Posts Tagged ‘web 2.0’

I have to admit, I was fairly surprised when I started my new job and a member of my team already knew what I’d been up to the previous weekend.  I had underestimated my online visibility, as do a lot of people, and could have jeopardised my job before I’d even started.  Luckily I lead a quiet life so no damage done…

The online distinctions between business and pleasure, once so definite, now seem to be blurring. With the announcement of a partnership between LinkedIn and Twitter, allowing users to share status updates across sites, the gap between individual social networks, and indeed our online personas, is being bridged.   

Even Google is getting in on the act, announcing deals with Facebook and Twitter to include their live feeds into searches.  I googled myself and although I’m quite far down the list (I’m not as popular as the other Laura Strong from London) I’m definitely on there.

I’m sure many of you will have heard the story of an employee ranting about her boss on Facebook, only to be publicly humiliated and sacked on their own news feed.  The Guardian has devised three rules to avoid social media catastrophes as ‘behaviour is very important in public and we all live public lives now’:

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.

Peter Mandelson wrote in his first blog on Labour List about new media and the fact that “we have to recognise that the days of command and control are over. Instead we need to learn to embrace and engage.” I guess they are still learning.

Cross posted with my personal blog.

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.

CROSS POSTED at my personal blog - balancing act

Everyone knows how Barack Obama and Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, have been able to harness Web 2.0 to create a digital grassroots campaign which has been significantly responsible to wining the White House. My question is, will this digital revolution ever be harnessed by the UK political machine?

The US Government has, to a certain extent, already jumped on the twitter bandwagon and it’s only likely to increase come January 20^th under the Obama Presidency. But, what about the UK? Number 10 has recently rebuilt its website to make it far more social media friendly, including twitter, flickr and youtube applications, as well as a whole host of bookmarking sites, which means someone can see the potential of social media outreach. But, at the same time it is all fairly basic. It seems to be a “we should give this a try”, rather than being a part of an overall strategy.

As far as I can tell, the only twittering going on comes from the Prime Minister’s office, along with David Cameron, Nick Clegg, a few other MPs and their respective parties, Hazel Blears and the Department of Communities and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office but not much more. DFID has recently set-up a blogging site written by on-the-ground staff in the UK and abroad and the Our NHS, Our Future site has a blog written by Lord Darzi, although it hasn’t been updated since July and David Miliband actively blogs of the FCO website along with other FCO staff.

Other Government departments also have online tools aimed at online engagement, but again, it all feels ad hoc. For instance, the DFID blog is on a completely different hosting address to the normal DFID site, so if you didn’t know it was there, you’d struggle to find it.

Is the Government harnessing digital and social media as well as it can?

The question can be asked of private blogs focusing on politics. There are thousands of blogs from journalists, pundits, firms all like this one, which discuss the whole gambit of Government; policies, polls, reform, rumours and the list goes on. But, what about sites like the Drudge Report, which is famous enough to have been mentioned on the West Wing number of times and has had an undeniable effect on US Political Communications. It has also been around so long, the Observer recently listed it as being “on the way out.” The UK blogger sites just aren’t quite the same. This is possibly why they aren’t seen as an issue to political communication aficionados.

The UK simply doesn’t do it as well as the USA, yet what Westminster has to realise is, one blogging site, with one story, with one influential reader, could change everything and the UK political world could have to completely change its style of communications with it. After all, it was Drudge who broke the Clinton-Lewinsky Scandal.