I’m sure anyone who follows politics through social media may have seen or heard about the interview with David Cameron on Absolute Radio this morning, essentially making a jibe at twitter and having a good joke with Chris O’Connell on the breakfast show.
Essentially Mr Cameron was asked if he used twitter and his reply was “politicians have to think about what we say” and the instantaneous nature of twitter can lead to a problem of keeping on message and not being able to get a message across in 140 characters. This is a reasonable and legitimate argument against the use of twitter as a political engagement tool, albeit one I disagree with.
But these perfectly reasonable points led to a bit of a gaffe when Mr Cameron said “too many twits might make a twat.” Oh dear.
Funny at the time maybe and I’m sure absolutely no offence intended -he clearly didn’t call people who use twitter twats, but in the blogosphere and twitterverse, eyebrows have been raised. If you search for Cameron on the Twitter search engine today, most of the tweets are focusing on this. I personally feel it shows a lack of awarness of the medium by the Tory Leader. The fact that this message has spread well-past normal Absolute FM listeners shows the power of social media. Even if you aren’t on twitter yourself, the message is still instantaneously released as Mr Cameron found out. He has since apologised for his slip up.
It also shows an inherent lack of understanding of the medium by UK politicians generally. Tools like twitter should be used to create calls-to-action for public engagement. Examples include asking followers to come to rallies or events, calling for support on specific issues, making people aware of campaigns.
Twitter, politically speaking, isn’t just for stating what you are having for breakfast or with marked frustration, tweeting how many letters you have opened today, as one MP did I noticed, although tweets like these do personalise the user, so they should be interspersed with the calls to action.
The slip up won’t lose Cameron too many votes, but the question remains, does Mr Cameron and the team not get social media, or do they just not get breakfast radio?
Below is the video of the interview embedded from the Absolute Radio YouTube site - let me know your thoughts
There has been a fantastic response to our survey Why there are less Conservative tweeters than Labour and Lib Dems? With MPs, Prospective Parliamentary Candidates, political activists, PR professionals and many more telling us they have filled in the survey, we are building up a great bank of responses to answer this conundrum. The party political range has also been fantastic with Conservative, Labour, Lib Dems, Greens and UKIP supporters tweeting the survey and passing it on to their colleagues.
BUT, we would love even more responses.
We are going to keep the survey up for a little longer and keep pushing it on Twitter, so please join in and help us get the broadest possible snapshot of how people view MPs’ contribution to Twitter.
Please forward it on to friends, family and colleagues and even your local MP so that we can have truly representative results and get the fullest answer to the question: Why are there less Conservative tweeters than Labour and Lib Dems?
The Tweetminster webpage, where Conservative MPs are outnumbered by their Labour counterparts
As a newcomer to Twitter, I can’t help wondering why there are only 66 MPs signed up to a social media site that they could use daily to stay in touch with their constituents?
The Conservative Party website is full of videos, YouTube links, blogs and audio messages and there are a couple of extremely successful Conservative blogs like OrderOrder and Conservative Home (although not directly connected to the central Conservative Party). David Cameron has packed his Shadow Cabinet with media savvy figures like Jeremy Hunt - founder of Hotcourses - and spent the last 4 years spearheading Webcameron and the Conservative Wall - innovative uses of interactive media.
So why are they so behind on Twitter?
I am going to put forward a series of hypotheses that could explain this mismatch:
1. Proportion - I thought at first that because there are more Labour MPs in Parliament it could seem like more are tweeting when the proportions are the same. But there are 349 Labour MPs compared with 192 Conservative MPs, yet there are only 9 Conservative tweeters and over 40 Labour tweeters. In terms of proportion this means only 5% of Conservative MPs tweet whereas 11% of Labour MPs do - a clear Labour margin.
4. ConstituencyImpact - But for me, the most redolent reason for why Conservative MPs can blog but not tweet is that whilst they are slowly seeing how blogs can help them to stay in touch with their constituents, they cannot understand Twitter’s benefits. In rural Conservative seats in Cumbria, Sussex and Hampshire there is most likely less frequency of creative and media jobs and less engagement with social media than the urban constituencies like Manchester, London and Birmingham where Labour MPs dominate. The greater number of students, teenagers and 20s-30s working in careers that use social media in Labour constituencies makes Twitter more relevant and usable in campaigning as Boris Johnson has showed as Mayor of London -a constituency with a modern and creative media hub.
These are my main thoughts on this twitter conundrum; but to get to the bottom of this question I am going to conduct a survey of MPs and people involved in political communications who may have a better idea of why there are less Conservatives than Labour MPs on Twitter. With this in mind I will blog again in a fortnight and outline my findings on the big question:
I was just pointed to a really interesting gallery on The Independent’s website titled Twitter’s speedy move to the centre of politics. The gallery is compiled with the help from the team at Tweetminister, which is a really useful resource that lists all tweeting MPs and Prospective Parliamentary Candidates (PPCs).
What I really find interesting about it and is obviously the point of the gallery, is the evolution of twitter use by Parliamentarians. Initially, when I first joined twitter around 18 months ago, I think there were only one, maybe two MPs tweeting. Now according to the Independent, there are at least 66 MPs tweeting - 10% of the Commons. What’s even more exciting is that the vast majority of those MPs are active tweeters. Sure you have MPs such as @HarrietHarman who hasn’t tweeted since May and there is Shahid Malik (@DewsburyMP) who has never posted, but you also have avid users such as Kerry McCarthy [Lab] - Bristol East with 2623 updates, Jo Swinson [LD] - East Dunbartonshire with 1503 and of course Tom Watson [Lab] - West Bromwich East with 2368. There are apparently also 13 Ministers tweeting away.
Some MPs have even got so involved they have tinted their profiles green in support of the Iranian protestors. This may be a slightly questionable in terms of foreign policy decisions, but the fact is these MPs actively involved in the political social media revolution.
Most surprisingly, possibly in the majority of cases, it is actually them tweeting and not a researcher hidden away in Portcullis house as proven by @JoSwinson who tweets from the Chamber. And they reply if you contact them.
So the moral here is that there is a growing awareness of the power of twitter and social media in Westminster and this is surely going to grow. Twitter, facebook and other tools are becoming more and more legitimate ways to contact and engage with MPs and other key decision makers. I can only guess about what is to come especially in the lead up to the General Election
PRs are often responsible for managing listening campaigns or monitoring programmes to see who’s saying what about a client, brand or product online.
There are great tools around for searching on names and also RTs but what about where links/announcements/press releases are discussed or shared without the client name or a direct retweet?
It is hard to monitor what is being said and also to pick up on any issues that may be being talked about.
A new application called Backtweets let’s you search for whenever your URL is tweeted (doesn’t matter if it is shortened using BIT.LY etc) and adds another, more thorough search element to any monitoring campaign.
I used to have a client whose brief to the PR agency I worked with was to get him coverage in the Financial Times that he could show to his buddies in the club house of the golf club. What a difference a decade makes, the internet has given us a lateral view on influence.
Looking at publications is not only about being able to reach potential business influencers: the C-suite (CEO, CTO, CFO, CMO - board directors in UK parlance) coveted by business-to-business marketers, it is also about being able to be discovered online by these C-suite individuals via search and having your brand mentioned in discussions that these people overhear online: WOM (word-of-mouth).
Which is where Technorati’s Attention Index comes in. The index does not measure whose publication does the best or most incisive journalism and analysis, but the journalism that is most talked about. YouTube comes in at number one, not surprisingly, probably because people like pictures of skateboarding dogs and kids in their back yard pulling Jackass-style pranks on each other. However it also emphasises the power of talking directly to consumers like JetBlue and Dominos Pizza have done recently.
However, it is not all about trashy novelties as stories, quality media like The New York Times, Reuters, The Guardian, the Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post all come immediately after the video sharing site. In comparison the Financial Times comes well below in 25th position and The Economist even lower in 38th position.
The Financial Times and The Economist were also found to be the biggest losers in terms of rank on the index and the amount of attention that they have received from bloggers over the past month or so.
I am not saying don’t bother pitching the Financial Times with stories, or that I would really put Lionel Barber on hold; but that influence and attractiveness of coverage in online publications may not be directly compariable to its offline analogue. I am waiting for the day when I get a PR brief that asks me to get coverage of a client on the Guardian Online so they can share it with their fellow guild members in World of Warcraft. This is also published at my personal blog renaissance chambara.
Yesterday morning, the Environmental Audit Select Committee published their report Reducing CO2 and other emissions from shipping. While I grant, it hardly sounds like a page-turner, I was discussing it with a friend who works as a journo at Lloyd’s List, one of, if not the, leading maritime publications in the UK.
He said this report was a wake up call for the government and shipping industry, which have employed, until now, a highly successful strategy of hoping nobody would notice the problem of maritime industry emissions and ignoring what is, evidently, a significant environmental problem.
I admit, my knowledge of the shipping industry is burgeoning on the non-existent, but what interested me about this is, the shipping industry is going to face an identical problem other industries have faced in the past and many more will in the future. Clearly, the sticking your head in the sand tactic doesn’t work and more industries will be found out as the public and regulatory agencies become increasingly environmentally aware and active. Everything we consume has a carbon footprint and as a story in last week’s Independent pointed out, TVs and electronics are huge power vampires, but consumer demand is beginning to force the manufacturers to fix this issue. Sony has been one of the first TV makers to answer this call.
When the Phase III of the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) begins in 2013, many industries will be in for a bit of a shock if they aren’t properly prepared, in particular the aviation industry, which, for the first time will be included in the EU ETS. Phase III is expected to be far more rigid and will include an annually decreasing carbon cap. More details will undoubtedly follow before the beginning of Phase III in 2013.
It is also desperately necessary for the Government to pull its head out of the sand and start investing more money in green technologies. The last budget was definitely greener than previous ones, but the fact is, much more money needs to be invested in green renewable technologies including wind, tidal, wave, solar as well as increasing the capabilities of the electricity grid. Indeed, the Government is criticised in some quarters for not doing enough.
Hopefully, industry and government will pay attention to what will befall the maritime industry as they are forced to update due to public and consumer demand and everyone will learn the head in the sand theory doesn’t hold up.
What is it about national print coverage that gets in-house PROs so excited?
Ruder Finn recently launched its Future of Communications report, based on a survey of 100 in-house Public Relations Officers (PROs) and 20 in-depth interviews with PROs.
The research, which looked at in-house PRO attitudes to digital communications, threw up a number of interesting angles including the inconsistent costing of digital services which Ruder Finn UK MD Nick Leonard discusses here.
But for me the most interesting was the fact that nearly three-quarters (72 per cent) of PROs said that given the choice between getting their story placed in a national newspaper or the online version of the same publication, they would choose print. Even the supposedly more tech-savvy technology PROs still preferred the print to online coverage.
There is nothing wrong with being more comfortable with what you know, but a fear of the unknown shouldn’t blind PROs to the more obvious benefits of the digital world. Online press coverage is permanent, more likely to be read by someone you really want to read it and contributes to your search rankings; a newspaper is here today and gone tomorrow. I know national print coverage has that wow factor, but in terms of tangible impact on a clients’ business is it really worth more?
What do you think – do you work in-house? What is it about national print coverage that really gets you excited? We’d love to hear your thoughts.
According to the recent Future of Communications survey Ruder Finn conducted, the answer is yes… though eventually and incredibly cautiously.
The ‘cautiously’ part is hardly surprising - in the regulatory environment that surrounds healthcare communications, especially prescription products, caution prevails. Facilitating greater dialogue around prescription medicines raises a whole host of issues from the interpretation of promotion versus non-promotion through to complications around adverse risk reporting. This cautious attitude is further amplified by the nature of the regulations surrounding digital communications. Although some regulatory bodies, like the ABPI in the UK, have taken steps to try and set down rules governing digital media, they are still peppered with ‘grey areas’. Where some industries have already taken the plunge and are happily doing backstroke, the healthcare sector has only just rolled up a trouser leg and dipped a toe in the water.
It is important of course to exercise caution, but the ‘eventually’ bit of my answer is also important. Not only must healthcare companies start to embrace digital communications in order to stay relevant, but if this does not happen, it will miss out on a consistently growing audience and medium with which to reach them.
Market research tells us that patients, carers and healthcare professionals use the internet more and more for health information. In fact at a nurse advisory board I recently attended, the majority of the room stated that they often go online during consultations with patients to look up queries. They of course had some favoured, trusted sources, but they were Googled nonetheless. I also think of myself and my family - I’ll often consult the internet prior to consulting a GP and older members of my family have carried out extensive research on their conditions to find out more about their treatment options.
Information is out there, whether pharma companies want it to be or not, and people are accessing it.
The healthcare industry is full of intelligent and sophisticated marketeers who recognise this ‘evolution’ is taking place and want to be part of it. Our own experience tells us that some pharma companies are doing great work monitoring social media and reacting to issues. But the key word is ‘reacting’. It is the proactive work that is difficult and the bottom line is nobody wants to be first to run a big digital campaign. But proactivity doesn’t have to mean taking risks. Healthcare will eventually fully embrace the digital age but it won’t be done in great leaps but small incremental steps. Only by doing these small steps will regulatory departments, who are key to this change ever occuring, come on board.
So what do we mean by small steps? It’s doing a few simple things well. Maybe that is sponsored links on google to ensure responsible web sites appear at the top of searchs when people look for counterfeit products. How about non-branded educational videos on Youtube, more of these are starting to appear now. Holding online advisory boards on secure networks, which are far more cost effective and allow flexibility for the participants. We could go on.
The way patients and healthcare professionals search for information and interact with each other has changed. Therefore it stands to reason that how healthcare companies communicate with these audiences also has to change. This will happen and, to a certain extent, is already happening but it will take time and it will take a lot of small steps.
