Art & sensibility

A few days ago I read an article that made ​​me really angry, especially because it is true and it is a pity. When most people visit a museum rather see something classic and figurative instead of something created in his own time.  Comments such as "my three year old girl can do that" are so common to hear in the contemporary art exhibitions that I feel tempted to say what my Art Teacher in COU used to say "to cast pearls before the swine".

And maybe that's the problem indeed. Who should have taught us to appreciate and understand the art at the time, convinced us that this is only for minorities. So people see dogs, see cats and see still lifes, see naked women, saints and martyrs and believe that they understand, but do not really know what it means because they don't know the iconography, they stay in the art of realism, perspective, chiaroscuro... but they don't see these works with the mindset of the time when were performed. Then, they go to see an exhibition of contemporary art, whose message, whose background, is much closer to us, or should be. Many of these works are not so focused on a refined technique as to convey a message, but the message does not arrive because the visitor is unable to see beyond their noses and is not their fault.

I remember a spanish literature professor that I had in High Scholl. He used to write in one of the special weekly sections in "Heraldo de Aragón", the "Heraldo Escolar". He suggested to us we should write something for publication in the "Heraldo", whatever we wanted. I presented some pretty bad poetry, -I might add- and he rejected them explaining that a literary or any other kind of artwork is good just as people understand what you want to convey with it.  A few years later I found these poems in a folder and I read it. It was then when I realized what my teacher told me. Not even me understood what I meant at the time I wrote that, even contextualizing in my memory the reasons that had led me to write these lines.

But this does not mean that every time you do not understand a contemporary work the artist has managed to convey his message. In the days we are, many times the message is simply to see how people react to your work. Sometimes the message is art for art's sake. We don't have to like it,  but it's certainly a message. The problem is that we are not sensitized to understand. We have been programmed to value the technique because in the drawing class have rewarded us when we copied well the drawing sheet and we had a bad grade when we stained with ink the sheet because of our sweating hands drawing technical graphs. So we are mentally programmed to like only those works figuratively very elaborate and with costly performance, even though we have no idea what they are telling because they are completely out of context. About this also has a lot of guilt an inadequacy teaching staff that transmitted to their students the wrong message.

Today I'm not going to pick on the subject of education, maybe I will or not at another time, but there are other more specialized blogs than mine to deal with this issue in greater depth. What I'm going to do is upload something that I have designed and I'm going to expect, contextualizing in the era we live in, maybe you, the ones who read this post, will be able to understand the message.

Community Managers vs. Content Curators

       A few months ago I was fortunate to attend a presentation at the Technological Institute of Aragon on this topic. Keynote speaker, which now can not remember her name but she was more than proven to speak of it, presented with great conviction and arguments that social networks were changing the world as we know it to the point that even ideas so rooted and established democratic formulas or traditional governance systems were being questioned and modified by mass movements mainly lauded and summoned through these networks.

       This is not the topic I want to discuss today, in fact, not the dissertation this person did was about it. Only used it as a starting point to support the idea of the importance nowadays are becoming social networks.

     It is not new that mass media becomes an essential part of people's lives. Radio and television were in their time, then came the Internet and mobile phone. Maybe no one will remember if in the beginning radio and television ads existed or not, but, at first, the Internet was not an advertising medium, it was becoming one step by step, until one day it was all banners and promotions. Now find a page that has not advertise or try to sell us something is not as unlikely as ads disappear one hundred percent of public television -if anyone really believed that this system would one day become sustainable was blowner away than the former President Rodriguez Zapatero using a TV format driven by the french right politics branch to ruin their audiovisual entity and to facilitate its privatization.

     But I dont want leave the bush with this topic. As I was saying, is that advertising, broadcasting, is everything in any medium. Alfonso Guerra said in times kind of like he preferred  ten minutes on television than one hour on the radio.  Now we should change that phrase and say that it's better to have a good spread in social networks before they take you out on TV. Just ask Tony Cantó, years on television put him in Congress and some bad weeks at social networks could complicate him a possible re-election in the next generals.

       And that's the other problem: good or bad, the image that we give in social networks, which is usually not direct but others spread, is essential for any business or social-cultural proyect, etc.., fail or succeed. And here come the figures that I mention in the beginning of this article.

       What is Community Management? I guess all or most of the ones are reading this will have arrived here through a social network of several in which I advertised, -Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ ... -.  The Community Management is the act of managing one or multiple accounts on one or more social networks to spread a project idea, concept, business, product or service. But then, what is a Community Manager? What does it really? The Community Manager is an expert in marketing that not only is dedicated to spreading but analyzes and classifies the targets of the audience recipients of broadcast campaigns, disseminate information selected according to these targets and prepare a dissemination strategy based on all the information that the same potential audiences provide them through comments, "likes", data published in personal profiles, etc...

        What is the problem? Well the same can have any advertising campaign. That this expert in the management and use of social media does not have to be an expert in the information it disseminates.  It is limited to advertise what the company or the project will say that advertises and simply implement their knowledge of SEO, SEM, analytics views, audience analysis... and when something goes wrong and the whole theory of marketing and advertising will fall under its own weight, the blame falls on the guy that sent the texts to the marketing guy and failed to convey the idea that he wanted to spread.  And in social networks is not enough to publish and hope that people will make positive comments or mark a "like".  If someone asks you something or make a technical comment on what you have posted should be answered promptly and honestly as possible.  If this is not done, and most community managers pure-marketing-they do not, the lack of feedback with the brand ends up producing the opposite effect. Such is the mishandling of the situation, that there cases where uncomfortable questions and criticisms to a product or service are eliminated by such managers do not know how to deal with this kind of situations they are not used because they come from a business school where they were taught an advertising model based on the unidirectional.

         What is the solution? I remember that the ITA rapporteur established this same thing I'm going to explain below: Content Curators are the real future of diffusion in social networks.

          What is a Content Curator?  In social networks people spread about any topic, a Content Curator is someone who selects the information to spread, usually an expert in this matter and not someone who would not care spreading about milk or about cowboy boots.

          A marketing expert can teach us to use the tools and plan our strategy, but when you have to deal with the public, nothing better than someone who can answer questions and master the disseminated subjects to respond adequately the reviews when they're out of a basis,  without being limited to ignore or even delete them. Therefore, the figure of the Community Manager is not the most appropriate for managing our social media image, but Curator of Contents is.

           Some people consider this as the figure of the Community Manager should be an expert on the subject, but I prefer to make a clear distinction and bet on Content Curator figure, clearly separated from Marketing expert and advocate because fashion to have a Community Manager will pass soon, so that we can lecture with experts and not commercial.