Last Thursday I attended a meeting at the University of Deusto with José Manuel Velasco, president of Dircom, the association of communication executives that brings together more than 820 professionals from the most important companies and institutions in Spain.
The association, with its headquarters in Madrid and presence in six other autonomous communities (Catalonia, Aragon, Galicia, Valencia, Castile and Leon and the Canary Islands), also aspires to gather enough members in the Basque Country to open a delegation in Bilbao to promote Dircom's vision and objectives in the Basque Country. These strategic axes are:
- Recognition. To promote the figure of the director of communication in organisations.
- Knowledge. Act as transmitters and providers of knowledge in the organisation.
- Networking. Promote the network of contacts and promote the exchange of experiences with the dircoms.
- CSR. Getting the dircom to lead the discourse on Corporate Social Responsibility.
Among the activities carried out by the association, Velasco announced as "a great event that no communication professional can miss" the World Public Relations Forum, which between 21 and 23 September 2014 will bring together a thousand communication managers from all over the world in Madrid. The central theme of the meeting is "communication with conscience" and its organisers hope to bring to Madrid "the leading thinkers in the profession to debate the importance and value of communicating with conscience and awareness, thus building stronger organisations, reputations and brands".
One of the intellectuals that the president of Dircom quoted in his presentation is the sociologist Zigmunt Bauman, father of the "liquid society" as an idea to define the world we live in: a modernity that has left behind solid values to immerse individuals in a watery, complex and constantly changing environment. I recently read a reflection of his on social networks: "We live divided into two worlds: one online and one offline. Both have very different rules. On the internet it is childishly easy to make friends and lose them. In offline, real life, you know how much effort it takes to find and keep a real friend for life. The advantage of the online world over the offline world is that it is much easier to get the things you want apparently. That's why people spend, on average, seven hours and five minutes a day in contact with digital technologies. Many people try to remake the offline world according to the patterns of the online world. If that happens, it will be a huge loss for humanity.
Luis Sala