 posts a day) and twitter followers…is this a sign that she is losing her tribe? Carlos Miceli and the CookieMonster on the other hand are posting once a day and racking up tweets and comments by the hour….how will their tribes grow and grow?

Which tribes are you are member of? Do you lead a tribe? Did you know you did? Do you want to?

I want to share with you a post I read that I have been contemplating for a while….I have to post this in full to give it justice – I urge you to visit the debate on the original post @ Harvard Business…but my question is…

if this is Gen M’s letter to the world….what is Gen Ys?and where is it different?

Dear Old People Who Run the World,

My generation would like to break up with you.

Everyday, I see a widening gap in how you and we understand the world — and what we want from it. I think we have irreconcilable differences.

You wanted big, fat, lazy “business.” We want small, responsive, micro-scale commerce.

You turned politics into a dirty word. We want authentic, deep democracy — everywhere.

You wanted financial fundamentalism. We want an economics that makes sense for people — not just banks.

You wanted shareholder value — built by tough-guy CEOs. We want real value, built by people with character, dignity, and courage.

You wanted an invisible hand — it became a digital hand. Today’s markets are those where the majority of trades are done literally robotically. We want a visible handshake: to trust and to be trusted.

You wanted growth — faster. We want to slow down — so we can become better.

You didn’t care which communities were capsized, or which lives were sunk. We want a rising tide that lifts all boats.

You wanted to biggie size life: McMansions, Hummers, and McFood. We want to humanize life.

You wanted exurbs, sprawl, and gated anti-communities. We want a society built on authentic community.

You wanted more money, credit and leverage — to consume ravenously. We want to be great at doing stuff that matters.

You sacrificed the meaningful for the material: you sold out the very things that made us great for trivial gewgaws, trinkets, and gadgets. We’re not for sale: we’re learning to once again do what is meaningful.

There’s a tectonic shift rocking the social, political, and economic landscape. The last two points above are what express it most concisely. I hate labels, but I’m going to employ a flawed, imperfect one: Generation “M.”

What do the “M”s in Generation M stand for? The first is for a movement. It’s a little bit about age — but mostly about a growing number of people who are acting very differently. They are doing meaningful stuff that matters the most. Those are the second, third, and fourth “M”s.

Gen M is about passion, responsibility, authenticity, and challenging yesterday’s way of everything. Everywhere I look, I see an explosion of Gen M businesses, NGOs, open-source communities, local initiatives, government. Who’s Gen M? Obama, kind of. Larry and Sergey. The Threadless, Etsy, and Flickr guys. Ev, Biz and the Twitter crew. Tehran 2.0. The folks at Kiva, Talking Points Memo, and FindtheFarmer. Shigeru Miyamoto, Steve Jobs, Muhammad Yunus, and Jeff Sachs are like the grandpas of Gen M. There are tons where these innovators came from.

Gen M isn’t just kind of awesome — it’s vitally necessary. If you think the “M”s sound idealistic, think again.

The great crisis isn’t going away, changing, or “morphing.” It’s the same old crisis — and it’s growing.

You’ve failed to recognize it for what it really is. It is, as I’ve repeatedly pointed out, in our institutions: the rules by which our economy is organized.

But they’re your institutions, not ours. You made them — and they’re broken. Here’s what I mean:

“… For example, the auto industry has cut back production so far that inventories have begun to shrink — even in the face of historically weak demand for motor vehicles. As the economy stabilizes, just slowing the pace of this inventory shrinkage will boost gross domestic product, or GDP, which is the nation’s total output of goods and services.”

Clearing the backlog of SUVs built on 30-year-old technology is going to pump up GDP? So what? There couldn’t be a clearer example of why GDP is a totally flawed concept, an obsolete institution. We don’t need more land yachts clogging our roads: we need a 21st Century auto industry.

I was (kind of) kidding about seceding before. Here’s what it looks like to me: every generation has a challenge, and this, I think, is ours: to foot the bill for yesterday’s profligacy — and to create, instead, an authentically, sustainably shared prosperity.

Anyone — young or old — can answer it. Generation M is more about what you do and who you are than when you were born. So the question is this: do you still belong to the 20th century – or the 21st?

Love,

Umair and the Edge Economy Community

This is a realisation that I had last week when I attended a seminar at work on Friday given by the Girl’s Guide to Business… it was quite simple but it came as a surprise to me. I always thought I was good at it! I wanted to share in case it strikes a tone with anyone else…

I have a lot of friends, in fact 943 of them on Facebook (yes I know them all personally), and I get on well with 90% of people that I work with – I always thought that this meant that I am naturally a good networker but after listening to the wise words of Caitlin and Kim I realise that when it comes to networking I fall into the same trap that many women do.

Women are allegedly natural networkers but despite the fact that we speak 20,000 words a day opposed to the 7,000 of men, the men still have bigger networks. After listening to the girls, I realise that this discrepancy lies in our inability to separate a social event to a networking opportunity whereas men treat networking as a science.

Most of my network is built up of people that I have got to know over a period of time or a series of occasions. I have left many events thinking how nice all the people where, how funny they were and how pleasant my evening was but I rarely leave somewhere with new connections made just on that night. If there is someone that interests me I just hope that they remember me next time that they see me. Apparently this is where I am going wrong, although I think I am a good networker – I am rubbish.

Another reason why I as a woman am a terrible networker is because I suffer from “impostor syndrome” – common in a lot of women. Suffering from impostor syndrome means that you feel like “I don’t really know what I am doing” or “I’ll fake it until I get caught” and in terms of networking – “why would they want to meet me” and “why would they want to network with me – what do I have to give”. Men don’t seem to experience this in the same extent as women and to be honest, no woman should suffer it…it is for the others to decide, not you.

I am sharing this realisation in myself as it surprised me. I was so sure that I had networking skills “ticked off” as one of my strengths but the way they put it made me realise I was so wrong. I now know that I need to learn a little from men in this circumstance and treat networking as a more conscious activity – not as far as being a science- but need to make sure that I am making connections when it counts and not just having a good time.