Dan Slee

In my early days as a communicator, media relations was the stand-out skill I needed.

I worked for a newsy council that had not long come out of special measures and fell at the intersection between warring newspaper groups. Three daily papers and three weekly papers fought it out with two radio stations and two TV channels. It was a busy time.

Media relations is still important.

But as news has moved from print to digital the key to media coverage has evolved from the ability to create 300-words of press release with a photocall to what content you can supply for Facebook.

Facebook remains the behemoth as we head to towards the third decade of the 21st century.

As I’ve launched a new workshop Vital Facebook Skills with Sarah Lay here are some things for you to know.

10 reasons why every communicator needs to take Facebook seriously

It’s a platform that has the numbers

In the UK, there are 41.8 million people who have used Facebook in the past four weeks. If we take the current UK population as 64.1 million  that means 65 per cent of the population is a regular Facebook user. (source: Ofcom)

It’s a platform that is growing

Facebook users are going up not down. The Cambridge Analytica scandal is something to be aware of and there has been a movement to quit Facebook. But this has had limited impact on the bigger numbers. In the UK, from 2017 to 2018 the number of UK Facebook users rose by 5.2 per cent from 39.7 million. (source: Ofcom here and here.)

It’s a place that’s local

Every man woman and child likes nine local groups and pages. That was the result on research I’d carried out. It has become the Parish pump. And the place new parents hang out for advice.

And the Polish community in your town. (source: original research here).

It’s the first port of call for community issues

A Facebook group mobilises support for an issue locally. In the old days it was a pen, paper and a clipboard to collect names. Now? It’s a Facebook group to turn clicktivism to rapid activism.

That’s something you need to be aware of and listening to.

It’s an effective place to target adverts

You can reach people you want to reach if you have budget. When you use Facebook you give it a pile of data. That means if you are after a married brass band enthusiast who lives within 20 km of your town hall you can target them and only them. Facebook accounts for 20 per cent of the global ad market, the FT says.

It’s a place where people don’t like to like public sector pages, TBQFH

In research I’ve carried out, just three per cent of the population like a public sector page. You can have good content. But you need other ways to go and reach people where they chose to hang out on Facebook.

That’s in local groups more often than not. (source: original research).

It’s a place that reaches older people

Ipsos research shows that Facebook reaches 7.8 million people in the UK aged over 55.

Often older people are on the platform to keep in touch with family.  (source: Statista).

It’s a place where the traditional media now is

As newspapers sell less print papers their digital reach has grown. Reach plcs’ Marc Reeves points to the Birmingham Mail’s 20,000 print copies and its online audience being 40 times larger through Birmingham Live’s 350,000 subscribers and its other Facebook footprint.

That huge.

It’s a place where video is watched without sound

Video is an important driver for traffic on your page or profile. But 85 per cebt of content is watched without sound. Why? Because people are out and about or at work or sharing a sofa with someone watching TV. (Source: digiday.)

It’s a channel that’s predicted to rise in the UK

Research suggests that Facebook is not going away any time soon. It predicts a rise in Facebook use in the UK to 42.27 million by 2022. (source: Statisa). That means its going to get more important and not less.

I’ve helped train more than 2,000 people from 300 organisations over the past four years. For more on VITAL FACEBOOK SKILLS workshops near you click here. Or give me a shout by email dan@danslee.co.uk.

Picture credits:

Cars Documerica / Flickr Graph Marco Verch / Flickr  licence Facebook magnifying glass Tim Reckman / Flickr.  Map stevep2008 / Flickr Target Tony Webster / Flickr.  Flowers and logo mkhmarketing / Flickr  mkhmarketing. Old couple Stannah Stairlifts / Flickr. Logo Ryan Adams / homedust.com. Silent film Mia Kunro / Flickr

There’s a minority of people who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

They’re the first to complain and often among the last to help.

They crop up in the comments section of the Daily Mail and you’ve seen them in the local paper and from time-to-time on your Facebook page, too.

Social media has given them a platform and their indignation helps keep media companies’ share price in the black.  

Nobody minds challenge, but the self-righteous eye-rolled trolling isn’t that at all. It’s a drip-drip of corrosive bile that can sometimes inhibit some people from posting. It can only end in a world that is much poorer.  

So, it was so refreshing to see a newspaper group shun the clickbait of faux outrage for something far better and by doing so ironically reach a wider audience.

The story is this. Police officers were photographed eating breakfast getting a briefing in a branch of McDonalds. A debate broke out on Facebook with some criticising the officers for their public break. So, credit EssexLive for shunning easy outrage with this headline:

We don’t care that Essex’s cops stopped for coffee and neither should you.

Their enlightened stance was welcomed by a senior officer responsible for them.

What builds on it is this piece of human comms for an Inspector who on his own Twitter gave public support and gave an explanation of what they were doing:  

Not for the first time, sharing the sweets to give social media access to frontline people can bring dividends.

• An every day occurance.
• Which became a residents’ picture
• Which became a Facebook post
• Which became a news story on the web
• Which became a tweet from a police officer shows the complexity of the media landscape in 2019.

But through it all a human voice still cuts through.

Okay, so this isn’t PR and comms exactly…

But a special case for the BBC Brexitcast podcast needs to be made on the theme of looking to communicate with a human voice.

What is Brexitcast?

The idea is simple. BBC journalists put together an occasional – and more recently daily – podcast to summarise what is happening with Brexit and give intelligent informal analysis.

What you get are BBC journalists you may see for 45-seconds on the BBC News at Ten given space to breathe and to kick around ideas. Free from the shackles, they’re also allowed to behave like human beings. So, their frustrations, fatigue and nail colour also form part of it.

If I could break it down by numbers, it is 10 per cent Newsnight, 25 per cent humour, 10 per cent running-on-empty tiredness, 40 per cent insight and 5 per cent speculation about the significance of the colour of Laura Keunssberg’s coat (baseless as it turns out).

MPs talking like humans

Fascinatingly, the informal approach also rubs off on occasional guests such as this MP who talks about his Brexit coping strategy:

As this snippet posted to Twitter shows, you get a disarming insight into the life of two MPs. One a Remainer and one a Leaver. They’re both affected by the stress of Brexit.

So much so, that one MP finds a quiet spot in Parliament to escape the stress by pulling his jacket over his head and maybe flick ‘v’s at passers-by.

The podcast itself gets published late at night and is my way to get up to speed on shifting developments.

Journalists talking like humans

As a former journo, I get that the most interesting stuff often doesn’t make the news story and Brexitcast gives some degree of flavour.

It captures something of the excitement of breaking news in a newsroom and the down-time speculation around stories that made where I worked such an exciting place to be.

News has changed

This could not have been done the last time the UK was debating its membership of what was then the EEC.

Technology has changed and so has people’s habits of consuming the news.

Things like Brexitcast remind me how antiquated the idea of solely gathering around the telly at an appointed time for news now is.

But what’s also fascinating is that downloads of the podcast on the itunes chart may give future historians an insight into how bothered people were about Brexit itself:

Pic: itunes chart, April 2019

At a time when MPs are being threatened in the streets and dodgy money is funding Facebook attack ads this is a wonderful reminder that at heart we are still British.

If you look hard enough, we still have a sense of humour, still have intelligence and still have tolerance. And the BBC are still finding ways to be as relevant in the 21st century as Robin Day’s bow tie was when I was a kid.

Note. I’ve updated to reflect that the podcast has been daily of late.

I’ve said it before but UK police can be flipping brilliant at delivering wry asides through social media.

The Bulwell, Rise Park and Highbury Vale Facebook page posted this image of a phone as a kind of lost and stolen item.

But reading on, it also seems plain that the phone could be returned but only if there are responses to the £100 of steak its owner took and ran off with and the suggestion of drug dealing.

Wry and witty it paints a picture that the police are human, have a sense of human but also take shop lifting – and drug dealing – seriously.

You can see the original post here.

Thanks to Maria Jones for spotting this update from one of Nottinghamshire Police’s pages.

I’ve blogged the CIPR’s annual state of the profession report and a really interesting spread of data.

Across the profession, there are issues around large numbers of white privately-educated communicators and not enough diversity.

I’d also add not enough young people to the debate prompted by the numbers.

You can read the CIPR data here and my blog here.

But one thing really does emerge from asking a set of additional deeply unscientific set of questions I asked of the Public Sector Comms Headspace Facebook group.

They in no way replace or undermine the CIPR data but one thing absolutely shines through for public sector communicators and that’s a lack of respect.

The strawpoll results

182 – Lack of respect for comms as a profession.

108 – Lack of resources

49 – Lack of planning and prioritisation 

39 – Most of them, TBF.

8 – Stress

And what to do about a lack of respect

For me, comms people often are their own worst enemy. One cog in a large organisation the easiest way is to go along with the request for a poster even when a poster isn’t what’s needed.

There are only so many times you can push back against someone with more years of service and a bigger salary and I get that. But I keep coming back to the idea that unless you do challenge and offer advice there’s really nothing between you and a glorified shorthand typist.

I’m a member of the CIPR. Why? Because broadly, they’re an organisation heading in the right direction.

If I was in-house I’d be looking at the work that LGComms, GCS and communicators in the NHS do too.

I’d be looking to train and learn as much as I could.

But at the end of the day, while there are organisations around, the need to be taken seriously as a communicator begins and ends with yourself. If you don’t take yourself seriously how can you expect others to?

I’d be interested to hear your view, too.

Picture credit: Documerica  / Flickr.

Have you seen the meme doing the rounds about journalism?

“Journalism it’s a tough job with insane pressure and pretty crappy pay. But on the other hand, everyone hates you.”

Thinking of public sector communicators, its a line I thought of when I read the CIPR State of the Profession report.

This is a remarkably fine document that maps where the wider profession is.

In the public sector, its a tough job being a communicator with insane pressure with okay pay and if you read the Daily Mail you’d think everyone hates you.

But what does CIPR’s report say?

Across the profession as a whole, two thirds are women and a third men with the median income £30,000 pa.

In the public sector, its closer with 49,660 men and 43,889 women and an average salary of £44,292 – which falls behind the industry average of £51,804.

That male – female split surprises me seeing as I do teams where men are in the minority.

But that’s just it. The stats don’t lie.

You can download the full report here.

The top line for public sector comms: #1 stressed

Almost one in four public sector comms people have been forced to take sick leave because of stress, anxiety or depression, the report says. That’s almost double the national average.

In addition, public sector comms is also the second most stressed sector behind consultancy and agency work.

But the report also says that 73 per cent of the public sector have a policy in place to deal with the issue which far outranks other sectors.

Pic: CIPR State of the Profession report 2019.

What strikes me talking to public sector communicators is that stress on its own is rarely mentioned. But the factors behind the stress are. A lack of resources. A lack of respect. Those two issues shine through.

The top line for public sector: #2 men still hold the top jobs

When I’m training I tend to see a sea of female faces. The LGComms Future Leaders intake are overwhelmingly female, for example. But the survey has a slight majority of men over women.

But the study says that across the profession, there is a £5,000 pay gap between men and lesser-paid women and the top jobs are more taken by men.

Are other across the board issues an issue for the public sector?

Across the profession as a whole a series of additional issues are raised.

• A growing trend to privately educated communicators with across the board more than a quarter coming from a fee-paying background.
• A lack of representation from minorities.

Are they issues in the public sector?

Hard to say.

On my travels working across the public sector, an issue with a battalion of Public Schoolboys trying to communicate with working class communities isn’t one I’ve come across.

However, I think the issue of a lack of ethnic minorities is an issue in the public sector.

Comms is an ageing profession

One thing that did come through from the survey, however, was just how few younger people there are in communications.

This can’t be healthy.

Just four per cent of comms and PR people are under 24 when more than 30 per cent of people are in the UK.  Tacked together with the fact that almost 60 per cent have been in the profession for more than nine years it makes me question if the profession has the life skills to communicate to younger people in such a rapidly changing landscape.

The skills needed at the start of older people’s careers are quite different in many ways.

The skills of 2019 are better evaluation, a need to be web-savvy and a knowledge of how people are using channels.

Pic: CIPR State of the Profession report 2019.

The public sector is the largest sector

What is fascinating to me is that the public sector is the largest sector outside of London everywhere apart from the East Midlands.

Pic: CIPR State of the Profession report 2019.

A video summary

Conclusion

Public sector communicators are the bedrock of the industry in the UK.

But this remains stressful and pressurised work.

Growing up my Dad was a town planner and he’d talk about the draft UDP over the dinner table. I thought this was normal but it turns out it wasn’t.

Growing up dad would be awake at 2am editing committee reports by writing in the margin with a biro. I thought this was normal but it turns out it wasn’t.

Overall, around a quarter of the working population work for the public sector.

There are some brilliantly talented people in that number who literally save lives.

But to be a communicator in the public sector brings a whole boat-load of headaches. No budget, no time, no staff and not much professional respect at time, either.

For almost 15 years I’ve been part of this tribe as a communicator in-house in the public sector and then self-employed working with them.

What are public sector communicators like?

Stoic, talented, long suffering and determined.

I thought I’d crowd-source a list of other opinions too via the Public Sector Comms Headspace Facebook group.

You know you work in the public sector when…

Everyone can do your job. – Kate Pratt.

You spot grammatical errors everywhere – Donna Veasey

You can’t post anything on social media without someone being upset – Mary Willis

You’re actually a magician in disguise – Debra Kerr

You do the best you can despite the red tape that is trying to strangle you – Lynnette Lee

You have no budget – Menna Rowlands

Someone asks you to promote their event and sends you a publisher file full of wordart – Nick Moore

The team really needs a toolkit to promote their roadmap…. there are no tools, there’s not a road – Maria Vidal Read

When your team has shrunk by 60% over the last nine years, you’re doing 2.7 jobs, you haven’t paid for training since 2011, but you’re still doing an effing great job every day. Josephine Graham

 It takes a month to get sign-off for a press release about a coffee morning – Scott Watson

You spend too much time getting the perfect photographic angle of the ladies toilets for an intranet post. Richard Birch

Every day you find people doing a bloody fantastic job, but they’re not telling anyone because they think it’s no big deal. – Lisa Potter

When the solution to everything is a poster – Jane Harris

Your private sector pals go to New York for work. You go to meetings across town & feel like you’ve had a proper day out – Penny Allison

When sometimes you do, in fact, make a small difference. And that is good enough. – Sara Hamilton

You ask for a one page summary and they give you seven – Sally-Ann Watts

There are three CIPR courses you want to attend. They offer member discount. Joining and getting the discount is cheaper than paying full price for the courses. So you join, book the courses and save the council £250. Finance then get in touch and say “we don’t pay for professional memberships, so you’ll need to repay us the membership fee out of your own pocket”.

Friends ask you to design their small business logo all the time. No mention of payment. – Kirsten Woods

You get all the calls that should go to IT – David Burrows

Your work phone is a blackberry – Katie Stephenson

You take great delight in track changing a non-comms colleagues ‘draft press release’ and sending it back to them – Royce Coates

You get an email saying “just a quick heads up that X is happening…” on the day it’s actually happening. – Chris Gomm

 When your only budget is a metaphorical pot of glitter and you’ve become a dab hand at rolling do do and winging it – Sacha Taylor 

When purdah starts and people think you suddenly have nothing else to do and have lots of capacity. – Julie Heath

People think your job is to whiz up a PowerPoint presentation or come up with a snazzy diagram – Alison Hollinshead Tobin 

You have a Mac and IT hates you – Mark Roberts

Telling the service’s bad news to politicians, becomes a comms thing. – Kim Inam

Your log in password is longer than your phone number and YouTube is blocked by IT so you can’t watch the videos you’ve created! – Paul Fearn

All of the above – but you still do the job and love it! – Paula Duxbury Lowe

Picture credit: Flickr / Documerica

When I first started to offer video skills training with the excellent Steven Davies for years ago good examples were hard to come by.

The data said it was getting more important but the examples were sometimes hard to track down.

Not so these days.

Rarely a day goes by without me saving something to take a closer look at.

Here are NINE more than impressed me.

Human stories shine through as a trend in this collection from men talking about suicide to a young cancer victim and sisters who serve in blue light services.

A video that runs through the life of an officer as a vlog

A New Zealand police officer talks through her day in a candid style.

Shot like a vlog the nine minute long video is longer than the usual YouTube clip but made an impact in the country.

In part, the clip made an impact because the officer was not just female but also quite attractive. The video as a whole mimics a vlogging style that is popular with young people.

A video that celebrates an achievement

Lobke Marsden is a nurse who helps children navigate cancer treatments. She’ll paint the mask they’ll have to wear so they’ll feel better about it. Getting through radiotherapy or chemotherapy is an achievement. Ringing a bell celebrates that achievement. Here she is helping a child mark that moment.

A video that gets across a complex point as light entertainment

It’s hard to explain to people how the budget for 1,200 services is spent by local government. So, why not present it as a Saturday night quiz programme?

This fantastic video from Swindon Borough Council has real people taking part in a short shiny floor quiz programme. You can see their Facebook post here.

A video that encourages women to be a police officer or a paramedic

People connect better to people like themselves so it makes sense as part of a recruiting drive to feature women.

The twist in this short clip is that twins have both joined the emergency services.

We see them chatting about the job and finishing each others’ sentences with cutaways of old pictures of themselves. You can see the Met Police Facebook video here.

A video that tells a human story of how a charity turned a life around

Samaritans answer the phone to people who are at their lowest ebb.

Darran was one of those people who was helped by the charity. A short sub-20-second clip on Instagram signposted people to a website with a longer story and a 1 minute 55 second YouTube clip here.

I love the fact that its a real story with a shorter clip on instagram compared to YouTube as these lengths work better.

“When I had been at my lowest, I had used the Samaritans and they were a massive help.” Darran turned to Samaritans when he was finding life tough. #RealPeopleRealStories (Link in bio)

A post shared by Samaritans (@samaritanscharity) on Mar 22, 2019 at 12:01pm PDT

A video that tells a human story of how horses help Alzheimers patients and their carers

The first three seconds of a social video are vital and the first three here are taken with someone telling a horse: ‘I love you very much’ make an impact.

This is a BBC Breakfast package that can be seen on the BBC Four Facebook page here.

We can absolutely learn from news social media through their use of something to grab attention in the first three seconds and then run sub-titles to tell the story with interview and cutaways.

A video that shows children telling what makes a social worker

Caring and hope giving are two of the qualities that make a good social worker.

Sefton Council enlist school children from their patch to run through the qualities such a worker needs. It’s bright, eye-catching and never stays still.

It has a fine bed of music, sub-titles, local voices and real people whose friends and family are likely to share it online.

Continue reading “SHORT GOLD: Another NINE videos that work effectively”

I’ve blogged this week about the need to look out for Facebook comments on your page.

The example given was from a media site getting bombarded with racist comments covering a hammer attack on mosques across their city. You can read it here.

But there is little black and white and a lot of shades of grey.

Here’s an example where the questions posed are far trickier.

Step 1: The appeal for a suspect

Hampshire Police posted an appeal for information about a suspect with a slightly unusual name that would remind you of baking and bakeries. I’ve left out the name as it has been taken down from the police Facebook page.

Step 2: Witty comments

Firstly, came the witty comments around the name.

“The family are kipling him hidden.”

“I crust the police are doing a good job…”

“Bakery puns have cheered up a crumby day.”

But, hey, that’s okay because it means the content is reaching more people, right?

But then this happens…

Step 3: The suspect’s Mum turns up

Mum turns up. Her requests not to make fun are met with… more jokes at the expense of the family name.  More than 60 of them on her one comment alone.

She goes onto say that there has been a death in the family but is met with derision.

It’s about this point that the post starts to raise questions.

Step 4: Things start to go a bit dark

It now appears that there has been a death in the family.

When Michael’s Mum points this out she is met with the line:

“Cheer up cupcake.”

Now, I don’t know about you but this feels as though its moved past ‘bantz’ and into a duty of care not just to the suspect, who is exactly that, a suspect, and onto the Mother of the suspect who is being exposed to hatred, ridicule and contempt facilitated by a police Facebook page.

Things are starting to get uncomfortable.

The need to act as a Facebook page admin

Legally, the admin of a Facebook page are not responsible for what someone posts until they are alerted to it and the expectation is that they take appropriate action.

But the question needs to be asked once this happens what the best course of action is.

This is really difficult. This exact case is unlikely to be repeated but the comments

What Facebook’s standards say

One way of seeing if you should act is to check Facebook’s own community standards. This is a yardstick of how Facebook expect its users to behave. They’ve been tightened-up in recent years. They’re clear on things like hate speech and nudity. But they’re less clear on sarcasm.

On the face of it, there are steps under Facebook’s community standards.

But under the narrow standards of Facebook’s community standards the Cakebread comments don’t appear to have breached anything.

Check your own Social Media Policy before acting

I’ve long been an advocate for having your own Social Media Standards that set out what you’ll do and what you’ll expect of people. New York City Council have one here. Bradford City Council have one here and South Lanarkshire Council have one here as an example.

Across all of those three examples, there are grounds to take down comments that are harassing and you also have the ability to switch off comments.

As with media companies, the aim of using Facebook is to communicate and do the right thing. Not to chase numbers at any cost.

At the most basic level, you need to respond to issues raised by the people who like your page who may do so through Facebook itself. But beyond that, you need to keep an eye on your page, too.

Your responsibility is to keep your corner of Facebook decent.

Note: I’ve anonymised all names from the original post.