This video illustrates how our minds are being trained to recognize brands already from a very young age.

“A crisis is much alike an event, with all its complications, whereas the main difference is of course that you don’t want a crisis to happen,” says Marieke Duijts, Client Director and communications expert at Wow!works. “It is interesting to see that despite strict plans and regular disaster simulations, things didn’t go as planned” she added, suggesting that governmental organizations can learn valuable lessons from the event industry when it comes to crisis communications planning.

Although the full report has not yet been released, analysis shows that over a dozen organizations was involved with crisis communications at the time of the crisis. This lead to conflicting messages and damaged the citizens’ confidence in local authorities.

One of the key rules of crisis communications is to keep the decision making circle small. “It seems this fundamental rule has not been respected in the first place,” says Duijts after a first glance over media citing the report.

The latter could well be a typical challenge of countries like the Netherlands, where a large population lives in a relatively small area, where cities are small and where a crisis easily stretches across city boundaries.

Creating a fan community from scratch is always hard, both for new initiatives as well as established brands. One can argue that the Winter Youth Olympics are both. “With an event that only takes place once every four years, you don’t get many opportunities to get it right. Especially for an event for youth, which by the time the next edition takes place, has grown up,” says Sietse Bakker, CEO of Wow!works and events expert.

Social media are well-embedded into the event’s website, but the buzz seems yet to come. For an event of such magnitude, having just under 25,000 fans on Facebook and just over 2,300 followers on Twitter (and a lot of sub-accounts with substantially less followers) is not a lot. Modest media attention for the Games, compared to the global hype around the adult Olympics, is certainly part of the challenge.

Sports bring people together. To achieve that same effect on social media, the Youth Olympic community needs strong ambassadors who can take the lead in the online dialogue.

“We should adapt the Olympic programme to the wishes of a young generation, and not be too conservative,” said IOC Chairman Jacques Rogge. “In my opinion, the Youth Olympic Games are the perfect place to experiment,” he added. The latter hopefully also counts for the way the Games are being promoted. London 2012 is the first edition of the Games after the social media boom and it will be interesting to see how the organizers deal with that opportunity. The activity on the London 2012 Facebook profile shows a hopeful beginning!

Meanwhile, electronics companies are rolling out so-called intelligent TV sets, that are directly connected to the internet. These TV sets give consumers simplified ways to watch video on demand and IPTV-channels, such as the ones YouTube is planning to launch.

“On short term, traditional TV channels will keep their popularity, but services like the one YouTube is about to launch are most definitely going to take market share away from them. First, we expect that traditional TV channels will see a bit by bit decline of viewership with the younger generation. In three to five years, YouTube and similar providers could very well take over a significant portion of the market. Traditional TV channels have to get prepared,” says Stijn Smulders, Head of Media Productions at Wow!works.

YouTube, currently part of Google, has announced to offer in-house productions as well as externally produced content.