At 30, Claire Diaz-Ortiz already has a pretty impressive resume. She works as the Manager of Social Innovation at Twitter, founded a charity to help orphaned children in sub-Saharan Africa and literally wrote the book on how to use social networking for philanthropy. But last week she added something rather special to her curriculum vitae: She got the Pope on Twitter.
Diaz-Ortiz, who has been working with the Vatican since their forays into the social networking platform earlier this year, served as the social networking platform’s primary liaison with the Holy See for the launch of Pope Benedict XVI’s official Twitter account. The pontiff’s first tweets appeared on the @Pontifex feed on Wednesday, along with seven other coordinated accounts with identical content in Spanish, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Polish and Arabic.
Diaz-Ortiz spoke to Wired from Rome about the unique issues of helping the Pope join the world of social media, the surprising technological progressiveness of the Vatican, and the complicated significance of papal retweets and follows.
Wired: So how did the process of getting the Pope on Twitter begin? Did you reach out to the Vatican or did they reach out to you?
Claire Diaz-Ortiz: When I started at Twitter about four years ago, my mandate was to work with non-profits and organizations that had an interest in using Twitter to make a difference. Almost a year ago, we started to do some basic data crunching in terms of what our users really do on Twitter.
A colleague on our team was looking through some tweets and saw what he thought was an anomaly at the time, which was that Bible verses were doing really well on Twitter. Lots of people were retweeting and favoriting them.
Then we started diving in deeper and realized that religious content on Twitter has an incredible spread.
It does very well.
Religious leaders punch far above their weight; a religious leader might have 1/50th the number of followers of a large celebrity but can still generate more retweets and more favorites and more engagement.
The Pope first came on twitter in 2010 with a number of accounts to send information for Vatican radio and Vatican news service…. The next step was in early 2012 when [the Vatican] launched an account called @Pope2YouVatican.
It’s not a great name; Jon Stewart even did a really funny bit about how the Pope couldn’t find a better username than that…. I had just started working with religion a couple months earlier. I reached out to them and they immediately jumped on it and said hey, we’ve been really trying to push this forwards in terms of an individual account.
So I did reach out to them, but they were more than excited and it’s been pretty symbiotic ever since. Continue reading
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