I’ve been amazed while I scroll these past few months how much AI has become a political tool.
We were warned that AI would be used to make deep fake to create online storms. Theres been some of this but the tools are being used far more as AI cartoons.
So what am I talking about?
I’m talking about the slew of AI art I’m seeing in some – not all – Facebook groups.
In the run-up to the General Election there was plenty and more around the far right riots in England and Northern Ireland.
What do they look like?
Well, there’s this one which shows a patriotic British Lion with a red white and blue mane chasing down their enemy to publicise a far right march in London.
Or this AI image of a British hourglass with the sands of time slipping and the question ’How long do we have left before its gone.’
It’s a far right trope that the Britain we know is disappearing.
It’s clever because its a dog whistle that stays the right side of the law.
But while they are noticeably far right in character the style is open to parody from more left wing campaigners.
In the riots in England in summer 2024 these two AI images collided.
Firstly, the Aryan-looking child appealing for Britain’s lion to awaken. Then the parody with the drunk lion sleeping off a hangover surrounded by a traffic cone and beer bottles the results of a drunken night out.
“Daddy, the police are at the door,” Aryan child asks “What did you do?”
Or this one.
The message is clear, that the far right protestors are drunk, patriotic and misguided. The symbolic bulldog we’ve seen before. Both the left and right are using established symbols to male a point.
The origins of these AI pieces goes back to before American Independence.
The long history of the political cartoon
In the late 18th century, a single image in a pamphlet or newspaper became a powerful tool.
Print technology allowed the line drawing to be replicated in the printing press. The political cartoon became a common feature.
By the mid-19th century magazines like Punch held power to account with cartoons which mocked, argued and teased on issues of the day.
Here, the British Lion roaring at the Indian Bengal tiger from 1857. This was the year of the Indian Mutiny or India’s First War of Independence depending on your national standpoint.
Of the 40,000 British civilians in India, 6,000 were murdered in the incident which prompted outrage in the British Isles.
In the image, Britain is represented by the lion defending the naked woman and child on the floor from the savage Indian.
Why is AI art effective messaging?
We know this AI art is not real. But these images are a snippet that makes a point in the time it takes to scroll. It can be read, understood, downloaded and reposted in a way that a Peanuts cartoon strip or a video clip can never be.
The speed with which it can make a point and then be shared makes it hugely powerful.
The question was posed recently by a worried lady in her 40s as to where she could find out about online trends.
My immediate counter question was ‘should you?’
That response has re-appeared for me repeatedly in the wake of the online trend of Gen Z writing the marketing scripts.
If you’ve not seen this trend, this was a TikTok where a posh woman in her sixties takes you on a tour of her historic bed and breakfast giving a Gez Z speak commentary written by her daughter.
So, the lady’s Medieval kitchen has ‘so much rizz’, her panelled room ‘understood the assignment, slay’ and her bedrooms help you recover from a ‘Brat summer or a menty B’.
In plain English, the kitchen has lots of charm, the panelled room is perfect, which is great and the bedrooms can help you overcome a wild time or nervous exhaustion.
The comedy of this is that the older lady clearly didn’t know what the heck she was talking about. It’s a mix of grown-ups not knowing the kids and well heeled attempting to be street. It’s funny. After just over a week, the TikTok from Fyfield Manor has 2.2 million views while Curry’s who did a similar thing around the same time has 2.1 million.
The Fyfield Manor one is here…
I’m not linking the Curry’s one. In 1985, my Mum had to have a stand-up row in their Stafford branch to get them to replace a faulty cassette recorder. Some things run deep.
Since then, TikTok and Instagram have been inundated with brands making their own copies of the Gen Z marketing script. The innocence of the first clips’ work has now gone.
So, where did it all go wrong?
Blame Kamala Harris
I’ve a feeling Gen Z speak really came into the mainstream when savvy 20 somethings on Kamala Harris’ campaign borrowed the lime green imagery and black typeface of Charlie XCX’s ‘Brat Summer’ album.
It connected with a younger audience almost overnight.
Who are Gen Z, anyway? By 2025, 27 per cent of the workforce will be Gen Z. This is everyone born from 1997 to 2012 and their ages range from a hefty 27 to a just starting High school 12-year-old.
By the way, If you’re a Gen X like me but have two Gen Z kids, using Gen Z slang in their presence is magnificent. “A little piece of my dies, Dad,” my daughter told me, “when you say ‘skibbidy toilet rizz.’”
Reader, this phrase expresses displeasure at something. My offspring’s own displeasure at me qualifies her to use it but she declines. She just glares instead.
An alternative language is nothing new.
Victorian criminals used an alternative language. To ‘dry up’ was to be quiet while to be ‘peery’ was to be a snitch. The British LGBTQ community in the past have used ‘Polari’ to conceal intention from a straight audience that can sometimes mean them harm. The words ‘naff’ and ‘camp’ jumped the fence from this patois.
A trend has the life of a gadfly
So, back to the Gen Z marketing script trend. Just over a week later and dozens of brands and organisations are getting in on the act with their own copies of the trend. It now feels, to borrow a Gen Z phrase ‘a bit cringe’. Why? Because what made it work in the first place was originality, creativity and humour. Johnny Rotten once said that when they first started to wear safety pins and ripped t-shirts it was original. When everyone did it it became a uniform.
If you’ve made one yourself feel free to disregard this. But I’m starting very quickly to absolutely get tired of it. It feels like the digital equivalent of the chief exec asking you to make a rap about finance and audit scrutiny so they can connect with the kids.
In the hit 80s teen movie The Breakfast Club, Bender ridicules the teacher by asking him if Barry Manilow knows he’s raiding his wardrobe. It’s that.
So, we can safely say that trends can often have a life span the length of a gadfly.
What to do?
All this returns to the original question of knowing where trends are and should you?
There is no getting around spending time on the internet to spot trends emerge and fall like waves in the sea.
As a strategy, I still love the approach Black Country Living Museum seeing a trend then seeing if they could put their own historical spin on it. If they could they’d try it. If they couldn’t they wouldn’t.
In short, you really don’t have to know where trends are to be a communicator. If it works for you, fine. If not, don’t worry.
If you’re using a channel where these trends simply don’t really matter then don’t bother. If you’re using a channel where this can help then spend time on the platform, take out a TikTok Business account and you’ll see in the backend a list for you of the popular videos.
If you’re late to a trend you may as well not bother.
In it, he complains that brands are getting too savvy at finding and replicating original ideas. Once a trend becomes identified with generating money for a brand, he says, the fun dies and it becomes exhausting to the audience.
When one or two do it, its fun. When loads of people are do it it’s not. He calls this ‘trend inflation’.
I’ve nothing against creativity. It’s just better if you’re being creative with a new idea that may or may not work rather than something that’s a fifth generation photocopy of the Mona Lisa.
It was never going to be like a robot invasion, was it?
There was never going to be a single cinematic moment when an AI UFO hovered over the town playing three notes from Close Encounters of the Third Kind and then took over.
Instead, AI has quickly become part of the day-to-day almost seamlessly buried in the tools we use. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Canva and Kinemaster all have AI in them. That’s even before the explosion of more than 14,000 new AI tools that have become available for comms people.
There’s three challenges facing public sector communications people.
You can maintain trust by using just enough AI in the right time and the right space. There are some seriously useful UK Government guidelines that can help you with this. Applying them and knowing the best tools to use is the next step.
Second issue is knowledge. What to use and when? People often don’t have the time to invest. I’ve read, watched and tried out the tools so you don’t have to.
Third is the idea that AI won’t replace a comms person but a comms person who knows how to use AI WILL replace one that doesn’t. Imagine being the comms person who didn’t know how to use the internet or social media effectively. You won’t have a long career.
All this is why I’ve included an AI element into the training that I run. This post sets out the new round of dates but also what that means in practice.
Have a look at the dates.
ESSENTIAL COMMS SKILLS BOOSTER – UPDATED
Given what’s happened to X, formerly Twitter over the last few months, taking a fresh look at the channels you use should be data driven and strategic. I’m updating the training deck at least once a week now.
There are now SIX sessions which cover what a comms person needs to know. This includes:
#1 Media landscape, comms planning and evaluation
#2 Making the most of algorithms
#3 Emerging channels – TikTok, WhatsApp, Threads and Nextdoor
#4 Facebook groups and LinkedIn
#5 How to deal with comment, criticism and abuse
And introducing:
#6 Using AI safely and with confidence
This new session will look at the basics you need to get in place, the pitfalls to avoid and some tips on the best AI platforms that can offer you the best return. I’ve done the work so you don’t have to.
We’ll look at how to use AI tools as a force for good and give you some tools for responding to deep faked AI that can be aimed at you as a force for bad.
Video has been at the frontline of AI development as a force for good as well as bad.
The training will continue to show you how to plan, shoot, edit and post effective video. The data and insight is fresh to help you build and refine a case.
We’ll look at how to use AI safely as well as some tools that can help you from speeding up the subtitling phase to adding value by using AI to animate your cutaways. But we’ll remind you of how to mark it so as not to scare your audience.
It’s been fascinating seeing how the media landscape has been evolving in 2024.
Riots across England and Northern Ireland fired by misinformation has underlined the need for good journalism. But the journalism many communities has is not what it was 20 years ago.
In this session, we’ll look at how to pitch a story idea for coverage as well as dealing with the incoming media query. Time was when every comms team was stuffed with ex-journos. That’s not the case now. That’s not such a bad thing but those skills are still needed by the effective comms team.
In the UK, figures are harder to come across with Ofcom suggesting ‘hundreds of thousands’ of monthly users in the UK.
The Threads figure may have taken a bounce in summer 2024 after Elon Musk went to war with UK Government and organisations started to move away from the platform.
So, how is it shaping out?
As a platform there is life on Threads
In the UK, Arsenal Football Club have the largest presence on the platform with more than three million followers.
Sure, a Premier League club like this has a global following rather than simply a UK one. But the size of those numbers do show that there is life on Threads.
The top 100 UK Threads influencers according to influencer platform Starngage are dominated by football teams and Instagram influencers who are already plenty big on sister site Instagram.
But how about public sector organisations?
The public sector top 10 in 2024
Doing some digging, here’s the UK public sector top 10 on Threads.
I’ve used a fairly liberal use of what makes public sector. Topping the list is Kew Gardens which is classed as a non-departmental public body. That’s 142nd in the Starngage list.
Elsewhere in the list the armed forces figure strongly with three places in the top 10 and tourism-focussed also taking up space.
Let me know if I’ve missed any.
Government is lagging
When Threads first launched there was a spate of councils, police forces, NHS bodies and others taking out an account to stop cyber-squatting. Since then, they’ve more often and not turned dormant.
It’s clear that the audience for Threads is building in the UK but the public sector are being hesitant in diving in with it. This is not such a bad strategy. There’s plenty to occupy the time of people who work in the sector.
At some point it does become chicken and egg. If you don’t post you don’t get followers. But the lack of followers on space holder accounts does make it a bit dull.
This isn’t a X/Twitter or Threads straight swap. If there’s an audience then by all means do both but right now for me Threads is a nice to have rather than a must have.
The shot is of a long lost Britain travelling to work without a mobile phone in sight.
Members of the Sheffield Facebook group quickly warmed to the image.
“Great depiction of the early days and how society has changed,” one said.
“Wow what a photo! I can smell it,” wrote another.
One group member was prompted to recall the distinct smell of soluble oil which used to hang over Sheffield in the 1960s. It came from a cutting lubricant in engineering factories, he said, and it hung to the clothes of people travelling home. He recalled the pride as an apprentice smelling of it.
Another remembered the route.
“Number 103 Bus out of Hackenthorpe was Vulcan Road if my memory serves me correctly,” another added filling in some recollection-dredged gaps.
One Facebook group member recalled how she used to catch that Hackenthorpe bus sometimes. Sitting upstairs meant you could smoke.
All these memories are genuine and recalled with warmth.
But the image isn’t real. It’s been made by AI.
“Bloody AI again,” one person points out. “No central aisle, how’s the conductor going to take fares?”
For two minutes scrolling this thread I was taken in myself by the power of the imagery and the power of people’s memories giddily remembered.
But of course, there’s no central aisle. How will the conductor get around and people climb on board?
It is, in effect, the bus to nowhere where like the Hotel California it is impossible to get off.
It never existed yet the memories of the people who recall it absolutely do.
This week I’m taking a look at a commercial generative AI tool that’s been named as one of the most influential 100 companies in the world.
Runway was founded six years ago and has been used by Hollywood filmmakers as well as music videos.
So far so fancy, but how can it be used for everyday filmmaking?
Creating video
What may have begun as a text to video product is now very firmly asking the user to upload a prompt image for it to base its work on. But unlike Pika when I looked at it you’re able to ask it to produce 10 seconds of footage instead of five seconds.
So, here is a picture of a British amusement arcade.
Helpfully, the platform makes some suggestions for the prompt. Firstly, what the camera may do but also what happens in the picture.
I used this as a prompt.
[Camera pans slowly from left to right] [We can see movement from the amusement arcade players as they load money into the slot machines or move around] [the neon lights blink on and off] [lens flare].
It created this.
Handy, but with a few glitches. The lady on the left appears to leave her foot behind.
Can it do better? I tried again.
[Camera stays static] [We can see movement from the amusement arcade players as they load money into the slot machines or move around] [the neon lights blink rapidly on and off] [lens flare].
Again, glitches. People blur and melt into each other. But the overall shot of moving into the image is still amazing. Would using those people be problematic for a filmmaker? Absolutely. GDPR would need to be sought.
Lip synching
Firstly, I tried using a creative commons image of Margaret Thatcher but got closed down as it closely resembled a public figure.
Drat and also wow.
So I uploaded stock picture from istock I have a licence for.
Here’s the picture.
And here’s the lipsynched video with some existing audio of Taylor Swift I also uploaded as an mp3 file.
Ten for effort. At a glance its plausible but an old face with a young mouth doesn’t cut it.
How about a recognisable face?
Well, here’s Mrs Slee. She’s recognisable to me but probably not to you.
Frankly, instead of the lovely person I married the interpretation looks more like Barry the bricklayer who has been punched in the face. Anyone who knows her would spot the fraud a mile off.
In summary
Like Pika, this may be useful for turning stock pictures into cutaways to add a voiceover too. Maybe there’s also room for lip synching an old image with some period text but only if it is marked up as AI.
There’s no question that experimentation is going to be of benefit but you’ll burn through the free trial pretty quickly. The standard package – which is the cheapest – will get you a minute of footage a month for £105 a year.
For Pika versus Runway? Runway wins.
There’s a lot of YouTube tutorials to play with and extra tools but this this an exensive business right now and it will cost you to refine what you are doing.
Image to video
Really handy but look out for the glitches.
4 out of 5
Lip synching
Worth playing with but aside from heritage projects I’m not sure how it can be used by the wider public sector.
The Health Research Authority makes it easy to do research that people can trust. The regulator, an NHS organisation, recently closed its X account. Head of Communications Eve Hart wrote an update for colleagues on what this decision means for the HRA, and has agreed to share it here to support comms colleagues still deciding what to do with the accounts that they manage.
If you can’t measure it, you shouldn’t be doing it.
The HRA’s communications team is part of the Government Communications Service (GCS), and its operating model for communications is clear that data and evaluation should inform our practice.
Since the social media platform Twitter was bought by billionaire Elon Musk and rebranded X, this has been a challenge. Where once the HRA’s highest performing social media account had a trusted blue tick and was rich with engagement, in the last year the site has changed beyond all recognition. And our analytics have gone. Without paying £1,000/month (which is greater than the cost of keeping our whole corporate website up and running!) it’s no longer possible to measure the impact of our social media content … what’s worked well, what missed the mark, and what have we learned?
At the end of 2023, confused about what the lack of data meant for @HRA_Latest, I asked my friends. At CommsCamp (a free conference for public sector communications professionals with tiny budgets!) I ran a session consulting with equivalents in other organisations. The consensus was that watchful waiting was the best way forward. Whilst we felt the winds of change, many of our audiences remained on the platform, and they still expected to hear from us.
By mid-2024 things had not improved. Accounts removed from previous iterations of the platform for harassment or discrimination were allowed to return, and the site’s algorithm was changed to push content from organisations like ours down in feeds. If we added a link, our posts would be shown to fewer people. But there were new shoots of hope as alternative platforms started to spring up and grow leaves. Maybe we should move to Mastodon, think about Threads, bring it on Bluesky? We registered our account names, just in case.
We started a social media review, well underway today. This includes an assessment of the range of platforms available to us. Using the HRA’s stakeholder categories and data from Ofcom we’re assessing what the different options would mean. Where do researchers expect us to post if our systems are down? Where does the HRA Community want to see us celebrate the amazing contribution they make to UK research? Where is the patient and public involvement community, we miss their input?
But whilst the starting point had been to use data to drive a decision to finally leave X (or not), this work is now looking forward rather than back, as our corporate profile on the platform was deactivated last week.
The media regulator has criticised social media platforms (especially X) for their role in the racially-aggravated violence which appalled us all earlier this month, and the owner of the platform has himself helped misinformation to spread. X is no longer a safe space for communications colleagues to manage as part of their roles, nor should we direct our stakeholder there for the latest information from the HRA. It’s counter to our values, and the careful work we’ve done to make sure ours is an organisation which people trust, and where they want to work, volunteer, or get involved.
In the coming weeks we’ll be talking to you about your comms plans. If we’re supporting you with a project or piece of work as part of which we were going to use X, we’ll work with you to identify other channels to reach the audiences you want to, and to measure the impact of your work. These are exciting times for team comms as we work to find new ways to achieve our external comms objectives and support the HRA.
Where we can measure it, we’ll be doing it. And we’re going to be proud of it too.
Eve Hart is head of communications at the Health Research Authority.
Neurodivergence is becoming more recognised as research improves. Research shows that as much as eight per cent of us have our brains wired this way. Rather than a challenge to employers Gabby Willis, who has had her own diagnosis, explains that it can be an asset in the team that’s not hard to accommodate.
How long have you worked in comms? For your neurodivergent colleagues, it might be longer than you think.
I was diagnosed with ADHD-C (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder – Combined Type) just over six months ago, after years of wondering why everything in my life felt so much more difficult than everyone else expected it to be. One of these things, despite me having completed a journalism degree and worked in digi-comms for the past few years, was communication. Oh, the irony.
My ADHD means that I can struggle with interpreting social situations and have done so since I was a child. My professional communication skills have been honed by years of masking my anxiety around speaking to and interpreting the tone and intention of others.
Behind the calm and knowledgeable exterior is a woman second guessing every single word. This can be frustrating, but ultimately, I believe it has served me well in my career. I have been a professional communicator for most of my life, always conducting a ‘vibe check’ of my audience and making sure my need for accessible communications is a two-way street.
I’ve been told many times that I make communicating look effortless. I’m ‘polite’, I’m ‘professional’, I approach everything from emails to social media with measured consideration and am in many ways the picture-perfect confident communicator. In reality, I feel anything but. It is often a mask that requires a huge amount of effort to maintain.
My manager, who is also neurodivergent, calls me a “natural born professional communicator”. He’s always quick to clarify that this is by no means to downplay the years of professional development I have also put into my craft, and the effort it takes. But it’s made me think deeply about what neurodivergent colleagues can bring to a comms team.
So, without further ado, here are some skills you should embrace from your neurodivergent colleagues (with the obvious caveat that not all people with neuro differences experience these traits in the same, positive way, and that many of these things will also apply to neurotypicals. As the old adage goes, if you’ve met one neurodivergent colleague, you have met one neurodivergent colleague):
Vibes checks
Many of us exhibit hyper vigilance to varying degrees. Whilst this is unpleasant for us, it can benefit you because we are more likely to spot when something is ‘off’ in the mood of Teams call or meeting with external stakeholders. We may also be the first ones to notice that colleagues are uncomfortable with messaging about organisational change, or if the air-con in the office is too cold, alerting internal comms to any potential issues.
Reading between the lines: clarification, and concise communication
Rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD) is also common, particularly in those of us with ADHD or ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder). This leads some of us to over-communicate to avoid being misunderstood, or to second guess our interactions with others. ‘What did they really mean when they said X?’ and ‘Can you clarify point X, please’ may be things you hear from us. Instead of being frustrated by this, I encourage you to see it as an opportunity to reevaluate your approach. We may be able to help you make something clearer and more concise, or to identify ways to clarify ambiguous calls to action.
Accessibility and inclusion
Accessible and inclusive communication is second nature to many of us. As above, we put a lot of effort into making sure that our communication to others reflects the accessibility that we need to be shown in return. There may be nobody better than us to bang the drum for WCAG requirements, diversity of contributors to audio-visual content, and appropriately responding to awareness moments.
Empathy
Empathy can be as much a learned skill as something you are born with. When you are responding to audiences who may be experiencing hardship or heightened emotions, such as during the recent harrowing events in Southport and subsequent rioting, look to your neurodivergent colleagues. We may be struggling with internalising the atmosphere and battling our strong sense of social justice, or we may again be the first to suggest an empathetic approach to acknowledging and dispersing tension.
Crisis management and problem solving
Hand in hand with empathy comes crisis management; many of us (with ADHD in particular) thrive in a crisis. My brain is chaotic, and there is nothing like a crisis to give me the challenge I need to remain stimulated and on task. After facing many made-up crises from my own co-morbid anxiety, a real professional crisis will see me remain level headed and pragmatic. This also means that I love to get stuck into solving a problem and will happily do the research and deep dives needed to investigate all avenues needed for a potential crisis response. It is better to be safe and prepared than to be sorry.
Strategy, project management and seeing the bigger picture
Following on from the above, a need for structure is a common neurodivergent trait. This can show up in a keen eye for strategy and project management. If you’re planning a big campaign, it might be one of us who is keeping you on schedule, helping you see the bigger picture, and coming up with exciting new ideas. We might also make excellent meeting chairs.
Perfectionism and pattern recognition
Do you hate proof reading, or analysing social media statistics with a passion? One of your neurodivergent colleagues might love to take this off your hands. It must be clarified that it is cliche to expect everyone with ASD to be a whizz with numbers, but many neurodivergent people count pattern recognition and analytical skills among their strengths.
Creativity, passions and enthusiasm
Need a creative solution to a problem? I’m ya gal! There’s nothing quite like the opportunity to do creative work to keep me motivated and working at pace. A common ADHD trait is hyperfixation, and whilst this needs to be carefully managed so that it doesn’t become a problem, I can hyperfixate for hours on creating a stunning branded social media campaign of graphics that will stand out from the rest. This is not quite a special interest (which is a potentially contentious term for some) for me, but in a similar vein many neurodivergent colleagues will be extremely skilled at or knowledgeable about the areas of work they feel most passionate about, leading to boundless enthusiasm and a drive to share this with others.
Whilst I have only scratched the surface here, I hope this blog has given you something to reflect upon personally or within your team, whether you’re neurodivergent or neurotypical.
Gabby Willis is communications and external affairs officer (digital) at IfATE Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education.
Extra help
* Neurodivergence can include a number of diagnosis including autism, attention defecit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), attention deficit disorder (ADD). While some people may still identify with the diagnosis of ADD, ADD is no longer diagnosed by medical professionals. Instead, they diagnose three types of ADHD (inattentive/ADHD-I, hyperactive-compulsive/ADHD-HI, or combined/ADHD-C).
In addition, neurodivergence can also include dyscalculia, dyslexia, dyspraxia or developmental co-ordination disorder (DCD).
Firstly, I uploaded an image of the British seaside from Wikimedia Commons that I’m using under a creative commons license. This gave it something to work with.
It’s an amusement arcade on a wet day in Burnham-on-Sea in Somerset. What can I say? I’m a child of the 1970s. I saw a lot of these on day trips to Rhyl in North Wales.
This is a British seaside amusement arcade. We can hear seagulls, rain and the distant bleep of slot machines.
It brought this…
Which was okay, but those seagulls were not making it. I hadn’t actually noticed the people in the picture so was pleasantly surprised to see them identified as humans and walking like them too.
But I wasn’t happy. So, I tried again. This time I wanted more rainfall and flashing lights in the amusements.
This is a British seaside amusement arcade. We can hear rainfall and the distant bleep of slot machines. There are lights flashing in the amusement arcade. We can also see rainfalling on the damp road and the reflection of approaching cars.
This brought a better result.
And asking it to retry made for better results although the audio is still not there.
All useful. So, I thought I’d take a look at what the results would be if I gave Pika nothing to work with.
Here is the anime version of that same prompot
This is a British seaside amusement arcade. We can hear rainfall and the distant bleep of slot machines. There are lights flashing in the amusement arcade. We can also see rainfalling on the damp road and the reflection of approaching cars.
No, that’s not what I’m after. But my own fault for choosing a Japanese film style.
And then finally just text.
This is not what I’m after at all. The cars look like they are from the 1950s, the signs look foreign and so does the road surface.
But hey, that’s on me.
Lyp synching
One interesting part of Pika is the ability to take video and merge it with imported audio.
I thought I’d give this a test by uploading two rtandom videos and seeing how they knit together.
So a couple of seconds of the vox pop in Bristol saying ‘another one?’ in an incredulous voice was the fiorst one I found.
Then I added a short clip of Roy Keane being interviewed.
To make this…
Not perfect but at first glance, it’s the audio being mixed with the video to give the Bristol woman Roy Keane’s voice.
Technical part
For the video, I’m able to change the tilt, zoom, pan and rotate and I’m also able to tweak prompts and retry. The moral of the story here is to keep trying and experimenting.
Conclusion
As something to add life to existing images this looks fantastic. I’m not convinced I’d use straight text to video. Overall, this could be useful for cutaways and supporting footage. The sounds I’m not that impressed with but the lip synching is dangerously good. I’m not sure ethically whay you’d use it.
Text to video
This was not good. Yes, it’s amazing that some words can end up as video and you’ve got to give them that but in terms of using this I wouldn’t.
SCORE: 1 out of 5.
Text to video with an uploaded image
This was really good and I can see a definite role in animating images for cutaways and better story telling.
SCORE 4 out of 5.
Sound
This was bad. Yes, there were slot machines but they were implausible. You’d need an alternative source for your audio.
SCORE: 0 out of 5.
Lip synching
It’s very easy to come up with something that at first glance looks the part. The ethics of it is another thing.
SCORE: 3.5 out of 5.
The site is free but at $8 (£6.27) a month you can take the Pika logo off, extend the video length and frame resolution and buy extra credits. The pro version is $58 (£45.46) a month.
Should you still be using your corporate X, formerly Twitter? It’s a question I’m often asked so I thought I’d write an analysis.
There are a great many reasons to not use the organisation’s channel. Since the takeoever of Twitter by Elon Musk it has opened back up to some unsavoury characters. A BBC investigation reported that it was now unsafe.
I loved early Twitter but I’ve not used the platform in earnest for 12-months. I grew sick of the algorithm pushing me extremist politics and anyway, the people who had made it a great place had moved on.
As this tweet says, it’s pretty unusable.
The state of Twitter. It’s becoming impossible to even post a local news story without dozens of weird replies about free speech from people in America (or possibly Russia..). It’s almost completely unusable for journalists at this point.
But should you still use it? It depends on your audience.
Your own personal account
There’s two questions to answer with this. Your own account and the corporate account. For your own account, hey, that’s down to you. If you find it a deserted hellscape then don’t use it.
It’s true that for comms people, the discuission has moved more to LinkedIn and Facebook groups.
This is more about the corporate account.
What X is good for
It’s very clear that journalists remain all over the platform. National reporters as well as local ones are still finding stories there and organisations are still connecting with them there.
Indeed, the UK Home Office in the days after the summer 2024 riots have been using their account as a ticker for prosections.
Like this one.
Our teams continue to work around the clock, along with the police, to charge people as quickly as possible and ensure justice is served, following recent public disorder. As of today, we have charged 159 people. See below for real-time updates today ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/kVkuAwwqpL
Indeed, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s video to lay down the law to those found breaking the law has been seen 3.5 million times in three days on the platform. The video went to other channels too.
Both of these channels were responsible for the flow of information from the street and neighbourhood before the events in Southport reached a wider regional and national audience.
But how about the health of the platform as a whole outside an emergency?
One thing I do when I’m conducting a social media review is to calculate the number of dormant accounts on what used to be Twitter. I use a subscriber tool called Fedica. Helpfully, it can give you a breakdown of followers on any account and analyse if their account is active. What is dormant? It means no posts in the past six months.
As a real world experiment, I decided to run the rule over the public sector in the Black Country where I live. Where’s the Black Country? It’s that bit of the West Midlands west of the M5. Dudley, Sandwell, Walsall and Wolverhampton self-identify as Black Country.
So firstly, I thought I’d run the council accounts through Fedica to analyse them.
Here’s what I found.
Black Country council X, formerly Twitter, accounts active followers v dormant followers
Dudley Council @dudleymbc active 26 per cent dormant 74 per cent.
Sandwell Council @sandwellcouncil 24.4 per cent active dormant 75.6 per cent.
Walsall Council @walsallcouncil active 15.7 per cent dormant 84.3 per cent.
Wolverhampton Council active 26.3 per cent dormant 23.7 per cent.
Source: Fedica.
First reaction? That’s a lot of dormant accounts.
Around 75 per cent of all four council’s X, formerly Twitter followers haven’t been active.
So, for @walsallcouncil, of the 35,000 followers this means just over 5,500 have been active in the last six months.
This makes me reflective as I set-up this account in 2009 when I was working for Walsall Council. I sent the first tweet and battled to convince people to take it seriously.
Scrolling through their timeline I can also see the number of people who have seen the tweet. Around 300 is common rising to around 750 for the more popular content.
But Walsall is not an outlier. The other Black Country councils in the region have a similar number.
But, is this just councils? How about the NHS?
Black Country NHS X, formerly Twitter, accounts active followers v dormant followers
Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust @DudleyGroupNHS active 33 per cent dormant 67 per cent.
Sandwell & West Birmingham NHS Trust active 34.9 per cent dormant 65.1 per cent.
Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust @RWT_NHS active 35.5 per cent dormant 64.4 per cent.
Walsall Healthcare NHS Trust active 30.7 per cent dormant 69.3 per cent.
Source: Fedica.
NHS accounts show around two thirds of accounts are dormant and are all showing similar numbers. That’s fewer than compared to local government.
Perhaps the recent pandemic is the reason for this as health news then came at a premium.
But how about blue light services such as police, ambulance and fire and rescue?
West Midland blue light services X, formerly Twitter, accounts active followers v dormant followers
West Midlands Fire @westmidsfire 22.2 per cent active 77.8 per cent dormant. West Midlands Ambulance Service @OfficialWMAS 25.3 per cent active 74.7 per cent dormant. West Midlands Police @WMPolice 22 per cent active 88 per cent dormant.
Source: Fedica.
The police take the prize. West Midlands Police had the highest dormant numbers with 88 per cent followed by West Midlands Fire and Rescue on 77.8 per cent and West Midlands Ambulance at 74.7 per cent.
Yet while the region’s police have the highest number of dormant accounts a recent tweet about the arrest of a man with what looked like a gun at a riot in Birmingham was seen more than 77,000 times.
#CHARGED | We've charged a man with possessing an offensive weapon during a gathering in Bordesley Green.
We detained a 46-year-old man on suspicion of having a weapon on Monday evening.
The first thing to say is that there are some hugely talented people who work in the public sector in the Black Country. I’ve worked with several.
Indeed, I’m sure those comms people are not relying on X, formerly Twitter, to get their message out and I’m pretty sure they’re alive to the issue of falling users on Musk’s platform.
The recent riots sheds light on what to use in an emergency. Big numbers can still be reached when information is at a premium.
There’s talk about Twitter alternatives such as Blue Sky, Mastodon and Threads. None of them have the reach of Twitter at its peak. Of those, Threads Meta’s Twitter alternative is the strongest horse to back but some distance away from being a full Twitter equivalent in the UK.
Users on Threads are moving upwards but UK users can still be measured in hundreds of thousands.
But for Elon Musk’s platform, it’s striking that the Labour Party’s successful General Election social media constituency strategy was Facebook groups, WhatsApp and Nextdoor. Why? They correctly identified that’s not where the constituents were. Journalists and other MPs, yes. Voters in that constituency? Not really.
People have moved away from what used to be Twitter but haven’t entirely abandoned it. LinkedIn and Facebook groups are there for discussion.
So what to do with it?
If you want to reach journalists and people in an emergency then X is still relevant.
On a routine day-to-day the numbers in these examples don’t support frequent use. To reach residents its WhatsApp, Facebook groups and Nextdoor. To reach journalists its maybe a mix of WhatsApp and X.
Right now in 2024, public sector X, formerly Twitter makes sense as a prime emergency channel rather than a prime daily platform.
This may mean a recalibration of how you use the account rather than abandoning it altogether.
