Convergence Conversation

There was a great story in the paper that I was reading on the train a few days ago. Not the one about the couple arrested for having sex on a train into Euston.  The typically English commuters ignored them and carried on reading their papers or working on their laptops (honestly, in this day and age -- didn't any of them have cameraphones?). The newspaper I saw rather quaintly reported that the woman involved was "from Essex".

No, not that one, the one about the couple getting divorced because a virtual private detective in Second Life caught the husband's avatar fondling a call girl's avatar. More...

Just as Lord Voldemort is euphemistically referred to as “He Who Must Not Be Named”, so the same treatment is applied to the word “recession.” The “R” word is, quite frankly, a dirty word. It strikes such fear into the heart of business, that companies would much rather use another word in its stead. Here are a few:

Downturn.

Slump.

Bottom out.

Realignment.

Bagel.

(Bagel is my personal favourite, it’s what Josh Lyman from the US show The West Wing insists on describing it.)

Of course it doesn’t matter what you call it. You can call a spade a “digging facilitation device”, but everyone knows it’s a spade so why pretend otherwise? Instead of wasting time thinking of names to call a recession, time should be spent on the most important question; how do you get out of one?

In my days working at an advertising agency, the answer of course lay in spending money on advertising. More...

Let’s start with a quick exercise.

If I say a well-known phrase I want you to think of the first thing that springs to mind. Ready?

Social networks.

Now, what came to mind?

I imagine a lot of you were suddenly presented with the disarming image of spotty youths furiously typing away, openly sharing their deepest personal insecurities with one another, using spurious “text speak”, the only language apart from Welsh to be completely devoid of vowels...a different language, indeed a different world, to a lot of us here in the business world. Social networking is just something those “youngsters” do isn’t it?

I know that’s the view I had a few years ago, whilst creating highly targeted, relevant, beautifully creative pieces of mailed communication (which my girlfriend called junk mail) for a large communications agency. More...