Dan Slee

It can only be good news that the CIPR has published research on black Asian and minority ethnic experience.

Commissioned almost 12-months ago and delayed by COVID-19 the Race in PR research lands at a time when equalities prompted by the death of George Floyd is in a long overdue.

The findings are stark.

Diversity has stalled and is reversing. In 2019, just eight per cent of PR people are from a diverse background a figure that had shrunk by three per cent in four years.

Not enough is being done. None of the 19 interviewed felt the industry is taking sufficient action to increase diversity.

Poor backgrounds. The research also showed that many people from minorities come from poorer backgrounds which is in itself a barrier to perceived ability to make connections and progress.

Independent. A poor experience has pointed people from minorities to become independent practitioners rather than proress up the corporate ladder.

Lack of fairness. Just six per cent said that ethnicities were treated fairly in the industry.

Unconscious bias. People often resort to stereotypes when they judge people which penalises people from minority backrounds.

Subtle digs. The report talks of ‘microaggressions’ which individually can be explained away but over time build-up. The unchallenged subtle racism of a client, for example.

Now, I approached this thinking I was the wrong person to be blogging about this. I’m a bloke and I’m white. After reading it, I still think I’m the wrong person but for different reasons. I’m not in a position of authority. But I do get that for things to change the whole industry needs to be prepared to change and that includes you and me.

Britain isn’t equal

During the #blacklivesmatters protests I was struck by a tweet from a campaigner thankin companies for their supportive tweet and then asking politely for a photograph of their senior leadership team to see how diverse that was.

But there is a big battle.

Britain is a place that hasn’t recovered from the Norman conquests and yes, I know they only occupied England and Wales. Norman names are 800 per cent more common at Oxford than the general population. Seventy per cent of the land is owned by 0.3 percent of the population. This is not an equal place.

It’s also a country that despite being rich in history buries it. Today, the leap is from the Tudors to the rise of fascism. I’m an English and History graduate. My knowledge of colonial Britain and slavery comes from reading around the subject not what I was taught in the classroom or in seminars.

In June 2020, at the height of protests race has never been higher as a priority but what happens when the news agenda changes and attention moves away? And what about gender equality? And equality for those from poorer backgrounds? They’re all part of the broader mix.

Can this be a start?

The research behind ‘Race in PR’ is based on 17 interviews with PR agency, in-house and independent practitioners. There appears to be no public sector involvement. I’d be keen too to know how geographically spread the interviewees are. That’s not to devalue the research. It’s hugely timely and a good starting point. But if we’re comms people we should be trying to get the best data possible and if 80 per cent of people in the UK live outside London I’d like to know what the picture there is too. If anything, I’d bet the problem is even worse in rural areas than in urban more diverse places.

But that quest for more data shouldn’t be an excuse for people in PR taking action and there are many steps are set out in the report and on the CIPR site. As the report says, what to do is pretty clear and set out. People just need to start to do it.

You would have to be living under a stone not to realise that the Black Lives Matter protests were taking place.

Sparked by the death of George Floyd in police custody in the USA protests have swept the world leading to a murder charge and heightened tension.

I began to see these issues argued about on community Facebook groups between those for the protests and those against. Being someone fascinated with how groups work this it got me interested.

Looking at it, there’s been a four act play of narrative and counter-narrative in UK Facebook groups.

Act One: Death of a man in police custody

Pretty straight forward. A tragedy happens and reactions start.

Act Two: Protest sweeps the world and protests take place in the UK

They are global and tap into deep feelings. They even reach Leamington Spa.

Act Three: Counter protest: But what about Lee Rigby?

The far-right seek to undermine the protest against the death through whataboutism. This is the strategy of pointing to another thing instead. Memes supporting this pointing to the murder of Lee Rigby do this.

One was a bloody image of Rigby’s killer knife in hand minutes after the murder.

This one was more presentable:

Act Four: It gets interesting with the sharable content from Lee Rigby’s family

Lee Rigby’s Mum steps in and posts an image with text to the Lee Rigby Foundation Facebook page. She criticises the use of her son’s name and related images to attack the protests.

The Rigby family statement on Facebook can be seen here:

For me, this is the most interesting part.

By and large, the Rigby family have kept a distance from too many public statements about the murder of their son by IS-sympathising Muslim extreemists. Who can blame them? To lose a son in such a barbaric way must be crushing. So, the intervention was measured and definitive.

What it did do was provide ammunition to people angry at the attack on the Black Lives Matter protest. The far right meme’s thrust was clear: you can’t be a decent person if you protest this thing in America because you didn’t protest Lee Rigby’s death. This regained that ground.

But how did it play out on Facebook groups?

I got out my calculator and randomly trawled through 25 of the West Midlands Facebook groups I’m a member of. That included Warwickshire, Dudley, Herefordshire, Birtmingham and Stoke-on-Trent.

I was starting to see the to and fro of debate in groups and it was meme and counter meme that kept recurring.

Almost half the Facebook groups mapped were debating the issue of Black Lives Matter protests.

A third had a version of the right-wing Lee Rigby meme.

Less than a fifth had the Lee Rigby family counter-meme.

But, it was memes that captured the debate.

Table: Facebook groups in the West Midlands debating Black Lives Matter

So, what does this mean for public sector communicators?

My own take on this is simple. There’s a need to create shareable content with a message to fight fire with fire.

What was striking in the debates online was that it was all taking place in the group itself. None of the debates were pointing people towards other resources or websites. This is entirely typical of Facebook. Users have been encouraged by the platform to stay on the site and not to navigate away.

There are going to be times when you need to create content to win back the narrative.

But hang on, accessibility

And now the spanner in the works.

Debating this in the Public Sector Headspace Facebook group several people quite rightly pointed out the broad need to create accessible content. In other words, text on an image isn’t cool if it doesn’t have text in the body that can be read by a screen reader.

But hang on, the future of democracy

Fake news is misinformation and disinformation that is designed to influence political decisions. It has been identified as a threat to the fabric of democracy by a Government enquiry

So, doesn’t that matter?

And this is where the $64,000 question comes in.

At what point does it become more important to tackle fake news than to serve accessible information?

And this, I think is a question that communicators must answer.

Sometimes you can do both. An image with text and an accompanying passage of text may be a compromise.

But broadly, I don’t think its a sliding scale of blanket ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

When for me its perfectly fine to share inaccessible information

In the aftermath of the Manchester Arena attack, Greater Manchester Police were swift in owning the story online. They posted to Twitter updates and presented them as images with text and a logo.

Like this one re-purposed by a local news account:

I know that some people will object to this and that’s fine. I respect that perspective but given the circumstances, I’m fine with this. Yes, this could be more accessible but against a backdrop of a terror attack I’d argue the importance of putting out timely information was the most pressing thing.

In video skills training, adding subtitles makes sense. But I get that in an emergency a piece to camera without delay is sometimes needed.

New legislation gives you a window

The Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications Act) 2018 is coming into force on September 23 2020. This snappy law asks public sector to make accessible content on their website and any app they’ve commissioned and built themselves. But it makes a series of exemptions and one mentioned are third party sites. There’s an argument that social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter are third party sites. I’d like to hear the views of people who work in this area.

But, the $64,000 dollar question

It all comes back to this.

You need to be able to create shareable content and you need to work out when winning the argument is the most important thing. This is an entirely personal decision.

EDIT: I’ve been asked by email why I’ve used the phrase in this blog ‘debate’ when there is no debate, of course black lives matter. That’s an idea I’m sympathetic to. I used the word ‘debate’ recognising that there are people who don’t agree with the Black Lives Matter campaign which the survey of 25 Facebook groups confirms. However, I’ve upgraded that to argue as this reflects the tone of clashes I’ve seen. In a blog that looks at two rival opinions and the use of memes to play them out its important to recognise the fact there are two opposing sides. I’ve also been asked why I’ve cut straight from the death to stats. In a nutshell, after 12 years as a journalist I have a voice in my ear that tells me that nobody really cares what I think. But I have edited to point out the murder charge and heightened tensions. My own view is that I hope justice is served in this profound tragedy.

You know you’re getting old when two moments from your life flash before you in a documentary film.

I stumbled on artist Jeremy Dellar’s ‘Everybody in the Place’ on YouTube this week. 

In it, he talks to VI form students about Acid House and the impact it had on Britain.

It marked a moment when people seized the means of production. In other words, people bought cheap samplers, made the music and organised the parties where it would the music would be danced to. Karl Marx would have understood this. 

It was the moment when the 21st century started. 

In 1990, Britain was a different country

People made-up their own networks using the technology that was in their hands.

Dellar reckons it marked the moment Britain changed from an industrial economy to a service economy. Quite literally, people were dancing in the warehouses where their ancestors operated lathes.    

I was involved in all this from 1990 to 1992 when dance had moved from warehouses and into nightclubs. The two moments? Dancing at Shelley’s in Stoke-on-Trent and one bizarre night when the Hit Man and Her was filmed at The Eclipse in Coventry.

Thinking about it, lessons I learned then endure.

You don’t need permission.

You just need the means of production.

Anyone can build a network.

It always goes a bit rubbish when money is involved.

Let there be house

“In the beginning there was Jack and Jack had a groove and from this groove came the groove of all grooves and Jack declared: ‘Let there be house.’ And house music was born. I am the creator and this is my house and in my house there is only house music but I am not so selfish because once you enter my house then it becomes OUR house.”

– Jack Roberts, ‘My House (In the beginning there was Jack)‘ , 1988. 

To be a decent communications person you need to understand all this and how networks work.

This documentary is a good place to start: 

Picture credit: Flickr / Documerica

In a fast-moving arena fresh data is essential to keep you up to speed.

Just because you always have doesn’t mean you always should.

So, if you’re involved with public sector comms the latest rolling data from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism should be useful.

Four things to take away:

People are trusting the Government as a source of information less.

People are trusting news media less.

People still trust the NHS.

People don’t trust politicians.

The breakdown of the figures from Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism can be found here but one of the key tables is here:

It goes without saying that the overwhelming number of public sector comms people must be apolitical. The figures are not presented without political opinion and to help people give the best advice. Particularly when people in England may have to present communications around a local lockdown.

So what does this all mean?

It points once again to creating local content and to have doctors and scientists front it.

One thing I admire the Government Communications Service for is to act on the data.

There’s the data.

Act on it.

Picture credit: Flickr / Documerica

I’ve been meaning to write this for literally years but a chat in the Public Sector Comms Headspace group prompted me to finally write it. You may be getting asked to do things on Facebook that you don’t think will work. Rather than saying a flat ‘no’ here’s the beginnings of a reply for you.

Dear [INSERT NAME]

You’ve asked me to post [INSERT TASK] to the corporate Facebook page.

This can be done. My clear professional advice to you and the organisation is that this would be damaging. Let me explain and suggest the most effective course of action.

Firstly, we need to know some basic principles about Facebook.

We also need to know that Facebook strongly discourages people from navigating away from Facebook. We need to put all the information on Facebook in an engaging way.

We need to know that Facebook is Facebook. We need to avoid the siren-call of merely replicating what we’ve done elsewhere.

We must understand that Facebook is a social media platform governed by an algorithm that seeks to shape people’s experience. This algorithm is a closely-guarded secret and changes often. But there are three ways we can understand it. They are: what Facebook says, what other user do and say and what we can discover ourselves.

What Facebook says is easy. Every year they stage a conference called F8 where they talk about the broad direction of travel. From this we know that people see fewer updates from pages they like. Instead, they will see more from friends and family. So, as an organisation with a page we have to be very protective of what we post.

From this we know that posts we make that don’t engage with people are marked down by the algorithm, shown to fewer people and do us no favours for future posts.

From this we also know that repeated content is marked down as being less interesting. Video or an image used over and over won’t engage and if it won’t engage it’ll get shown to fewer people.

What others say and do is also easy. Companies that specialise in social media will post insight on how they have used Facebook as a way of demonstrating their superior skills to others. While we should not blindly accept every blog post there is a collective bank of knowledge that we do well to draw from.

From this we know research on the most engaging types of content. So, video is the most engaging followed by an image followed by a link and lastly followed by text.

What we know is also easy. Facebook gives us lots of data around how our post performed, how many saw it, how many people engaged with it and where they were from. Our lived experience is really valuable.

From this we know exactly who our Facebook audience is, what sex they are, what town they live in and what kind of content they like. Think of it as as room of those people. If you go in and deliver the wrong speech to the wrong audience you’ll fail.

We know that content is king. If content is unique, engaging and interesting then it has a chance of flying high. If it isn’t it won’t.

From this we know that a regional daily newspaper can post 20 times a day and be rewarded with good engagement providing it has enough material that people are interested in. We know that if we repeat post frequency ourselves without the content we will fail. It is a quality not a numbers game.

So, in summary, we can [INSERT TASK] but I strongly recommend away from this course of action. However, if we together create something that’s relevant to the audience, unique and interesting on a channel that’s appropriate then we have a chance.

Yours,

[INSERT YOUR NAME]