They all came from an era when their mistakes, blunders, gaffes were less highlighted. There are no videos surviving of the time when Winston Churchill mixed up his words or when Mahatma Gandhi forgot someone’s name or when Calvin Coolidge accidentally said something inappropriate - but I am certain it must have happened.
Their careers, whether good or bad, are largely remembered by their witty remarks, political judgement or important policy actions. Their careers are not defined by gaffes, because a gaffe is much funnier when seen on television than when reported in the news. If you read about Dan Quayle (see above) misspelling potato, whilst visiting a school, it is funny, but it does not encapsulate the gut-wrenching horror or cringeworthiness that the video brings.
What has spurred me to write this is the fate of Alan Duncan. He is Shadow Leader of the House of Commons and what he does day to day is largely unknown to the general public. His good decisions and policy initiatives are not discussed or made public. What is known about him is that he made an off the cuff remark about MPs expenses that is becoming an internet video sensation. Poor old Alan.
I do not have sympathy for him personally, but I feel that Alan Duncan is not a new breed of blunderer. I’m sure there were many serial blunderers in the 18th, 19th and early 20th century. But, sadly the rise of video combined with the internet has meant that political gaffes now travel the world phenomenally quickly and will last for years. I’m afraid that Dan Quayle will forever be known as Mr ‘Potatoe’. For this reason politics has changed. There is such a thing as a career ending ‘political gaffe’, which may be caused by little more than being filmed at your most tired, most forgetful or when you just seize up in front of the cameras.
At least in yesteryear politicians knew roughly which decisions would land them in trouble with the press. In the modern age of all-pervasive media and rapid distribution of material globally you can go from great television performer (as I have heard Alan Duncan described) to loose cannon in an instant.
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
The Government has published its Template Twitter Strategy for Government Departments (even more impressively, it is available for download on a Scribd page), suggesting to civil servants to begin tweeting and explaining how to do it, with the ultimate aim of improving public engagment.
The document is a really interesting, well put-together twitter template. It sets out pros and cons, twitter stats, a glossary and a reasonably significant list of influential twitter uses including journos, departments, MPs. It also has devised twitter objectives and metrics, which I’m sure will spur plenty of debate amongst bloggers and tweeters.
Written by Neil Williams (a.k.a @neillyneil), a self admitted “Web strategy geek at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills,” the document advises civil servants, particularly those from the digital comms teams, to tweet on departmental campaigns, news releases, ministerial announcements, highlighting content on other social media platforms such as YouTube and even asking and answering questions.
Amazingly, this all means that civil servants will be crawling out of the shadows of Whitehall and will have a face, albeit a digital one. By encouraging interaction, there will be a transparency and two-way communication that, possibly, has never existed in Whitehall before.
Tom Watson MP, the first blogging Parliamentarian and avid social media nut, was also on the Today programme on Radio 4, spruiking the benefits of social media and, in particular Twitter, as a method of communication and interaction.
Tom Watson also made the point that many old mandarins still get their secretaries to print out the mandarin’s emails for review.
MPs are similar; we are currently surveying Parliamentarians and politicos about the use of twitter in Westminster. There are indeed MPs like Tom Watson, who was among a number of MPs on the Independent’s list of influential parliamentarian twitter, who are actively involved on the blogosphere and many of those listed have actively participated in our survey. But the truth is many still don’t get it and don’t see the point.
But surely, strategies like this show that social media has been adopted by the main stream and the idea that social media is just for kids, computer geeks and a small sector of society is no longer true. The powers that be have recognised the revolution will be digitalised and they have no choice but to get on board.
If you are interested in this issue and you would like to take our survey on the use of twitter in Westminster and Whitehall, we would more than appreciate your comments. http://bit.ly/10sf8B
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
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.
Our director of digital strategies either decided he has far too much spare time and needs another platform from which to espouse his words of wisdom, or else his cruel boss has nominated him for a spot on the sparkly new PR Week site….either way, check out his new blog, called Kittens, babies, sunsets or flowers? Life online.
From an interview with Dell to a useful set of tips to consider when naming a web site or community, Ged provides insight into agency life and the wider PR industry as a whole. The official blurb is as follows:
Ged Carroll of Ruder Finn blogs on online curios, direct-to-audience comms and technology for PR Week
N.B. Ged also blogs here and at his personal blog - Renaissance Chambara. He can explain the reasons behind the name(s) far better than I can!
When people ask me about social media: teach them how to do <insert an activity> on <insert the name of a service de jour> and I say sure I can teach you that (for a fee), but this is as much about the way think and look at things as anything else. You can pick up skills as you go along, once you know what you want to do.
However, services come and go, but the conversation remains. A classic case-in-point is GeoCities. Yahoo! has non-announced that it is shuttering this pioneering social network at the end of the year. GeoCities was founded in the mid-1990s and grew rapidly (ok so this was the dial-up era and the page building tools on it were the then equivalent of cutting edge-bandwidth hogging web 2.0 tools).
The site was organised into neighbourhoods of common interest: Silicon Valley for technology for example where ‘birds of a feather’ could ‘flock together’. The page creation tools were broadly comparable to MySpace profiles: people foisted poor aesthetics, bad web design and golden labrador digital photographs on an early online audience.
From a standing start in the middle of 1995, two years later they were the fifth most trafficked property on the web and a million-plus registered users (or Homesteaders as GeoCities called these web pioneers).
In college, I found lots of great content on GeoCities and cited some of the homesteaders pages as references in my essays and degree course work.
Yahoo! acquired the company for 2.87 billion USD in early 1999, this was cited as his ‘first rocket ship ride‘ by veteran VC Fred Wilson. There are obvious parallels to Facebook in this meteoric growth.
When I worked at Yahoo!, the disastrous terms of service debacle at GeoCities post-acquisition change in the terms of service where ‘the company owned all rights and content, including media such as pictures’ were held up as a lesson that we should learn from. Whilst Yahoo! quickly reversed this decision there was an exodus of homesteaders. It was an expensive mistake that we were loath to repeat when working with newer services like flickr. Again this sounds like some of the debacles that Facebook has faced. Indeed Facebook’s current terms of service includes rights on the user content that is far greater than in the current Yahoo! terms of service, here is the relevant section from Facebook’s Terms of Use:
… an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.
GeoCities like Facebook with its Beacon service had a scandal on its hands over user privacy. The FTC found that GeoCities had engaged in deceptive acts and practices in contravention in their privacy act. Subsequently, a consent order was entered into which prohibited GeoCities from misrepresenting the purpose for which it collects and/or uses personal identifying information from consumers.
Time moved on and GeoCities became a key part spam email acting as a redirect page for online pharmacies and replica watch sellers alongside more conventional GeoCities user pages. Over the past years the site traffic for GeoCities dropped faster than shareholder value at Yahoo!. The lesson here is that the Twitter or Facebook or today, can be the GeoCities of tomorrow. In fact, only five of the top 15 web service of a decade ago still have a similar kind of profile today.
If we look beyond web services to world history we can all think about eras and empires that have past, yet thinking (from the likes of Niccolò Machiavelli, Sun Tzu | 孙子, Miyamoto Musashi | 宮本 武蔵 and Carl Von Clausewitz) is as relevant today as it was when they created it centuries or millenia ago. In the grand scheme of things being open and understanding the concepts of conversation are more important than the latest tools. Whilst I still get excited about the ‘new Twitter’, I still like to keep things in perspective. This is also cross posted at my personal blog renaissance chambara.
Well, it has happened, the first big UK political name has been brought down by British bloggers. I won’t go into a detailed discussion on the events because if you are reading this post, you will likely know the story (here is a good synopsis here in the Telegraph). But to quickly recap, Damian McBride, a senior figure within Downing Street, albeit behind the scenes, has been brought down by the power of blogging and it looks like another senior Labour character, Derek Draper, is also losing in the battle of the bloggers between his blog, Labour List and Paul Staines, who runs the conservative blog, Guido Fawkes.
The point I want to make here, instead of getting into the history of “Emailgate”, is that both Labour and the Tories are seemingly struggling to understand how to campaign online and their efforts seem all very ad hoc with no real direction. Draper himself admitted only in February that he didn’t know the difference between “my RSS from my elbow” and from my standpoint, there has very little positive interaction with the voting public so far. While Guido Fawkes, as the name suggests, is just trying to bring down the Labour Government, although his aim is to replace it with a Conservative one and doesn’t have the anarchic goals of his namesake.
Its obvious Labour has set up their web presence to try and get some kind of Obamaesque traction on the blogosphere and from voters, after all, I may be cynical, but it is an awfully big coincidence that Draper and Co. devised Labour List in November, around the time of Obama’s victory. And as I have mentioned in a previous blog, the Conservative’s seem to be behind in this regard.
However, Labour List, Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale, another high-profile Conservative blogger, seem to just snipe and battle each other from across the political spectrum. While this is interesting from the point of view of a political junkie like myself, Becky McMichael, a colleague and fellow blogger, put it perfectly - they are just preaching to the converted.
There is no real engagement, no real message, no grass roots campaigning, no real harnessing of support from people who don’t already support either party.
There is a new post on Labour List by Mark Hansen titled “Labour is gaining fast online: Don’t let Guido wreck it“, where the author states “Just ten days ago a ragbag group of Labour bloggers and campaigners was gathered (organised by Derek Draper) to offer ideas as to how to build the resources on Labourlist and make it more useful to Party members at constituency level. How to build this Labour-minded community.”
Mr Hansen has summed up Labour’s and the other party’s problem quite succinctly without knowing it - they are trying to engage with Party members and registered supporters. These people won’t win you an election, it is the swinging voters who get you elected, any student of electoral politics will tell you that. They must deliver their message outward, not just inward.
I spotted a really interesting piece from McKinsey this week on six key ways that companies can make web 2.0 work for them. The piece covers the management and technological aspects of deploying web 2.0 tools with a few interesting supporting cases from google, AT&T and Pixar amongst others.
So this kicked off my thoughts about the six (OK I tried ) seven biggest benefits that I have seen at Ruder Finn since embracing and actively using web 2.0 strategies and tools both internally and externally are:
1. Recruitment. One example is a fabulous associate director through Twitter last year and have had some great CVs for a senior account exec post this year
2. Internal comms. A third of my team (tech and corporate division ) work remotely / collocate at least part of the time so using collaborative tools has helped the division manage account work as well as keep the banter up at a healthy level.
3. Measurement and trend analysis. We find that social media provides a much quicker and more reliable measure of current opinion that older forms of research. Everyone from our managing director to graduate trainees use social media to crowdsource ideas, gain recommendations and give / seek advice from both inside and outside the industry.
4. New business. We have received new business briefs, recommendations, invitations to speak at events, training requests and various others through the blog and Twitter. Writing a proposal in only 140 characters is our next mission
5. An even bigger focus on reading and analysis. Our agency believes passionately that you cannot be in PR without being a total media junkie however through use of RSS, embracing apps like Twitter and becoming bloggers ourselves, we read and consume more media than ever.
6. Genuine experience and better consultancy. Through doing it ourselves, we are much better placed to advice, counsel and help clients in their social media efforts - an essential in an industry moving this fast.
7. Feedback. Whilst compliments on social media (or anywhere else) are always fabulous to receive, far more valuable are the more negative constructive things you learn about yourself, your agency or your clients that might previously have gone unnoticed. The stuff that helps you improve as a company is, in my opinion, the most valuable result of all.
(I haven’t listed stronger/new relationships and conversations here as that is a given)
Reading this list you can see why the naysayers are so frustrating to us and others in our industry. No matter what your opinion of web 2.0 is, I’m sure you’ll agree that the outcomes listed above are pretty impressive business benefits by anyone’s standards.
) seven biggest benefits that I have seen at Ruder Finn since embracing and actively using web 2.0 strategies and tools both internally and externally are:
