Fly Me to the Moon

Hong Kong's night market getting ready for business earlier this evening.  Nothing to do with media relations or social media, but very cheap watches.

Chris Deri is CEO of Burson-Marsteller China.  An American, he has an amazing resume, including serving on Al Gore's 2000 Presidential Campaign.  He's fluent in Mandarin, and earlier in his career taught English at Shandong University.   Back in the US, he went into communications and lobbying and is now in back in China heading up a practice that includes foreign companies operating in China as well as Chinese multi-nationals.

We were lucky to have Chris open the final day of the Media Relations in the Digital Age Conference in Hong Kong with a keynote presentation on reputation.   He urged delegates to think about how they can ensure statements about their company's mission or purpose really break through.  Many multi-nationals are enormous (Wal-Mart, for example, as an economy is as big as Poland) and could take inspiration from the way politicians and governments express their goals and vision.  They don't talk about what they have done.  What breaks through is what you to commit to doing in the future, and the journey you will take to get there.

We all remember JFK's "We choose to go the Moon".  Or more recently, "New Beijing, Great Olympics."

Many companies still have published mission statements that talk in vague terms about "making people's lives better" which few have even read, never mind remember.

Chris has not only a great sense of humour but terrific comic timing.   In my introduction to his keynote, I gently chided the Americans for hiring lip readers for the Royal Wedding television coverage to see what participants were saying.  Typical, I said, tongue-in-cheek, of the Americans to do something vulgar and tasteless on such a special day.  "We had no choice", Chris replied instantly, "all the phone tappers were booked up."

Touche!



A Twitter feed of the conference can be viewed at #smrdigital

(Posted from Wanchai, Hong Kong)