He will be addressing heads of state and finance ministers on the subject of “Creating Green Jobs”, one of 12 topics on the agenda during the two-day summit in Seoul.

Joining Vestas on the exclusive list of companies taking part will be leaders in a number of industries such as VISA, Nestlé and HSBC.

By Jonathan Winch, Partner & Co-founder

The telecom provider Telia has spent a lot of time and money on such statements. But their customers rate them at the bottom of the customer satisfaction scale (Markedsføring magazine, 23.03.10).

I visited a Telia store recently and became highly irritated with their service. They refused to bend a harmless rule to help fix a problem they themselves had created for me. The difficulty was one of having the wrong attitude toward their customers.

Leaving that store, I decided to sneak into another Telia store to see if they might be more flexible and the girl behind the counter helped me immediately. Her attitude made all the difference.

When people ask me to create a vision/mission that consists of a bunch of statements (something they often do), I just can’t see the value. And I typically advise them not to do it. Unless they do it right, that is…

There are essentially two types of vision/mission projects: The first are highly creative efforts that result in something most people like and think was worth it. They are the results of big, expensive processes and get implemented in companies like Carlsberg, LEGO or Nike. I can recommend them if you have the cash and time.

The second is the text-by-the-meter model where you write a lot of stuff from the company’s “We” perspective. That always results in paragraphs that you yourself would never read and which you therefore can’t expect others to want to read, either.
Without the big process, the only thing you can do is to string a lot of clichés together in prose – i.e. the second type. And that’s what we can do for you if you want us to, of course. It would take about 4-5 hours. No input is required – we just pull the clichés out of a rather worn old hat. Of course, I believe that it would be against any good brand to do so.

But there may be other internal or external pressures that require it to be done this way. The reason I’m so tough on this is that times have moved far away from long paragraphs of blowing the company’s own trumpet. People don’t believe it like they (maybe) used to. It’s just another sign that the company is not a leader – because leaders are action-focused, have a simple but powerful attitude, show that they know the customer’s time is short. Employees don’t get behind this stuff, either. They get motivated by the excitement of working with a company, not by management statements and rules.

It’s not about looking like everyone else, but about looking different in an interesting, exciting way. So let’s cut to what is really important. Let’s drop those stiff corporate statements that waste management time and no one can remember anyway. And let’s focus on expressing and living an attitude instead. So the answer is? Create an attitude with edge and express it via text, images and interactions. That works much better!

If you want to see how, just ask us.

A quick glance through the job pages in the Norwegian newspaper AftenPosten on a Sunday, and you soon notice something similar about around 75% of the companies seeking new employees. They are all one of the largest or leading companies in their field.

There are some variations. They may be the largest in Norway, Scandinavia, Europe or the world, or the leading transporter, pipe producer for the oil & gas industry or IT consultants focused on the communications industry. But they are the largest somewhere or lead something.

These companies usually state this fact in the first line of their boilerplate text – and as a reader, you soon learn to ignore it. Because it’s boring. And because it doesn’t tell us anything about the company’s personality. Perhaps it’s time for communications people to rethink what people want to know about their company – and put that up front.

Here are some opening lines from boilerplates that I think connect with the reader, and give you an immediate idea of what the company is like:

“Innocent is the UK and Europe’s favourite smoothie company, selling natural healthy products in over 13 countries and employing over 220 people across Europe.”

“GE (NYSE: GE) is a diversified infrastructure, finance and media company taking on the world’s toughest challenges.”

“Apple ignited the personal computer revolution with the Apple II, then reinvented the personal computer with the Macintosh.”

USA Today runs yet another story about the “Happy Danes”.

Copenhagen bus driver Mukhtar probably won’t forget his recent birthday for a while. A surprise party captured on film and used as a part of the campaign “Bedre Bustur” (Better Bus Rides) made the unsuspecting bus driver’s day quite special.

Transport service organisations Arriva and Movia are behind the viral campaign, which has been shown on You Tube more than 330.000 times since the launch 13 May.

The overall purpose of the campaign is to show people that lots of stuff can happen on a random bus ride – it is more than just a ride from a-b! Mukhtar probably agrees!

Watch how more than 100 friends, colleagues, musicians and production people took Mukhtar by surprise.

Bedre Bustur campaign site (in Danish): www.bedrebustur.dk

If you’re thinking of saving money on your next translation job - by using a low-cost agency or doing the work in-house - this article in the New York Times may make you think again.

As China opens its doors for Expo 2010, 600 volunteers are working to remove bad translations from signs, hotels and restaurants across the country. And they have their work cut out, removing signs such as Racist Park, Slip and Fall Down Carefully, and Do Drunken Driving.

But not everyone thinks that eradicating all Chinglish from China is a good idea. Jeffery Yoa feels that Chinglish can be refreshingly lyrical, and perhaps offers non-Chinese an insight into how the Chinese think of language. Still, even he draws the line because, as he says, “I want to see people nodding that they understand the message on these signs. I don’t want to see them laughing.”

Check out the article and make up your own mind - and be sure to watch the slide show.

English is of course widely spoken as a second language throughout the world - it’s a way for people from different backgrounds to communicate effectively in an international setting. Grammar rules are broken. Words are mispronounced. But people still understand one another. And now a retired French IBM marketing executive, Jean-Paul Nerrière, has given this pattern a name: Globish. He claims it’s “the worldwide dialect of the third millennium”.

Nerrière says that memorizing 1,500 English words and a song (he suggests “Strangers in the Night”), is all it takes to communicate in Globish. You won’t sound eloquent, but you’ll be understood. At least by non-native English speakers. And that’s the catch. Seems that native English speakers can’t understand a word of this English-based international language. Odd, no?

So does Nerrière have any ulterior motives for establishing Globish as a lingua franca? Well, he does claim that,”Globish will limit the influence of the English language [on French] dramatically.”

Not paying your bills can be dangerous – especially when the creditor in question has access to your company website. The results can be messy, as a restaurant in Tønsberg, Norway, found out recently.

Visitors to the restaurant’s website were greeted with this message:

“Welcome to the restaurant that hasn’t paid for its website.
Do you work at the restaurant? You should answer my email.”

(I’ve translated that myself from the Norwegian, apologies for any errors.)

Long-time Eye for Image customer FLSmidth has been named best Large Cap company in the Nordic region in terms of investor communications. FLSmidth got the award from the IR Nordic Markets 2009 study, based on research carried out by the analytics institute REGI Research Strategi.

FLSmidth beat off some tough competition to claim the award. More than 150 Nordic companies were considered for the awards. And each company was judged on 21 investor relations-related criteria, including daily IR communication and reports.

Congratulations to FLSmidth from all of us at Eye for Image.

You can read more about the awards on the Dansk Kommunikationsforening website.