About the Authors

The book is written by two authors with extensive cross-cultural background.

Silvia Cambié was raised in Italy, educated in Austria and has worked in different parts of Western and Eastern Europe. She speaks five languages and, in her previous capacity as a journalist, she has written in English and German for leading British and German publications. Her articles were also published in Italian, Czech and Hungarian publications. She is highly familiar with the various approaches to communication and public relations used in different cultural and linguistic environments.

Silvia serves on the International Executive Board of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC), a network of 15,000 professionals worldwide, who practice PR and communication in their career.

In this capacity, she interacts on a daily basis with PR practitioners from all over the world. She is in a unique position to find out about PR trends and to collect case studies and best practices from various countries

Silvia is also a member of the Arab International Women’s Forum (AIWF), a London-based non-profit organisation set up to link business and professional women in the 22 Arab countries with their counterparts in the international community. This membership enables her to keep up to speed with developments in important international markets like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. It also provides her with high-level contacts in the local PR sector.

Thanks to her international background and cultural sensitivity, Silvia has a unique approach to cross-border communication that will be reflected in the book.

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Yang-May Ooi is a writer specialising in cross-cultural issues and social media. She grew up in multi-racial and multi-faith Malaysia and now lives in London, where she runs her cross-cultural blog Fusion View, an East/ West view on writing, culture and the arts. Fusion View is read by over 8,000 unique visitors a month from all over the world, from Japan, through South East Asia and Europe to the USA and Australia, and has been featured on the BBC Radio programme Pods & Blogs. Yang-May has also published legal thrillers with Hodder & Stoughton in the UK, set in Malaysia and the UK with dynamic Asian protagonists and best described as “Amy Tan meets John Grisham”.

Yang-May also has many years of senior executive experience working in government and corporate environments as a lawyer and understands issues for business communications from an executive perspective as well as from a marketing point of view. She currently works part-time in a management role in a financial institution in the City of London. She also offers consultancy services on how to use social media in a business context. Yang-May has edited corporate and legal journals and newsletters in her various senior executive roles, working closely with the marketing teams. Within her current management role, she has developed and facilitates a blog for the housing finance sector.

Yang-May’s international background, corporate experience at senior executive level together with her expertise as a a writer and social media specialist makes her uniquely placed to write on cross-cultural online communications from a business perspective.

Some of the research for the book will also be carried out through online discussions and conversations via the two authors' respective blogs. This has the advantage of bringing interactivity into the creation of the book that can be seen in real time by potential readers as well as by communicators contributing their experiences and expertise to the authors’ research. The use of social media in the writing of the book will be a way of "leading by example" and "walking the talk" that is very relevant in today's communications climate.