Social media are about people not technology.

Communicators are forced to make this point again and again …. in discussions with the IT department or with reluctant clients.

Need an example to convince them?

Chile has a great tradition of citizen activism, which in the past few years has been successfully migrating on-line.

During my recent visit to Santiago, 3 pharmacy chains (Ahumada, Cruz Verde and Salco Brand) were accused of collusion. From November 07 to April 08, they had jointly agreed to increase prices of medicines.

The case caused an uproar in the press. It also prompted an internet user to develop a Google map that would help people identify “safe” pharmacies which had not been part of the collusion scheme.

And Chilean netizens used Facebook to organise an official boycott of the 3 pharmacies on April 7.

Still believe we are only dealing with a bunch of web site????

The thing that struck me most when I visited Estonia a couple of years ago on business is its incredible night life.

For such a small Baltic town, trapped in a cold, dark winter for most of the year, Tallin has the most clubbing-obsessed people I have ever encountered. And this applies to all ages… as demonstrated by my local counterpart who wanted to drag me on a dancing spree after an all-day seminar.

The ability of the Estonians to spring into action at night might have come more than handy during the recent cyberattack on the country.

The International Herald Tribune has called the incident “the first war in cyberspace“.

It all started when Estonia began to remove from a park in Tallinn the statue of a Soviet soldier who fought in WW II. The issue had been at the centre of an ethnic controversy. Estonians of Russian descent believe the statue to be a symbol of the struggle against the Nazis, while Estonians consider it a relic from the Soviet era and a symbol of the Stalinist yoke.

The Estonian government expected violence in the street (and got it!), but did not expect an attack on the country’s digital infrastructure that paralyzed the web sites of the government, Hansabank (the country’s largest bank) and of several newspapers. According to the IHT, Estonia suspects “Russia or Russian ethnic sources” to have staged the attack in “retaliation for the removal of the statue”.

The American political activist Ralph Nader once said : “I don’t care how many lobbyists you have. If you are weak in the streets, you are weak.” In our era, we might want to add that if you are weak on the internet, you are weak on all fronts.

I believe the cyberattacks in Estonia hold an interesting lesson for issue managers and communicators. These days, no matter how much convincing you try to do off-line (through PR, lobbying, etc), you might end up losing the battle if you do not pay sufficient attention to the internet… not only in terms of protecting your cyberspace but also of trying to identify and prevent on-line crisis before they explode.

The hacktivists’ assault on Estonia shows how monitoring the web and engagin
g in on-line conversations has become vital for governments and corporations if they want to be able to spot trends early enough.

As the Euroblog 2007 survey shows, there are still corporations and communication agencies that do not understand the impact of social media on the bottom line.

After the Estonian cyberwar, I suspect few will still have doubts.