more 2.0, please

So I’ve been kind of lost for a while, but I have not forgotten about my dear lunchbox :) I know I have some pending topics to write about but I'll be honesy, maybe I’ll never do it… who knows. I wanted to write more about Banco del Libro’s Award, about volunteers and many other themes but I haven’t got to that moment where I sit in front of Panelita (my mac) and feel like writing about it.

Anyway, tonight I want to write about my passion: Social Media. This week I had two 1.0 encounters with the 2.0 world. On Wednesday (Social Media Day), Dom Sagolla (Twitter) and Dave Morin (Facebook) visited Venezuela and gave a confernce. Thanks to my cool job at the Venezuela sin Límites Foundation, I got to go and it was really awesome. I loved to listen to them talk about these tools, how they were created and simple case studies that made it easy to understand its reach.

 @dom and my not so esteemed whale

Given that this is my passion, I found this conference to be very interesting. I do believe Social Media is changing everything in our lives but, specially, it is changing traditional media and how people communicate. After this exciting conference, the next day I had a class at a CSR course I’m doing thanks to my other awesome job at 4help! It was precisely the “CSR and communications” class. I was obviously pretty excited about it because that’s what I do every single day of my life. I do it at the Venezuela sin Límites Foundation, at 4help org and in my own personal life through this blog and my twitter account.

So I sat there very excited not only because of the subject of the class, but because the teacher is well known in the CORPORATE (I hightlight this word because she has a lot of experience working with social responsibility mainly from the traditional big enterprises) SR world. However I was greatly disappointed when I found that the contents of the class matched the environment: it was completely 1.0. I strongly believe that it is a fact that the best and most natural media to communicate CSR is the Web and Social Media. So based on this believe, my expectations of the class were very different from what I got.

The teacher based its discourse on traditional media and not flexible structures that worked a few years ago but are changing now. I wanted to talk about what is coming, that change, not what we are leaving behind. I am not saying traditional media doesn’t work, not at all but the priority when it comes to communicating CSR is, without a doubt, the web.

We got to a point where people asked if an enterprise should or should not follow people on twitter. For me, this isn’t even a question! I believe enterprises MUST follow people on twitter! The people that say good things about them, the people that say bad things, their workers, allies, providers, traditional and new media businesses… you get the idea.

I strongly believe that Social Media is about listening, sharing and creating bonds with people that you cannot create through traditional media. I mean, how cool is it that you know from your client itself what he likes or don’t about your product. Without any other big consumer study or whatnot. This is the greatest chance for enterprises to connect with their clients and really make a bond with them. Many people say that there is no such thing as true brand fidelity but I believe that with Social Media the probabilities of creating that fidelity from your clients are much higher than with traditional media. How can they do that? Well, I’m very looking forward to writing my opinion on this matter… but maybe in another post ;)


P.S: Thank you Rafa Bello for saying that you were going to read my blog it totally motivated me to get home and write!