Forumblog.org - The World Economic Forum Blog

Please help Pakistan!

During the past few weeks, a group of colleagues from the World Economic Forum visited Pakistan, including areas which have been devastated by floods and landslides. The experience brought home to us the true gravity of the situation.

Pakistan is already affected by serious challenges including energy shortages, poor water supply, and widespread poverty in addition to constant terror threats and a challenging political situation. Torrential rains have now caused the worst floods in 80 years which many of you may have read about or seen in the news over the past month.

The data is staggering. Some 20 million people are affected by the floods and by some estimates one fourth of the land is under water. Many lives have been lost already, many remain in acute danger of disease and malnutrition and it will take months, if not years, to rebuild the infrastructure that has been destroyed.

The Forum has appealed to its staff to collect funds that will be donated to a trusted and reputable local organization such as the Edhi Foundation to ensure that our support reaches people most in need. Once this emergency relief phase is over, we also hope to be involved in longer-term rehabilitation efforts with our members and partners and by supporting local social entrepreneurs such as the Kashf Foundation.

Twitter Survey 2010

A week ago we asked our followers how we could improve the Davos Twitter feed @Davos? Thank you for all your inspiring comments and useful suggestions. We wanted to take this opportunity to answer some of them.

“The Forum blog could act as an important "aggregator" and distribute discussions via Twitter. ‘Davos’ is associated with leadership and exchange of ideas - this should be mirrored here and multiplied via Twitter”, suggested @industrialist. “I'd like to see the thoughts of those who make Davos tick more”, added @markpalexander. We have taken your comments at heart and will try with our live tweets from our meetings to capture the most salient and interesting quotes from panellists in 140 characters.

“Give us stories about what is happening on the ground. Make it real and personal”, said @aoconnornd. We are planning to organize more Twitter interviews with key participants and as @TeraThomas pointed out we might “need a twitter journalist at all your events”.

Our main objective is to keep the Davos Twitter feed interesting throughout the entire year or as @billshander nailed it “be a continuous issue-driven thought leadership platform”. @rogerheo we will try hard to “keep bringing something only Davos can create”.

None of us, including @hanmireddy and @Passionfortalen, like to be inundated with tweets, so we will keep it to “one tweet a day”. On a more technical side we have implemented @isaacgriberg’s suggestion of empowering our staff to “tweet via personal (branded) accounts”. There is a whole list of colleagues on Twitter already: http://twitter.com/davos/wefstaff.

Hashtags are useful @mowglitweets but they can also create confusion. Allow us to stick with #WEF for now. As @SidVoice suggested, we have applied to become a 'verified account' to avoid any confusion.

And finally we will continue to “be open, random and supportive” as @swissbusiness wrote. Thanks for all your input and continuous support. For ideas simple leave a comment below or via Twitter @Davos.

Training for leadership at Columbia's School of the Arts

50 Global Leadership Fellows from the World Economic Forum took courses in rhetoric, improvisation, physical presence and voice technique at Columbia University's School of the Arts this July. The workshops were designed to help the next generation of young leaders from around the globe use training in the arts and theatre as a resource for effective leadership.

Click on the picture to watch a video of the training. Read the full story at the website of Columbia University School of the Arts and the article Training for Leading roles in the New York Times.

How to improve our Twitter feed

The World Economic Forum has been on Twitter since April 2007 and thanks to Twitter’s suggested user list we now have over 1.5 million followers @Davos. We know too well, that not all of our followers are listening or reading our tweets.

In order to find out what our Twitter followers want we are conducting our annual Twitter survey. Tell us how we can make our Twitter feed more interesting!

Over the past year we live tweeted from our regional meetings in Cartagena, Dar es Salaam, Brussels, Doha, and Ho Chi Minh City. We will plan to live tweet the key quotes from our participants at our upcoming meetings in Tianjin, Marrakech, New Delhi, Dubai and Davos. Should we live tweet our events from a different account such as @WEF?

Since our Annual Meeting in Davos-Klosters 2010 we create specific Twitter lists for all our events, capturing the tweets of the participants and providing a fascinating read of their thoughts and musings during the event.

As more and more of our participants join Twitter we hope to organize more Twitter interviews such as the one we did with Queen Rania. And finally we also tweet the occasional reading recommendation and job postings.

But where shall we go from here? What else could we do to make our Twitter stream more valuable to our readers? Simply put your suggestions in the form embedded below.

TV documentary about 40 years of the World Economic Forum

The first German television channel ARD will has aired a 30-minute documentary about the 40 years of the World Economic Forum on Sunday 17 January at 13.15.

Reporters Axel Finkenwirth und Eckhart Querner were able to follow Klaus Schwab, the executive chairman of the Forum at numerous events in Davos, Jordan and in China. Entitled “Magnet der Mächtigen” (Magnet of the Powerful) the documentary will be is availble on demand for several weeks in the ARD Mediathek.

 

Update. The documentary will be aired in English, Spanish and Arabic on Deutsche Welle TV on Monday 25 January at 15.30GMT, Tuesday 26 January at 03.30 GMT and Wednesday 27 January at 09.30 GMT.

 

Twitter Survey 2009

A big Thank You to everyone who participated in our Twitter Survey to help us make our Twitter feed more valuable for our followers.

Many of you voted to have more Twitter interviews and in general more direct access to participants at our meetings. We will work on this and try to have a good line-up of high level participants for Twitter interviews at the upcoming Annual Meeting in Davos held from 27 -31 January 2010. If the interviewee is willing we might even consider livestreaming these interviews on our Qik or Livestream channels.

One of the biggest challenges we face is how to make our Twitter feed more interactive and how to funnel questions to sessions/speakers from those who cannot attend. Can we crowdsource topics and trends in advance of our meetings and how to integrate ideas submitted on various topics in the form of blog posts or tweets?

We will definitely take these suggestions into consideration. Be assured we are listening and as often as we can we will try to answer, so feel free to fire your questions at @Davos.

As we wrote earlier we will continue to live tweet interesting speaker quotes at our upcoming forums in China, India and Davos. Live tweeting at our events inevitably means that we will go over the limit of 5 tweets a day that some have been asking for.

We will also keep on posting about upcoming events, links to our live stream, links to videos and session summaries as well as job postings. In between meetings we will try to update you on what is happening at the Forum on a daily basis. Some of you have asked us to keep the world informed and also share other non-Forum related information. We have started to do so and, who knows, maybe our Twitter feed will evolve into a more 'global exchange platform'. The most important thing as @LauraRmz pointed out is writing interesting things.

We promise we will try and keep up the good work! Thanks for your support and encouragement!

Help us Make our Twitter Stream More Valuable!

Five months ago we asked our followers how we could make our Twitter stream more valuable and we received amazing feedback. The overwhelming answer was Live Tweeting from our meetings and Twitter interviews.

 

We did live tweet from our meetings in Rio de Janeiro, Jordan, Cape Town and Seoul and even organized our first Twitter interview with Queen Rania. We plan to continue to live tweet from our upcoming summits in China, India and Davos.

 

But what else should we tweet? How can we make our Twitter stream more interesting for our readers? What would you suggest? What else do you want to hear and read from the World Economic Forum? Simply put your suggestions in the form embedded below.

New Head of Communications at the Forum

Adrian Monck, Head of Journalism and Professor of Journalism at City University London will become Managing Director, Head of Communications at the World Economic Forum. Adrian Monck, an award-winning journalist, author, commentator and social media expert, has over 20 years of experience as a journalist with CBS, ITN, and Sky News.

He has authored three books including Can You Trust the Media?. Adrian is an avid blogger (http://adrianmonck.com) but has just announced on his blog that:

"In the new role I’ll be removing my commentary hat and travelling a lot more, so the blog will probably fall into abeyance - it’s been suffering of late."

Adrian will lead the media, publications and website teams comprising of 18 staff members and oversee the Forum's numerous social media channels including this blog. Adrian can already be contacted on Twitter @amonck. Adrian Monck replaces Mark Adams who has left the Forum to become head of Communications at the IOC in Lausanne.

Forum Photos on Flickr under Creative Commons Licence

We have just uploaded 300 of our best pictures from the Annual Meeting 2009 in Davos to the World Economic Forum's Flickr account (http://tr.im/ForumPics). Admittedly it took us some time to choose the best pictures from the thousands shot by our official photographers from Swiss-Image. My colleague Dafni Kokkidi spent the past week adding descriptions, tags and geo tags to all the photos.

But it was well worth it, because these 300 high-resolution portrait shots are available for anyone to download in all sizes. Best of all, these pictures are licensed under the Creative Commons licence (BY-SA 3.0) meaning you can use them for free on your blog, on your website, in print and even for commercial purposes under the condition that you credit the World Economic Forum. We also uploaded the best pictures from our regional summits such as the recent World Economic Forum on Latin America in Rio.

Forum Wins Season Opener of Geneva Corporate Football League

The World Economic Forum's "All Blues" football team won its opening game 1:0 in the Geneva Corporate Football League - and its first competitive match in recent history - against a selection of Polo Ralph Lauren. The team around captain Yann Zopf was able to grind out a result, withstanding a strong spell of pressure by the visiting side, especially in the second half.

The "All Blues" took the lead after Jan Klawitter finished off a flowing counter-attack and punished some sloppy defending just before the half-time whistle. "I am proud that the lads showed strong team-spirit and a winning mentality for this historic victory," said Kamal Kimaoui, Trainer of the All Blues".

The next game will be on Monday, 6 April 2009 at 20:00 at Varembé against the team Louis Dreyfus.