The Pope, Benedict the XVI has launched his own You Tube channel in the hope of reaching the Digital Generation. In a video blog (‘vlog’), broadcast on You Tube (of course). Saying that the internet has become a ‘resource of upmost importance’ and especially for the digital generation, the Pope continued (text is linked to You Tube video): ‘Undoubtedly, wise use of communications technology enables communities to be formed in ways that promotes the search for the truth, the good and the beautiful, transcending geographical boundaries, and ethnic divisions. To this end the Vatican has launched a new initiative which will make information from the Holy See more readily accessible on the World Wide Web. It is my hope that this initiative will reach a wide range of people...’
The Vatican has committed to updating the YouTube site daily with papal news items produced by the Vatican television station CTV and Vatican Radio. They will further be translated into Italian, German, English and Spanish – to ensure its reach across language boundaries. Monsignor Claudio Maria Celli, who heads the Vatican's social communications office, said the pope fully approved of the YouTube channel, saying Benedict was "a man of dialogue" who wanted to engage with people wherever they were (Source: Channel4.com)
This shows how committed the Catholic Church is to sending out its message and reaching the audience it aims to ‘recruit’. It will be interesting to see whether corporations – even in tech sectors – will follow suit, with their CEO’s reaching future employees. From our research we find that ‘viral’ communication such as this has a much greater impact on the ‘Digital Generation’ as it is reaching them using one of their preferred consumption mediums (youtube), which is also easy to share across networks, and uses visual media (pictures, stories, and moving images) which are much more likely to capture their attention than a page of traditional text. It’s considered to be more ‘transparent’.
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"Corporate communications has radically changed," says Andy Sernovitz, chief executive of the Blog Council, an organisation for heads of social media at big companies. "It's no longer just companies talking to the press, and customer service talking to customers. All these other people showed up in the -middle. They may not be press and they may not be customers, but suddenly their collective voice is bigger than the traditional channels."
The essence of social media is conversation. Rather than a one-way stream of information, where companies make announcements to the press and customers, social media enables a great deal of interaction, where companies are in constant dialogue with the public. "We've seen a shift from doing things the old way to now having conversations with our customers," says Jeanette Gibson, director of new media for Cisco Systems.
Ms Gibson, who began her job in 2007, says there is now a mandate at Cisco that all staff be attuned to what is being said about Cisco online. "It has definitely shifted how we've done communications," she says. "Our executives are video blogging every day. Everybody's job is now social media."