Proa Comunicación has taken part in a talk-colloquium with Gustavo Entralafounder and CEO of the agency 101an online marketing company. Gustavo was the one who convinced the Holy See to open a Twitter account for the Pope. He also designed the News.va portal, which unifies all information from the Vatican media.
The colloquium, organised by Alumni-University of Navarra, gave participants the opportunity to learn that the @pontifex account has grown from three to six million followers since Pope Francis was elected. "Benedict XVI had three million followers on Twitter, of which two million were from Anglo-Saxon countries, and 700,000 in Spanish. Now, with Pope Francis, the number of followers in Spanish is 2.2 million," Entrala said.
The entrepreneur and internet expert also says that Pope Francis tweets every day: "They are simple, positive messages. With Pope Benedict, half of the messages on Twitter were negative; now, only 10%; and the remaining 90% are positive. At the moment, the communicative honeymoon continues. Now we want the Pope to have conversations with certain people on Twitter, and to follow people".
Entrala said that, as a Catholic, he wanted to help the Church to set your own communication agenda. He wrote a handwritten letter to Federico Lombardi, spokesman for the Holy See, offering his services to the Holy See. And four months later, when he had forgotten all about it, he received a call from Lombardi himself. "To manage in today's world, you have to be proactive. The Church has not had its own communication agenda, and now it is starting to be proactive. If you reduce Catholicism to a series of controversial issues, such as abortion or homosexuality, you are not conveying the Christian message. The message of Jesus Christ is very luminous, the Gospel has many very positive tweets. Another issue to communicate: the Church accompanies people throughout their lives, in the most important moments and always".
Gustavo Entrala also explained that the Church did not have the tools to know the news on the internet well, nor to respond quickly. Now it is beginning to have those instruments. His company, located in Madrid, continues to do consultancy work with the Holy See. Before the Pope's first tweet, which Entrala himself wrote, three training workshops were given to some 30 people from the Vatican. "We talked about how communication works today, how to manage a crisis, and what the Church can communicate that it is not communicating. The idea for the News.va portal came out of those workshops.
Entrala also commented that the Vatican receives 20,000 cyber attacks per dayhackers attacking the servers of the Holy See's websites. But "in the United States lives a Capuchin nun, a software expert, who helps the Church a lot to defend itself against these attacks. The Church has no power, but it has a lot of influence. And it has the support of many people all over the world".
Asked about Pope Francis, Gustavo said that their gestures and their way of communicating is a matter of course.. "There is no strategy behind it. What you see is what he is. He is a very good communicator. And, with small gestures, he has wanted to show from the beginning that he is going to make a powerful change in the Curia. For the rest, he is doing the same as he did in Buenos Aires".