At the beginning of February the Social Media Week took place in Rome. As partner at Info, I had the chance to organize and moderate a panel entitled “Employee 2.0 – Dalle relazioni istituzionali alle relazioni distribuite” and dealing mainly with two topics: the new relationship between empowered employees and empowered users; the opportunities and challenges this relationship rises for external and internal relations management. It’s interesting to note that – notwithstanding the not-so-popular subject – the conference rapidly sold out and that the room (which was quite big) was full.

To open the panel, we showed a short interview I pre-recorded via Skype with Josh Bernoff – senior vice president, idea development at Forrester Research, co-author of “Groundswell” and “Empowered” – who helped us to define the context of our discussion.

Here’s an excerpt of what he said:

With the power that consumers and customers have now using social media, the pressure on corporations is greater than ever before and the only way to move at the speed of your customers is to actually empower your own staff to reach out to them. […] These people are what we call HEROs. HERO is an acronym meaning Highly Empowered and Resourceful Operative: it just simply refers to an individual within a company who has an idea about how to serve customers using technology, an idea that the company want to support

And here’s the video:

The panelists where three well-known academics and two experienced managers:

• Giovanni Boccia Artieri – Coordinatore del corso di Laurea in Scienze della Comunicazione, Università Carlo Bo
• Stefano Epifani – Docente di Tecnologie per la Comunicazione d’Impresa, Università La Sapienza
• Matteo Menin – Director @ Between S.p.A, responsabile delle Attività di Consulenza Strategica legate all’area Consumer e Web
• Luca Sartoni – Team Leader, Social Media and Internet Marketing, @ 123People.com
• Marco Stancati – Consulente aziendale e docente di Media Planning, Università La Sapienza

Together, we tried analyze and comment the state of the art of corporate communication in Italy, spending a great part of the conversation in defining the true difficulties italian managers and employees are facing while dealing with the online revolution. Then we tried as well to envision what’s next.