[Chile's Juan Pablo Tapia. From his Photo File]
Juan Pablo Tapia, is a senior consultant in strategic communications, serving as a Projects Manager at Crisis ICC , a communications firm. He's also a professor of Strategic Communication at University Pacifico and UAH where, he tells me, he has "incorporated contents about the Social Media whenever I can." Additionally, he is co-founder of the Civic NGO responsible for implementing TimeBanks in Chile. His personal blog, is a venue he told me "where I collect Typos." Juan and I share something in common on that one.
I hope you read it through, ir at least skip to the end, where Juan Pablo tells me the best case I have yet heard on social media changing government behavior.
1. Tell me about your country. How big, how populated, major industries, quality of life, education, etc.
According to Wikipedia, Chile is the world's 38th-largest country. It is comparable to about twice the size of Norway. Chile's 2002 census reported a population of 15,116,435. Its growth has been declining since the early 1990s, because of a decreasing birth rate. About 85% of the country's population lives in urban areas, with 40% living in Santiago, our capital.
We have a dynamic market-oriented economy characterized by a high level of foreign trade. In 2006, Chile became the country with the highest nominal GDP per capita in Latin America. Even though the exceptional Chilean economic results, the Chilean economy income distribution has been extremely poor. Chile ranks 80th among the countries on the list of income distribution, being the fourth in Latin America and ranking behind much poorer African countries such as Zambia, Nigeria and Malawi.
Chile has signed free trade agreements (FTAs) with a whole network of countries, including an FTA with the United States, signed in 2003. Over the last several years, Chile has signed FTAs with the European Union, South Korea, New Zealand, Singapore, Brunei, China and recently Japan.
We Chileans call our country país de poetas—land of poets. Gabriela Mistral was the first Chilean to win a Nobel Prize for literature (1945). Chile's most famous poet, however, is Pablo Neruda who also won the Nobel Prize in 1971.
2. Tell me about yourself. What do you do? When did you first get involved
in social media and why? What tools do you use and why? How has social media changed your life?
I define myself as a guy with the desire to learn and to make things in different scopes and Social Media is sure one of the most important.
The first time that I became jumbled with the Social Media was around 3 years ago, thanks to one of the first blog I've ever read ( www.leoprieto.com) made by a friend who is one of the refering ones of this subject in Chile. From that minute, the potentiality of being able to have conversations, virtually with any person in this world, hallucinated me; and even more, there were registries of those dialogs. To understand the phenomenon like a conversation is clearly thanks to you Shel and to your first book. Lately, that power to generate " responsible conversations between participants", has interested me more from the point of view of the impact in the corporative communication.
At present I maintain two blogs juanpablotapia and bancodeltiempo One is in Wordpress and the other in Blogger. I use Google Analytics to evaluate both in terms of performance and impact. Also I have incorporated 2.0 tools like Podamatic, Slideshare and Scricblike to make them more attractive and to share different types of content. I use RSS for reading and Bloglines and Firefox. My Social Bookmarks are managed mainly by Del.icio.us.
Lately, I've been giving more attention to Facebook and Linked In because of their great potential for creating international and professional networks. Finally, I maintain my accounts in YouTube, iGoogle, Flickr and others for active video and images.
I use Slide to share my classes with my students and my mindmaps are build on Bubbl, etc. I have a Myspace site to meet and inform me about new groups of music. Recently, I have incorporated Twitter and WIXI on my "software to evaluate's" list.
I am on a permanent search for new tools that allow me to handle the infinite information available at present. So yes, social media has changed my life within the last few years.
3. Do you use social media for your work? How and why?
I use social media practically the whole day at work.
Some projects are developed collaboratively and I use Google Docs, the videos I use for my presentations are on YouTube. When I'm searching for referral information I dig for it on Technorati, Alexa, and others. I believe strongly that the Chilean corporate communications industry still has a passive attitude in respect to this subject.
4. Now, tell me about technology in Chile. How many people have cell phones and/or computers? How many connect to the internet? Where and how do they do it?
Chile has the most technological development of Latin America. According to ISI 2007, in the first quarter of 2007, the Chileans spent an average of $532 USD per person in information technology. According to WIP, in Chile, Internet's primary users are children and teenagers from 6 to 17 years old followed by young men age 18 to 29, mainly from the high half of high socioeconomic sectors.
Personally, I believe these figures are not exactly accurate. In the poorest neighborhoods, we can observe a notorious amount of Cybercafés, with plenty of young men using them mainly for playing games on line, instead of doing homework. Whatever they use them for, it is a good first step. The laptops prices have been falling lately and that, added to such TIC projects as Chileaprende from the Ministry of Education's and Pais Digital Foundation , prepare a positive stage for the upcoming world of digital culture and social media.
5. Talk to me about young people. Are they more involved in social media than older people? What tools do they like most and why?
There is no doubt that young Chilean people are taking great strides in adopting social media. The Fotologs, for example, had experienced an explosive growth in the last years. According to the consulting firm Divergent. On Fotolog, Chile surpasses bigger Latin American countries like Mexico, Brazil and Argentina in the number of registered Avatars. Thirty-four of 100 Fotologs worldwide are Chilean. Three million Chileans, or 20% of the population has one.
The new technologies also have allowed many young people to access information that define themselves in terms of cultural identity: the great amount of urban tribes, organized and with access, have their own places on the Web, which is a clear sign of upcoming communities and grassroots initiatives.
Lately, teenage students have marked a tendency in the use of YouTube. This has received public attention, because students have uploaded and shared videos of bullying in classrooms, which has been followed by media repercussions. Another recent case that reveals the phenomenon of massive repercussion was the Fotolog of an anorexic young girl, who, via fotolog, revealed the crude advance of her disease. Fotologs and blogs have had considerable growth in last years. The Chilean "blogósfera" is acquiring an important level of participation, specificity and reputation from formal media and authorities, and has helped increase the impact of collective initiatives.
Older people are just discovering the potential. In my opinion, they have a reluctance to participate in the conversations generated on the multiple platforms of social communication or Planet 2.0, as a young and prominent Chilean author defined it. Older people are taking their first baby steps on new technologies but they feel crushed by the amount of new global content and participation. Who doesn't?
6. Is business embracing social media tools? If so, in for what purposes? If not, why not?
With few exceptions,, the Chilean businessmen still don't realize the enormous potential to generate commitments and productive conversations with all stakeholders through the social media.
Some have begun using social media tools inside their organization. VTR and others have included/understood the potential of tourism online 2,0, like the tour agency Cocha . But we have a long way to go. Chile is a fertile land for the social media from a corporate and institutional perspective.
Government employs RSS in some official sites and a pair of ministries upload YouTube videos. But overall, it has not been able to visualize the potential of the SM to generate a greater socialization of their public policies for a citizen participation according the present times. The actual government has not included/understood the necessity to define a digital agenda responding the needs of the Chilean reality.
We Chileans used Second Life to celebrate our National Day and the state TV channel used it to launch its new Soap Opera, but in my opinion these are only incipient attempts.
7. How--if at all-- do you think social media will impact business over the next five years? What about Chile in general?
Social Media means collaboration and communication.
If you allow me to reduce its meaning, then, I believe it will happen here, as well as anywhere. I see a renaissance of marketing and the formation of spontaneous citizen movements as well as strategically developed campaigns. Chilean CEOs and business leaders will come to recognize that these tools will have a strong development and even a greater growth. On the top of their to do lists, must be to understand social media and strategically use them to communicate with clients and their communities.
But Chile is and always has been a tech lab. Then, it is to hope that, for the rest of this year, a takeoff takes place and thus we receive a 2008 that can even cause the development of significant social media projects in terms of software, creation of content or who-knows-what.
8. SAP, one of the world's largest software companies has contracted me to conduct this survey. Could social media improve their position in Chile? How so?
Absolutely! I see the game like this: The first company to plant the social media seed will be the first to harvest the fruits. SAP has a prominent presence in Chile, so credibility and reputation are part of their "PR toolbox". I'd start with the techs, young and pro community, engaging and inviting them to a serious effort to disclose Social Media. Launch collaborating projects with national and social benefits, on a CSR basis. CSR or RSE in Spanish is the key path, from my perspective.
9. Do you have any interesting case studies you could share with me?
The most remarkable example is the case of Digital Liberation ( Liberación Digital ). A movement that was born from a post of Leo Prieto on his tech blog FayerWayer. There he revealed a restrictive and invasive collaboration between the Chilean government and Microsoft.
In less than 24 hours, that post became a Web site, and only 10 days later, received a letter from the Commission of Science and Technology of the National Congress opposing the agreement . The letter, the different groups, the logo, the presentation, everything was created collaboratively on a wiki. As Leo Prieto told me; "I have never seen an organization, public or private, move so fast and in a completely distributed and decentralized way". I totally agree with that
