Citizen Relationship Management and trees

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” is a philosophical riddle that raises questions regarding observation and knowledge of reality.

Last week I was watching the talk of Sir Ken Robinson and suddenly he mentioned this sentence, and I though about if it is something I am experiencing with the customers… but more important, does it happen in our democratic system?

If we think about politics as (company) and citizens as (customer) the only time that we experience something similar to a real marketplace where you can sell proposals and people can buy them is when we have to vote; the elections. We are already seeing many politicians on both sides of the spectrum fighting for those who have more friends on Facebook, and those with more modern aspect dealing with the tools of the network. On the other hand my perspective is that the network can only be an advantage if it is not only consider as a campaign tool, but allowing the network to change the way that politics currently are, and to listen, interact, learn, collect, and propose to citizens.

The new tools that the network intelligence provides to democracy should help us to be in contact with politics and influence them more than before but also politics can know more about how to reach targeted people with the right message. It is not about how popular as a politician am I inFacebook but in how I can do the segmentation of the citizens not by color of skin or geographically but by communities, by behaviors, something that it is starting to happen now. As citizens we should realized the advantages of the network intelligence in a way of how can our feeling or needs can be solved before, also we may be able to choose not every four years but more often…

In the last American elections politicians parties started to use this “intelligence” in order to know more about us and to run campaigns efficiently, would it be also the moment as citizens to use this “intelligence” to improve our democracy?, we will see. Anyway the future is not in the stars, it is in the cloud, do you remember?

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