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.
Wired: Did the Vatican have concerns about what it would mean for the Pope to join Twitter?
Diaz-Ortiz: Of course. They are a conservative organization, and they obviously have a lot of concerns about making sure that the Pope’s persona remains intact and his messaging remains strictly controlled by the Vatican. But at the same time, they are extremely innovative, as I found the first day I walked into their offices back in March [2012]. They want to reach believers where they are and they know that believers are online. They launched a YouTube account in 2009, and [Twitter] was a natural step for them. I think people forget some of the ways the Vatican has been innovative over the years. They were great about radio really early on despite many protests from people who said, “the church shouldn’t be on the radio, that’s crazy!” Even though there might be some dissent in the Catholic community about whether the Pope should be tweeting, I think the Vatican very clearly says yes…
There has been some natural dissent, but you expect that from within the Catholic community from people who think that perhaps the Pope should be more reverent than Twitter…. But we already have an ongoing list I’m working on with the Vatican of new archbishops and cardinals who are saying, “Hey, the Pope’s doing this; now I can do this.” That’s exactly what the Vatican wanted from this. They want to see a lot of the engagement coming from the Catholic community.
Wired: How similar or different was dealing with the brand management of the Pope on Twitter compared to a Hollywood celebrity?
Diaz-Ortiz: I think there are a couple of key differences. Obviously what we see with an average Hollywood celebrity is they’re more interested in personal branding and that’s obviously not done with the Pope. The Vatican wants the Pope to connect with people as much as possible and are encouraging engagement with the Catholic community, but they’re not trying to have the pope get out there and self-promote on Twitter…. In contrast to that, an obvious similarity is the issue of security. And that’s more of a concern for the Vatican than it’s been for many of high-profile Hollywood folks that we’ve worked with. The Vatican is very, very concerned about whether his account could be hacked and maintaining the integrity of his different Twitter accounts. That’s been an issue from the beginning, but we deliver secure solutions for all our users, and we will do that to our best extent with the Pope as well.
Wired: The Pope has used his Twitter feed to respond to several questions so far, although he didn’t tag the users who wrote the questions. Will this type of back and forth interaction be a big part of his social media strategy moving forwards?
Diaz-Ortiz: We’re hoping that with the Vatican we’ll be able to develop some great sort of events in the coming years that will highlight the question and answer [interaction]. The thing that’s really important to the Vatican is that all the tweets will be his actual words. The several tweets he’ll be sending out each week – they’re not sure of the exact number yet – will be coming from things he’s saying at his Wednesday audience or his Sunday service.
Wired: How big of a social media team does the Pope have to run his eight different accounts?
Diaz-Ortiz: [laughs] It’s amazing how small it is. [His] social media is less than one person’s full-time job… So many people on the Vatican side have been receiving that question and they just find it hysterical. They really are strapped for resources. Once again, it’s been amazing what they’ve been able to do. Another thing I should mention is that one of the other key concerns for the Pope’s account that’s different from a lot of high-profile individuals we work with is that it’s really, really important for his account to be international. The launch last week wasn’t a launch of one account; it was a launch of eight accounts. Those eight accounts are just the ones we have for now, and the hope is that six months from now there will be many more. All these accounts in these different languages need to be providing the same content, translated. It’s a whole new concern for us at Twitter, because most of the high-profile folks we work with are really only tweeting in one language.
Wired: The English language account appears to be really dominant in terms of followers compared to the accounts in other languages. Did you find that surprising, considering the international makeup of the Catholic community?
Diaz-Ortiz: English is kind of the international language, even for the Pope. The highest percentage of Catholics in the world speak Spanish, and if you look at the eight @Pontifex accounts, [the Spanish version] is the account with the next highest number of users on it. But it’s really important to note that the Pope’s first tweet was actually from the Italian account.
Wired: Have you noticed different international reactions to the Pope joining Twitter?
Diaz-Ortiz: There’s a great graph on The Guardian did looking at the percentage of @Pontifex users based on each country’s numbers of Twitter users. It’s a fascinating to see which countries have the highest percentage of Twitter users following one of the pope’s accounts. It’s interesting to see that the two highest countries on the map were the Democratic Republic of Congo and Peru. But sure, there are different reactions. I don’t have a great line on what those different reactions are aside from the fact that a lot of people were really pleased to see that one of the eight accounts was in Arabic.
Wired: Will we be seeing the Pope use more of the engaged functions of Twitter in the future, such as retweets, @replies or following other users?
Diaz-Ortiz: Well, there are a couple of issues here. First of all, in terms of the following numbers, that’s a really interesting dilemma that we’ve seen with a lot of high profile leaders. If you look at the other biggest religious leader on Twitter, the Dalai Lamai, he’s following no one. And the Pope as well – he’s technically following himself in other languages, but that’s just so that anyone who looks at the @Pontifex account will be able to see the other ones quickly… If you ask the Vatican, they haven’t quite determined what will be the barometer for deciding who they would follow. It’s a hard thing. Again, you contrast it with [President] Obama, and he follows 700,000 people. It’s an interesting question for a leader with such a high profile, to decide how many people they’re going to follow and whether following means endorsing, which is obviously the concern. In terms of engagement, I think we’ll have to see going forward what it means.
Wired: In terms of your future outreach to high-profile figures who aren’t on Twitter, who else would like to see joining the platform?
Diaz-Ortiz: Outside of the religious world, I would love to see [Secretary of State] Hillary Clinton join. In terms of Catholic leaders on Twitter we’re looking at many of the cardinals out there. We’re also always interested in more English-speaking Muslim leaders. Some of them are doing really well, but I’d like that area to increase as well.
Q&A: Claire Diaz-Ortiz, the Woman Who Got the Pope on Twitter
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Q&A: Claire Diaz-Ortiz, the Woman Who Got the Pope on Twitter
