 Hello, and welcome to the third STRATCOM panel titled Digital Strategies Reloading. As we all know, communication technologies are constantly evolving, changing, and renewing themselves. This has accelerated the globalization process, and as a result, our world has become smaller as distances have shrunk. Our speakers on this panel will discuss the digital strategies of states, international organizations and corporations in the digital age. I'm joined by Miklos Gaspar, he's the head of digital communications at the International Atomic Energy Agency based in Vienna. Miklos ran key strategic corporate projects at the International Trade Center and organized the World Export Development Forum, ITC's flagship event in Rwanda. It was the largest such-ever event ever held. Mathias Lufkin sees a social media architect at DigiTips, a boutique PR agency advising a range of corporations, UN agencies, and non-profit organizations on the best use of social media. Mathias is best known for having created TweepLomage, a study which looks at how governments and international organizations use digital platforms. Nancy Groves, Nancy Lee's Digital Communications Strategy for the United Nations Environment Program. Her unit manages all web, social media, and internal communications activities and coordinates UNEP's outreach and responses to journalists and media partnerships. Kwan Kruger has over 20 years of experience in digital marketing and strategic communications for large organizations and brands such as UNICEF eTrade and JPMorgan Chase. He's currently the head of digital communications at the United Nations Development Program. And last but not least, Daria Santuji. Daria is an international communications strategist with extensive experience in bringing innovation to corporate communication with a digital focus. She currently works for European Training Foundation, an EU agency, where she's in charge of strategic communications, press services, social media management, and the coordination of the media campaigns for outreach in the EU neighboring countries. Thank you all for joining us. Thank you for joining us. To start with Miklos Pris. Miklos, the increasing impact of digitalization is undeniable, but what kind of challenges and opportunities are created by digitalization? Thank you for that question. So, indeed, digitalization has become the new norm, and it is creating both challenges and opportunities, and in some ways, they are the same, that there are no limits. You can reach anybody. There's no topic that's niche enough for there not to be a community in the digital landscape. It also allows organizations like the ones I work for, and my colleagues on this panel work for, to reach out directly to audiences that traditionally you could have only been able to reach via intermediaries like the press. At the same time, digitalization also creates bubbles. People only talk to the people, only hear from people that think the same as themselves. So, you have more opportunities to change minds, on the one hand. On the other hand, it's sometimes harder to penetrate these bubbles, because when all they had was a news channel on TV, well, that covered every point of view. Now that they can pick from among many, many digital channels, they will pick the one that only oftentimes broadcast the views that they agree with. Is there anything you'd like to add to that question, Mathias? I think about the opportunities and challenges is that... I remember when I put the World Economic Forum on social media back in 2006. I was told, Mathias, why would we put our panels onto YouTube? Because the students watching YouTube, they're not our target audience. Well, that target audience has grown up. They are now the CEOs going to Davos to the annual meeting every year in Switzerland. So, I think we have to be where the audience is. And the audience is on social media. Just to give you an idea, the two biggest countries in the world are number one, Facebook, with over two billion active monthly users, and number two is YouTube. So, it's kind of obvious that we have to be there. And the other opportunity that I found out really early is that we function like a newsroom. We have to be like a newsroom and work like a newsroom, because that's what media companies do. So, I'm a former journalist. And by doing that, we kind of disintermediated the media. Now, the media is following organizations on Twitter, on Facebook, and all the other channels. Before, it was just, here's the press release, but now we're actually producing the news all the time. Very true. Sam, how would you like to answer that? What kind of challenges and opportunities are created by digitalization? Yeah, thank you for inviting me to today's event. I think for companies, organizations that are digitalizing, the opportunity is greater collaboration. I know that the technology for a long time has... Oh, can you hear me, by the way? Oh, yes, we can hear you. Okay, sorry about that. So for the longest time, technology has enabled collaboration, but I think the latest generation of tools are showing greater abilities to create deeper experiences when it comes to collaboration in the right hands, that is. So I can jump on a Zoom call, like we're on now. I can present a file that I'm working on. Those that are in the meeting have access to that same file here that's cloud-based. And we're editing things as we're talking, but in different locations. And that's just editing, for example. There are tools in communications for production, for project management, for a variety of ways in which we work today. And today's generation of tools, if they're integrated properly, can be very powerful. Now, I think the challenge with digitalization, and you said this early on in the introduction, is that technology is constantly evolving and changing. And to keep at pace with that is very difficult. Large companies, large organizations, they have to think through a process of testing and deciding what is the most suitable technology to fit into their environment. And they have to do this at pace with all the changes that are happening. And so how do they think through, okay, what is appropriate for my multinational company or my global organization, and how quickly and do I introduce these adaptations to a staff, like in the case of the UNDP, there are 17,000 people in the organization. So it can be tricky, and that's a huge challenge for them. Interesting. Daria, anything you'd like to add? Yes, thank you very much. Good afternoon and tonight in, I don't know if that's correct in Turkish. And thanks a lot to the director of communications of the Presidency of the Republic of Turkey for the invite. Yeah, I mean, what I'd like to add is that, think from the perspective of the organization for which I work, the European Training Foundation, which is helping countries in the UN neighborhood develop education and labor market system. We've seen that digital communication could be used strategically, for example, during the pandemic to help the learning community learn on being strategic through digital and beyond. I'd like to frame this point with an example. When the pandemic first hit, there were 1.5 billion students in 160 countries who had been forced to study at home. And as an organization dealing with the learning community, we asked ourselves how can we help them? And being located in Italy, which is the first new country to be in a lockdown, we reflected on how to transform, how to reload our digital strategies to the service of society. We had initiated an initiative which is called Learning Connect. It was a campaign to engage the learning community from anywhere beyond the countries in which we do operate directly. And that was precisely meant to create a connection across all those who were being facing the consequences of the pandemic. This is to say that in my opinion, digital communication in these ages, in these era which we are exploring, still has got value, not necessarily because of the technicalities which are connected to digital, but because it is a means to connect societies. And the conclusions we draw from the experience we've been running are that this is a moment in which we need to explore way further the audiences with whom we try to connect because each of us is changing the context in which he or she lives. And this is absolutely necessary in order to understand better the personas to whom we are communicating and reach better results. Linking to what a colleague mentioned earlier on is true in the past and the area in which we work which is learning. In the past digital learning used to be the privilege of a linear circle of tech gurus. And now theoretically it belongs to everyone by keeping in mind the point that there are students and teachers who still do not have access to the internet nor have the means. So digital to conclude was relevant, yes use the relevant, yes it is sufficient, no. Thank you very much. Thank you so much Daria. Nancy, how would you like to answer that? Yes, thanks for having me and hello everyone. I think on the case of where I work at the UN environment program and also for the UN secretariat as a whole the major challenge is just acknowledging that there's no one size fits all approach or audience. So for example, for the UN environment program a lot of our communications efforts are designed for audiences in developed countries as populations there have an outsized impact on environmental crises, greenhouse gas emissions producing all kinds of waste. But some developing countries are feeling the impacts with droughts and unprecedented floods both of which we have seen in Kenya where I'm speaking to you from today. So this reality really outstrips the capacity and expertise of our staff to create so many different pieces of content which might resonate with all of these audiences. So there's also a huge problem of disinformation. Some studies show that climate disinformation in particular is rather well funded and well organized and we certainly cannot compete. So what can be done? I mean, I don't have the answer but one way we have tried to address this is by working with the platforms themselves. No one knows more about how to maximize outreach than they do. For example, we at UNEP along with a number of UN entities and organizations working on the climate crisis have joined forces with Facebook on a project called the Climate Science Center. Using their insights about their audiences and their unprecedented reach we've gone through our products to identify what needs to be prioritized for featuring on this platform where like it or not, people are getting a huge amount of their information. So depending on where you are in the world, you will see something tailored to you. In certain countries, you might see a more data heavy version of the app that also highlights content about sustainable consumption. But if you're in a part of the world where data is expensive compared to your income or wifi or energy access is much more limited, you see a lighter version, but then also tailored content. For example, if you don't have options about what to buy or finances, our messaging on sustainable consumption makes no sense to you. So it's good for us to use our really limited internal resources to communicate in this way. Thank you so much Nancy. Mikos, once again, starting with you, I'd like to ask all our guests this question. What effects does digitalization have on our social, political, and economic habits? So let me give you this time an experience from my own work. I work in nuclear communications as head of digital for the International Atomic Energy Agency. And one aspect that digitalization has is that people have more easily access to more or easier access to all kinds of news, all kinds of information, including fake news and fake information as our keynote speakers discussed this morning. So this is very true about nuclear that lots of incorrect assumptions, information is present on the internet. And our job as communicators is to come back with scientific facts and information that's actually correct and spread it through various channels that you can reach these people, social media, search engine optimized websites so that you can enter these bubbles and you can do your best to counter the misinformation. And this trend is true not just in my area but in really many other areas. And so some of those political, economic, social changes are fueled by a lot of misinformation that we who know need to do our best to counter. Interesting. I'd like to ask the same question to you, Mathias, what do you think? Well, one of the aspects is that we don't have much time. Basically, our attention span has become so short. Our attention span is as long as almost a Vine video. Okay, Vine doesn't exist anymore, but kind of a 10 second TikTok. And this is really, I think a key change. If I look at my children, they're on their devices like all the time, constantly, I sometimes think. And how do we get that quality time back because so that we're not always connected, either to screens or to Alexa and so on. So I think this is one of the key aspects in terms of communicators. Obviously, our mission is we have to reach that audience. We have to get their attention and how do we do that? I think, and that's a challenge. So kind of there's, on the one side, we as users are, we cannot disconnect anymore almost on the other side as communicators. We want exactly to reach these audiences and the younger, the better. We want to reach the 12 year olds on TikTok in order to spread the messages for our organizations. For sure, what do you think could be done? Like, how can we use digitization to benefit family, for example, family life? I think digital consumption has to be used and has to be taught in schools. And I'm a big advocate that we have to teach our children how to, what to post on Twitter, what to post on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, whatever, really teaching them. The problem is our teachers weren't, did not grow up with the digital channels. They were thrown into these digital channels and often they say, oh no, we don't want to get involved. But really kind of helping users to use these tools. What can you post? What pictures are you allowed to post? And if you use, like, my idea was when my children were younger in middle school, why don't we do a school newspaper based on the Facebook page? Well, there was no, you don't, basically reaction from parents was absolutely, how dare you want to put our children on Facebook? That wasn't my mission. My mission was really kind of to explain the 12 and 13 year olds, this is how you manage a Facebook page. And even if you look at, if you're a communicator, even if you're a baker, as a baker, you want to have your bakery on Facebook, on Google, obviously, in order to attract your customers when they come by. Or even just to remind them, come and have a coffee in the bakery. So kind of, you need to know as a baker how to set up a Facebook page. And how do you communicate? And I think this is really key. Communication should be part of the curriculum in schools, full stop. Totally, I agree completely. Sam, how would you like to answer that what kind of challenges and opportunities are created by digitalization? Yeah, I think a couple of the panels have already mentioned this, but I want to restate this with more emphasis that even though there is so much promise and potential with digitalization, it's quite uneven. And there are those that have and those that don't have. The ones that have have more advanced technology, better infrastructure, greater knowledge. The ones that don't have are falling behind. These inequities are creating a digital divide. And we see the divide at the local level, national level, regional and global levels. So while there's so much promise, we do need to make sure that we share that promise and potential of digitalization across the board. Thank you, Sam. Daria, is there anything you'd like to add? Yeah, thank you so much. While you were answering to this question, an additional point came to my mind, because if we think of the opportunities from the digitalization, then for example, from the perspective of the work of the European Training Foundation, we see the opportunity for sharing solutions and best practices across countries which say in the face of the pandemic are facing or might be facing similar issues. But other aspects which we would like to, and we should put in the discussion, are on one side, like Sam just said, the lack of digitalization, which is having some countries or some specific groups of populations which are lagging behind. And as Matias lagged earlier on, the excess of digitalization is also an issue because of the reduced attention span and the difficulty, for example, in selecting what's relevant and what's not. And at last, an aspect which is at the core of the action, again of the European Training Foundation, because we work a lot on vocational education and training, is what it is difficult by its own nature to become digitalized, which is for example, technical learning. So I would say we have a number of challenges and opportunities. And I think communicators could contribute enormously to discussions as such, given their horizontal overview and their natural capability and skills for providing innovative eyes to the subject. What's relevant and fundamental is keeping very honest and horizontal discussion as it's happening now. Thank you so much. Thank you, Daria. Nancy. Sure. So I already mentioned that the UN, or UNEP is the UN's lead scientific program when it comes to pulling together information on the triple planetary crises. But we also host the secretariats of 14 multilateral environmental agreements which are staffed with experts on international law. So internally, we are sitting on huge amounts of information and data that we need to figure out how to make accessible to every audience that needs it, whether it's researchers, journalists, students, policymakers, and of course, the young people who have been so effective at raising their voices on the climate crisis. So a major challenge for us as communicators in this digital landscape is to really critically pull out the information from these experts who know much more about the crisis than I do. So we can get it into the conversations that make the most sense, and that can lead to lasting an impactful change, which is ideally better policy decisions by governments and businesses based on really sound science. So some of these internal experts put together these UN reports and resources, they don't understand communications at all, maybe even not the best way to put information online in a digital context. So we really need to figure out how to speak their language first so then we can then speak to people who need this information outside of our organization. On the other hand, you have others who are so in love with communications, and then you have to temper their expectations because they may not understand why, you know, one specific piece of information is not going to go viral, no matter how good a communicator you are. So there's just a lot of these internal work that we need to do to make our external communications as effective as possible. So much savvy communications expertise to know when to join a conversation and when not to join it. Of course, a mistake could set you back in incalculable ways. So that's really, I think, one of our major challenges as well. Right, thank you so much, Nancy. Mateus, once again, starting with you, I'd like to take your final remarks on any subject that you'd like regarding this topic. I'm sorry, not Mateus, Miklos. Well, thank you. So I'd like to add to actually what Mateus started talking about. You know, you asked about families. Certainly one issue is this generational divide that kids are either using digitalization too much or as Sam has said, they don't have access and they don't use it at all. And what I'd like to add to what Mateus said is to teach them how to responsibly use digital devices and digital communication and that to educate them so that their lives don't become just all the digital but they still go out to play and that we as parents and teachers still take them to do other activities so they grow up in a healthy way. I reckon that's not too easy though, right? Yes, that's right, trial and error. True. Mateus, excuse me for the last confusing your name. Yeah, I think what I wish we would do more often as communicators is ask our audience, not just kind of like this post or kind of this call to action that we all have in our social media posts but really kind of connect with our audience and ask them what they want. It's simple as that. I don't think we do that enough. Just to, yes, we will do polls and sort of, but I think it's really asking, having this two-way conversation, much too much, we have this one-way conversation hoping our campaign will stick, hoping the hashtag will go viral but how can we have that conversation? And one thing I like about, for example, TikTok, so the latest social media channel, is not just a platform where you can host vertical videos but it's really that in order to do a good TikTok video you have to tell a story that is so engaging that the users will take the elements of that story and amplify it and create a video for their audience, which I think it's a huge challenge for communicators and I love it because it's this, I have the impression it's much more of a two-way conversation where we're talking, we're creating with users rather than just talking at them and posting the video. Do you think digitalization has killed creativity, for example? Absolutely, no. You're dying out. No, no, I'm a big fan of digital channels and the creativity on digital channels is just absolutely amazing. I was a journalist, I was editing videos, in order to edit videos, where you had to be working in a TV channel, nowadays you do it on your mobile phone and my daughter, she's 11, she's not on social media yet but she will teach me how to do it. So creativity is there. Now the creativity obviously depends on do we have the devices or are our children going out and being creative in the garden, in the woods outside because that's what we want them to do at the same time but obviously we live in a digital world so yes, our children are connected and we are also connected and we have to put those devices down when we sit at breakfast, lunch and dinner. I think that's the rule in our family. For sure, I agree. Sam, do you have any last remarks that you'd like to add? Yes, digital communications, just that field alone is so broad and we need to understand that special knowledge, experience, training is required to work in this area and even to maybe develop policies and think through how these tools apply to our work and our lives. So it's not just something that you pick up and think, oh, I just published something on Facebook or I tweeted something and now I'm a digital communicator. It's much more complicated than that today. TikTok compared to Twitter, for example, it's just a different approach to communications and you can get specialists just for Twitter or you can get specialists just for TikTok and within that, you have to understand the algorithms. So you can see the whole list of things that are required to be good and proficient at digital. We talked about the digital divide. I think policy people need to have a strong tech background and digital background to be able to address these challenges. We see hearings in Congress in the United States, for example, where congressional leaders, they're trying to catch up with the tech leaders in these congressional hearings, but they just don't have the knowledge to be able to push back and design the right policies. But I see, but we're seeing that that's changing and I would suggest that that investment in knowledge and skills in digital is important. Right, thank you, Sam. Nancy, can I please take your final remarks? Sure, I would say it's really exciting to be able to communicate and do this job, but it's also pretty hard on someone's mental capacity, particularly if we're working on topics that seemingly aren't getting any better, whether it's a climate crisis or in a UN context, various crises, famine, wars. So I think it's a real challenge for us in addition to just the work-life balance that has been mentioned is to also figure out how to help one another as colleagues and to really find some way to, if you're a really great communicator, you're gonna feel so strongly about the topic. So really help one another keep some perspective, share lessons learned, and then I have found an event like this, because I'm so busy normally just producing content, analyzing content, moving on to the next thing. So it's a real treat to be able to take some time out and have these kind of conversations with our peers. So thanks for organizing it. Thank you, Nancy and Daria. Your final remarks, please. Yeah, I would fully endorse Nancy's point. I fully agree about the fact that moments of fact are very relevant for communicators, and I share sometimes the difficulty of dealing and communicating about very relevant topic with a great impact on audiences which are spread all over the globe. So my plea would be to have more of these exchanges and more particularly as strategic communicators working mainly on digital, have an eye on inclusion and share how we are dealing in the respective organization with keeping an eye so as to leave no one behind even when we use mainly digital communication tools. Thank you so much, Nancy. Miklos Gasper, Matthias Lufkens, Nancy Groves, Sam Kwangruger and Daria Santuji. Thank you all for joining us. While that wraps up our digital strategies reloading panel, thank you all for listening. Thank you, Sume. Thank you, Sume, for that very insightful panel with all of your guests, both here and abroad. Greatly appreciated.