For the last few years too stuffed with mince pies I’ve blogged some predictions on local government comms. It’s all about jet packs and Robot butlers.
Here’s a look at last year and what I got right and wrong.
What did I get right?
Comms teams overall have got smaller although a minority have grown. A survey comms2point0 ran for LGComms showed 57 per cent working in teams that have shrunk since 2008. Anecdotally, there have been fewer heads of comms as the duties are shared for cost saving. Better evaluation remains to be needed. Local government comms has become become the poor relation of public sector PR. It looks on with envy at others’ budgets. Digital comms has continued to go mainstream but there is lipservice to it. Many teams have been outsripped by the pace of change.
Anecdotally, poor internal comms remains.
What did I get wrong?
Digital comms has not stepped-up a gear from simply tweeting press releases to tackling the really thorny problems. That’s a source of real worry. Elsewhere, social media remains a frontline task but the pace of change here has slowed. There was no major emergency where social media shone.
Too early to say?
Comms teams still need content creators although this hasn’t happened. There will be more shared comms teams. People will look at how this can work across a geographical area and also between authorities.
So here are 11 more for 2015
Some councils will no longer have a meaningful comms function. Cut to the bone, they will do little more than answer the phone and answer media queries.
Social media will stall. After early innovation, the time and space to experiment as part of the day job has gone. The door has closed. Twitter and Facebook will be it.
New platforms continue to go untouched. As new platforms grow and develop like SnapChat, Instagram and WhatsApp there will be no capacity to experiment with them leading to a section of the population disenfranchised.
Evaluation will become a case of do or die. With budgets being cut, the comms team needs to justify what it does before it is cut. Unless they can look finance in the eye and demonstrate why they should live they will go.
People who bang the table and say ‘no’ will stand a chance. Those who don’t won’t. There has never been a more important time to say ‘no’to meaningless fire-and-forget blunderbus comms. But this argument needs to be one had strategically as budgets tighten. Comms teams can deliver real change at a time of problems. But they need to fight their corner.
There will be fewer press releases written for fewer newspapers. An easy one. At some point someone will notice and ask what the point of comms teams are. The window where people can get their story straight is about to end.
It will get more fractured. Content tailored for those keen on one country park or a care home needs to be created and be more sharable. This is where comms teams can help and enable service areas.
Video gets more important. But the skills need to be learned.
Social media accounts need to be reviewed and closed. That arts centre that played their face for a Twitter account and then updated it three months ago? It needs to be taken down. There is too much bad digital in local government.
Customer services, social media and comms need to become best friends. At present, this is happening sporadically. This needs to be hapening everywhere… and six months ago.
Facebook pages will become pointless unless supported by a budget for ads. This is the reality which many are struggling to catch-up with.
It’s an obscenity that even as libraries close and care is cut that there is a £67.85 million back-door subsidy paid by local government to newspapers.
A what? And how much?
This is the true cost of councils being forced by law to pay over-the-odds for public notices tucked away in the back of printed newspapers being read by fewer and fewer people.
It is a throwback, a misguided sweetener to the newspaper industry and comes from the days when the local paper was the only show in town.
What are public notices? They’re announcements of where double yellow lines are to be painted, who has applied for a taxi licence and an application from a pub licensee for a late night opening licence. It is the bread and butter of a community.
Should they be communicated and publicised? Absolutely.
Can it be done without swingeing annual charges? Yes.
Being forced over a barrel to pay to communicate through local newspapers is the last throwback to a world before the internet.
It is wrong.
It flies in the face of government policy.
It is print-by-default in a digital-by-default world.
It must stop.
This is why and here is how we can do it.
The Government department in charge of local government has asked for ‘councils, newspapers and others’ to take a new look at how public notices are distributed. Any solution is dead in the water unless councils are stopped being made to pay for expensive print notices – or even pay for digital ones.
Really? Councils have to communicate like this?
Yes. Bonkers, isn’t it? There is a raft of legislation that mean that councils must take out newspaper ads before they take certain decisions. The aim is to publicise and encourage people to come forward with comment and opinion. Getting people involved is absolutely a good thing. The more people are informed and take part in the decision making process the better.
Her Majesty’s Government’s Ambassador to Lebanon Tom Fletcher has written eloquently about this being the digital century. I’d agree with that. In the digital century people find out about what is happening through networks and the web. Not through small ads. Ask yourself this question: when was the last time you bought a local newspaper? When was the last public notice you read? And can you remember what it was about?
What is the state of local government?
In short, perilous. Every penny counts and in Town Halls up and down the land small sums of money and budget decisions are being argued about. The Institute for Fiscal Studies predicts 1.1 million job losses by 2019 across the public sector. Birmingham City Council Leader Albert Bore has talked of the ‘end of local government as we know it.’ Government funding cuts to local government are touching 40 per cent and spending power is falling by 25 per cent according to a critical National Audit Office report which observes that the Department for Communities and Local Government doesn’t understand the impact of cuts.
In other words, cuts are being made and every penny counts. Which is why being forced to spend on newspaper ads is wrong.
But how much do the public notices cost?
Think tank Local Government Information Unit – LGiU – calculated that in 2012 public notices in newspapers were costing £67.85 million. Public Notices: The Case for Radical Reform: Part One’ shows that this is on average £181,000 per authority. In some cases, the report says, public notices incurred a rate three times as expensive as normal display ads and reaching over £20 per column centimetre in some publications.
“This is a lot of money, especially when councils are trying desperately to !nd savings. It is also an outdated system that has been left behind by technological advances. The current system provides no feedback to councils and ignores the fact that the audience is moving away from printed newspapers, to a varied digital media landscape.
“LGiU believes change is necessary in the following areas: councils should be free to decide where is best to place public notices, more work needs to be done to de-jargon and standardise the content of public notices, councils who do publish notices online should o”er users an email subscription service, allowing users to opt-in to receive public notices, hyperlocal, neighbourhood websites, as well as traditional local media news sites, should be encouraged to carry feeds of council notices the government should look into the possibility of supporting the development of a central online portal for publishing public notices.
Public Notices: The Case for Radical Reform: Part One. LGiU.
But who reads newspapers these days?
Some people do. Ofcom in their annual Communications Market Report says that adults in the UK spend 15 minutes a day reading newspapers or looking at newspaper sites. For some people, they keep them informed. But these figures are dropping.
In comparison, adults spend 36 minutes on websites or apps and 26 minutes on social media. The breakdown is here.
In Walsall, where I worked in local government communications, the local paper the Express & Star in 2013 sold around 10,000 copies of the Walsall edition in a borough of more than 269,323 people. The newspaper industry says that between two and five people read each paid-for copy. For the sake of argument, if that was three people per copy that means 11 per cent of Walsall get to see the public notice. That’s if everyone reads the paper from cover-to-cover. That’s not a reason for paid-for public notices in print.
The figures are replicated across the country according to database JICREG with 67,759 copies of the Birmingham Mail on a Friday in a city of 2,440,986. In Greater Manchester, this is 126,293 on their busiest day for the Manchester Evening News in a population of 2,685,400. In Glasgow, the Evening Times reaches 33,397 in a population 2,850,000. The online readership of these three newspapers will be far higher but figures are difficult to obtain. None of these newspapers show public notices when you enter the search term in their websites.
I’ve heard the anachronistic argument that somehow only newspapers can be trusted to publish public notice content. Somehow the act of handing over 200 words and paying through the nose for it to appear in the back of newspapers that few people in a borough read afford some undefined magic propertiies. This is, of course, balderdash.
The days when newspapers are the only means of communicating have ended. They are one of a number of channels. The requirement to take out public notice ads with them should end. Sometimes, they’ll be the best way of communicating. But that decision should be de-centralised down to the local authority.
Four ways public notices breach Government advice
It wouldn’t be so bad if the current millstone doesn’t go against Government advice. But it does.
“In just over 2 decades the internet has become a huge part of our everyday lives. Today 82 per cent of adults in the UK are online. Completing transactions online has become second nature, with more and more of us going online for shopping, banking, information and entertainment. Why? Because online services tend to be quicker, more convenient and cheaper to use.
“But until now government services have stood out by their failure to keep up with the digital age. While many sectors now deliver their services online as a matter of course, our use of digital public services lags far behind that of the private sector.
“Government has got to do better. This Digital Efficiency Report suggests that transactions online can already be 20 times cheaper than by phone, 30 times cheaper than postal and as much as 50 times cheaper than face-to-face .
“By going digital by default, the government could save between £1.7 and £1.8 billion each year. But this isn’t just about saving money – the public increasingly expects to access services quickly and conveniently, at times and in ways that suit them. We will not leave anyone behind but we will use digital technology to drive better services and lower costs.”
Frances Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office
This is all excellent stuff. It articulates exactly why local government should be digital by default and not be held back by the anachronism of print public notices.
And bloggers too…?
Bloggers are able to attend public meetings and video, blog and post realtime updates. This is a good thing and opens up the whole often very dull decision making process to public scrutiny. This is an excellent step from DCLG. They hailed it as: ‘a boost for local democracy and the independent free press, councils in England were brought into the 21st century.’
That freedom should be opened up for bloggers too. How can they carry data from public notices alongside the mainstream Press?
So what would all this look like?
Information can be communicated effectively using the web. It could be added to a council page. An RSS feed or a widget could allow others – newspapers, broadcasters or bloggers – provided free-of-charge to carry the feed on their own pages.
Of course, if there was a pressing business case for print advertising this could happen too. But that’s the thing. Rather than being a print-by-default position it should be one of several channels.
This already happens in two places. Firstly, the TellmeScotland website aggregates and distributes public notice alerts through text and email.
Secondly, in ice and snow a more geurilla approach sees gritting updates aggregated and distributed in the West Midlands. On Twiitter, the hashtag #wmgrit is used by authorities in the region. A coveritLive widget here can be re-used on websites.
So what next?
There are bright people in local government who can produce the answer. Some of them are in the localgovdigital group although relying on a handful of volunteers in the sector is not the answer.
Maybe this is for larger bodies to support with time and resources. Communications teams should take the lead and work with web to come up with solutions. Maybe, that’s SOCITM, LGComms, the LGA and others coming together with local government officers.
Whatever the future. in 2015, the current situation which sees an enforced subsidy through paid-for ads to wealthy newspaper groups should not form part of the answer.
I’ve been thinking a bit about what makes my heart sing. Not what you are passionate about. Anyone can be ‘passionate’. It’s a word that is rapidly losing its meaning.
What I mean is what makes your heart truly sing.
What prompted this was reading ‘Talk Like TED’ by Carmine Gallo which looked at what makes the best TED talks work. TED, if you don’t know, stands for Technology, Education, Design and has snowballed from an exclusive conference for the super rich to a global franchise of affiliated events.
They are short talks. 18 minutes is the most you’ll get. They’ll have a bit of powerpoint. But the slides help the speaker tell a story rather than provide a script.
Last April I left local government to work on comms2point0 full-time. It’s taken me to meet some fascinating people doing great work across Britain.
A few weeks back myself and my comms2point0 colleague Darren Caveney travelled to Jordan at the invitation of the Foreign Office to facilitate a two-day comms event for Middle East and North Africa comms staff. We also staged a half day unconference. There was never any doubt in my mind that the unconference aspect would work. It did. The people in the room rose to the task.
I began at the start of the event by asking the question . There were some puzzled looks at first. Then some great answers.
But what makes my heart sing?
Over the years many things. It used to be watching Stoke City and when I was a journalist writing a frontpage story. My children do. But I’m their Dad, so I’m biased.
What makes my heart sing now is working out the best ways to tell a story and communicate with people. The web has taken everything and thrown it up into the air. Who wouldn’t want to try and explore how those pieces fit?
My heart sings when I see people understanding how to communicate in an area I don’t know about.
Even though I love Twitter, I don’t care for people who think Twitter is the answer to everything. It’s not. If some print works, then go for it. That’s fine. There’s no point being a channel fascist.
Here’s a comment made at the Middle East event by a locally engaged comms professional who does brilliant work for the FCO with the Arab regional media.
“In Libya, people have Kalashnikovs and want to kill each other. There are four tribes. Just because an infographic works in the USA it doesn’t mean it works in Libya.”
You need local knowledge. You need the passion to understand the media landscape wherever you are whether that’s Derbyshire or Dubai.
Hats off to Steven Hardy and Craig Morley from the FCO for staging the event and to the 70-odd attendees who made my heart sing.
Fueled by a bottle of red wine a frustrated journalist and blogger wrote a bold post in 2006 called ‘Die! Press Release! Die! Die! Die!’ that took an axe to one of the standard tools in the PR toolbox.
Now taught in colleges the Tom Foremski post was a battle charge against the Linus blanket of the press release and its 400 words of journalese, approved quotes and notes to editors.
In a digitally-connected world the answer is, of course, to produce sharable content.
When I came across the post two or three years ago it articulated perfectly my own burning frustration at being asked to prioritise servicing newspapers whose sales were melting in the bright sunlight of the digital morning.
In 2014, Robert Phillips has picked up Foremski’s axe and is turning it not just against press releases but against the entire PR industry. It is time, he says ‘to call bullshit on what had become the bullshit industry.’ But who is he? A hater? No, he’s the former UK chief executive of global PR giants Edelman whose CV includes the Wonderbra ‘Hello Boys!’ campaign and the shaping of the 02 brand. He co-founded Jericho Chambers in London. In short, he has been a pillar of the PR establishment and that he is questioning the future is a cause of interest. He has blogged for comms2point0 before.
Robert hasn’t dashed off a late night blog post. Instead he has written a polemic called ‘Trust Me, PR is Dead.’ This book promises to be more powerful and far reaching than Foremski’s post. It challenges not just a tactic but an entire industry. If anything, it’s ‘Die PR! Die! Die! Die!’
So, what’s dead?
I was in London this week for a discussion organised by Robert at the Cass Business School entitled ‘If Everything is Dead, What Comes Next?’
What’s dead?
Deference. Hierarchy. Spin. The illusion of control. The idea you can manage the message.
What killed it? A perfect storm of MPs expenses, the banking crisis, the recession and the end to final salary pensions. And the 80s trend to individualism. But most of all the subtle re-organising that the internet has done to connect people in networks. Citizen activism. 38 Degrees. The democracy of the social web.
Don’t get it? Need evidence? You may be looking in the wrong places. Video blogger Stampy Longhead makes videos of himself playing the Minecraft video game and gets five million viewers effortlessly. The BBC look enviously on but they have been left behind.
In the discussion, clear points emerge. People want to be engaged and not led. It’s about what we do that counts. Not what we say. PR is struggling with all that.
What is threatening PR?
A resistance to change. In five key areas, Robert Phillips says. The industry is not across data and insight that can offer greater chances of measurable success. Outputs are often still measured over outcomes. Whizzy numbers are put forward when the answer should be what have people done as a result of what you’ve done? The world is about networks and not heirarchies and PR doesn’t get that. Creative ideas are too small to scale and make a difference and there is a lack of talent, he argues.
Phillips writes:
“There remains a perverse determination within PR to defend top-down behaviour in a flatter world. PR currently speaks to hierarchies in a world of networks. It is therefore starting in the wrong place both for its own domain and the wider universe of citizens, companies and brands. PR can no longer dictate on its own terms.
“It is not about loudhailer broadcasting or ‘managing the message’ anymore. Shrill press releases are irrelevant in a world that sees through obfuscation and deceit. Building advocacy and activism within networks is the way forward. The voices of regular people need to be heard.”
So, what comes next?
It’s easy to point to the changing landscape and declare things dead. It’s a lot harder to point to what comes next.
Phillips reckons the answer may be somewhere around the idea of something that you can call ‘public leadership.’ The chief exec as activist, prepared to engage with people, prepared to sometimes say they are wrong and to listen more to people.
Radical honesty, he says, is needed when the landscape is an expectation and demand for transparency.
For me and my public sector background, that’s being honest and straight about the cuts. And to call cuts ‘cuts.’ Not efficiencies. Not savings. Cuts. That makes the most important communications in the public sector about the budget and how money is spent.
One of the panelists in the discussion, the Labour MP David Lammy, talked about the broad picture of change and dust not settling just yet and perspective being hard. He also talked about there being a lack of courage. He’s right.
Much of what Phillips talks about sounds idealistic. Listen to the people. Crowd source. Be citizen activists.
“That’s fine,” one Chinese audience member challlenged. “But I grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution and all this sounds very familar.”
Maybe so. But there is a radical discussion to be had about the changing role of so many things. PR included.
For me, if PR was to give PR advice to PR it would be to drop the tag: ‘PR.’ It’s toxic. It’s too linked to the age of spin and Max Clifford.
It will be fascinating to read Robert’s book when it is published in 2015.
It was around 2010 and as depressing conversations with a reporter go this one took quite some beating.
I was in local government communications and we had started to post gritting updates in real time on Twitter. We were talking with our residents directly without going through the Priesthood of journalists.
“The thing is,” the reporter said, “When you post your updates to Twitter, newsdesk want you to give us a call as well, so we know.”
I declined. I pointed out that they needed to be on Twitter themselves. I shook my head in despair.
Despair
I started in newspapers in the early 1990s and spent 12 years as a journalist. I still love them despite themselves and despite a further eight years in a local government communications team.
There was a time when I despaired of local newspapers utterly. Declining newsrooms, re-locating to ‘hubs’ far away and shedding staff still make me shake my head.
But just recently, I’ve had cause to think that maybe the penny is dropping and that newspapers really can use the social web and create journalism that will be relevant to the channels of the future.
Telling a story with the web
Making brilliant use of the web are the Evening Mail in Birmingham. They are telling the story of the Birmingham pub bombings which killed 21 people 40 years ago today. They are doing so with imagination and passion. The incident remains an unhealed wound in the city. Nobody has been brought to justice for it. Six people were imprisoned wrongly.
They are using thunderclap to gather support for the case to be re-opened. You sign-up using a social channel and agree to share a message.
For audio, they recreated the IRA telephone call to the Evening Mail offices which came minutes before the explosion.
For images, they created a gallery of news images from the time from their archive.
On Twitter, they used the hashtag #justiceforthe21 and #BirminghamPubBombings to promote the call to bring people to justice.
On the web, the posted the news story in which they name the man, now dead, they allege is responsible for the attack.
On Facebook, they shared content and drew scores of responses.
This is what future journalism looks like. Story telling on a range of platforms. It’s sharable and commentable and has a purpose. But above all it is human. I just can’t tell you how much I like this.
They still make me shake my head do newspapers. The public subsidy they get through the government insisting local government pay them for print small ads for public notices at a time of 85 per cent internet connectivity is plain wrong.
But the Evening Mail have shown peerlessly how to tell powerful stories on the web. This really does tower over anything else I’ve seen in the 21 years I’ve been involved with local journalism. Sincere congratulations to them. Buy shoe polish and make sure your suits are pressed. You’ll need them for the awards.
Brilliant work and the lessons to take
This is brilliant work. Genuinely brilliant. This is using the social web to tell a very human story. It’s powerful. It’s moving. But it has a sense of purpose. The purpose is to mobilise public support for a specific aim. It is is to press for justice.
Yet there are lessons here for the public sector where I now work. Just recently the #housingday initiative saw a 24-hour campaign which saw housing people talk about the jobs they do and the people they serve. Very soon #ourday will do a similar task for local government. I’m an advocate for them. They tell hundreds of stories that tell a bigger story. They empower people. They connect people too.
But wouldn’t it be something if that wall of noise was made easier to follow with a live blog? And wouldn’t it be something if there was one single call to action, whatever that was? What is the biggest issue facing housing? Or local government?
What would that campaign be?
Wouldn’t it be something if that energy was pointed at something?
When I left local government six months ago I said that this was to do more in local government and the public sector.
Every week being full-time on comms2point0 has been quite literally an adventure. One of the adventures was to write social media guidance
for part of the public sector that is struggling with it. Health and Wellbeing Boards are where the NHS, charities and councils come together to make billions of pounds of spending decisions.
If you think that guidance for this arcane corner of the public sector
has nothing for you, I’d ask you to swing by and take a look. I think
you’ll find some principles that can help you out whereever you are.
Climbing a challenge one step at a time
So, how do you persuade organisations and people that don’t use social
media to start using it?
There was a long list of things that health and wellbeing boards should be doing. Live tweeting meetings, posting slides used at meetings to slide sharing website slideshare and using social media to listen are all there.
But nobody wants to look at Mount Everest on their first day in walking boots.
So, we made it easy. We made slow steps possible. We created five steps – or five stars – that made progress not only possible but measurable.
We made the first star deliberately easy. All you had to do was post the date and time of your meeting on a social profile. Simple. Congratulations. You’ve got a first star. As any walker will tell you
once you conquer your first hillock your eyes turn more readily to something a little bigger.
That, we think, is the powerful and encouraging thing that can make these guidelines work.
We crowdsourced
What I’m most proud of is that we didn’t just write this in a vacuum.
We asked the online community and the offline community too. My role
as author was less a writer and more a facilitator. What should these
guidelines look like? Gemma Finnegan at the weekly #nhssm chat which discusses social media in the NHS steered two discussions that had a profound effect. I don’t have my name on this document. I have
comms2point0′s logo. But we have thanked everyone who conrtibuted to
those discussions and the survey which shaped it. I also spent a lot
of time chatting to people. If you want to look at an authority doing
a trailblazing job look at Louisa Willoughby at Sheffield City Council
and Cllr Simon Allen at Bath and North East Somerset. And some of the work that @claireOT has done in sketching out what things could look like.
Thanks also to Kristian Hibberd who has now left the LGA for pastures new and to Laurence Meehan and Caroline Tapster who remains.
We used data
We surveyed people and we used those results to shape the discussion.
* 53 per cent thought their council uses social media badly for health
and wellbeing boards. * 81 per cent are in favour of live streaming. * 83 per cent said that space should be given to the public to ask questions at meetings.
We had five basic principles
From my time in local government, I’ve been in favour of a framework of
basic principles rather than a dogmatic policeman of highly prescriptive. Nobody wants the guidance that says you must use MySpace. So we came up with this:
Be engaging: interact wherever possible with users and reflect the
debate.
• Be timely: post information at a time that is most convenient or
relevant to the audience.
• Be jargon-free: use language that works on the platform of choice
without jargon and language that people outside the health and
wellbeing board would struggle to understand.
• Be connected: look to share content from partners and from across
the public or third sector where is relevant.
• Be informative: look to inform and to educate.
If you work in the public sector and want to chat further drop me a
note by email to dan@comms2point0.co.uk or on Twitter @danslee.
The #nhssm discussion of the LGA health and wellbeing board guidelines takes place between 8pm and 9pm on Wednesday November 19.
So, you are wondering whether or not to join in #housingday, #ourday or a similar real time Twitter event.
But I’ll bet you think that you’ve nothing to say and not many people will find what you are doing interesting, right?
Good news. You couldn’t be further from the truth and by taking part you’ll be lending your voice to create a far louder noise around an area that no doubt doesn’t always shout about itself.
Back in 2010, me and some colleagues staged #walsall24 which was the first real-time Twitter event in local government. We won the first LGComms gold social media award and for a day the borough was the centre of the digital universe. People from across the council used Twitter to post the day-to-day things we were doing.
We’d taken the idea from Greater Manchester Police and tweaked it. It’s great to see others now take the idea and tweak it further so it’s the voice of a sector and not just one authority.
The #housingday initiative has grown from strength to strength as a way of telling the social housing story. Like any success, it has many fathers. But Ade Capon from Yorkshire Housing is the man responsible for first taking the plunge.
Here’s 10 ideas to help you make the most of the day
The more mundane it is to you, the more interesting it is to them. Trust me. Everyone thinks they do a fairly dull job. To others its madly interesting.
Tweet the little things. Tell people about the drain cover you just fixed, the window you are replacing, the meeting you’ve been to. It all builds a picture.
Take a picture. A picture tells 1,000 words and when you’ve only got 140 characters that’s pretty useful. People like pictures. They get shared more too. You don’t have to be David Bailey.
Take a video. With Instagram you have about 14 seconds of video that can be shared to Twitter.
Take some audio. Soundcloud is a cracking app that lets you record people talking. Ask someone to say who they are, what they do and what they are doing today. Then share it to Twitter.
Share some content. Press the retweet button and share what other people are doing.
Ask a question. Ask what people think. Ask the for their own experiences.
Follow a member of staff. Pick someone who does a frontline job. Then follow them around. You can tweet about what they are doing and where they are in realtime.
Stage a Q&A. Persuade a senior person to be available to answer questions on a topic. Promote it. Share the answers.
Embed your Twitter stream on the organisations’ website so non-Twitter people can see what is being said.
Build it and they will come is silly. Go offline. Tell people about it. Email them. Put it in team briefings. Shout. Shout. Let it all out.
Capture the tweets you’ll send and the comments you’ll receive on the web. By all means use Storify to capture what is being said. That’s an easy drag and drop web application you can use to preserve things.
Capture the tweets you’ll send and the comments you’ll receive as screenshots. Take a screenshot. Email it to people. The officers in the repairs team. People like that.
Feature the residents. How long has Mrs Smith lived in that house? What does she think of her windows? What could she suggest to improve the area she lives in?
Ask people to do something. Don’t just let the day be just noise. Here’s the thing you’d like people to sign-up for. Here’s the consultation you’d like them to get involved with. Channel all this to help you make a difference.
So, we’ve gone and hired a cinema for a bit of a celebration and it would be wonderful if you could join us.
More precisely, we’ve hired the Electric Cinema in Station Street, Birmingham which is the oldest working cinema in the UK. The date is Thursday December 11.
We’re doing three things. We’re having an awards ceremony, we’re watching a film and we’re showing that you don’t have to spend a fortune and go to London for an awards bash.
The event is the comms2point0 unawards and I’d like you very much to come along and to enter. It’s going to be great. December is a chance to celebrate and its a chance to think back to what you’ve done well.
If there’s one thing that irks me about comms teams it is their inability to celebrate their own work. Stop it. It’s not clever.
So pick a category, enter by November 12 by emailing dan@comms2point0.co.uk or darren@comms2point0.co.uk. More details are here.
If you don’t fancy picking a category come and watch the film. It’s Armandoi Iannucci satire ‘In the Loop.’
1. Best communications team chosen by the overall event sponsor
2. Best communications officer (this includes digital too) public vote sponsored by Alive – The Ideas Agency 3. Best small team (from one-man band up to three people max) public vote sponsored by David Banks Media Law
4. Lifetime achievement to comms public vote sponsored by Touch Design
12. Best private sector/agency comms campaign or initiative
13. Best ‘Worst comms’ (this can be anything from use of clip art, worst poster, silliest random request – feel free to be creative) sponsored by Alive – The Ideas Agency
“What we need to do,” said the man in the blue jacket and the crisp white shirt, “is to communicate more like insurgents.”
An arresting comment to make, particularly as the man in the jacket was HM Government’s Ambassador to Lebanon Tom Fletcher.
The comment was made – and a whole host of others – at the tail end of a fascinating two day event in Jordan hosted by the Foreign Office for their Middle East and North Africa comms staff.
A week later and it’s a comment that keeps rattling around.
We need to communicate more like insurgents. What does that mean?
It could mean a whole host of things. To nail the obvious, it’s not about communicating beheadings. To me, it’s more about having an overall framework to work in and allowing people on the ground to be flexible, creative and agile. What I took was that it was about being not hemmed in by procedure. It’s about creating sharable content that is going to be shared. It’s seeing what works in the field and replicating it.
Here’s a second arresting comment from the event that keeps re-occuring.
“Al-Qaida’s leaders view communications as 90 percent of the struggle.”
Think for a minute of that group and what do you see?
Ossama bin Laden in a fuzzy vhs video?
The Twin Towers?
Both are powerful images which frame the first 14 years of the 21st century.
They are communications.
They were framed by communications people.
The Ambassador is of course right. Sometimes we can be too hemmed in by process to think agile, creative, sharable and flexible.
To have such a green light from the top is a gift to cherish.
Sometimes the play book comes not from the institution or the old ways of doing things. It comes from unexpected quarters and what your enemy does.
It also poses the question that if communications is 90 per cent of the issue then are you doing enough? More importantly, have you got the support to do enough?
Spanish poet Baltasar Gracian said that a wise man gets more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for comms planning and having a purpose.
If the aim is to do something then it makes sense to have your comms pointing at that.
The only thing is that social media isn’t like that. It’s social. So, a stream of call-to-action updates just won’t work. It’s as social as a stream of flyers being pushed through your letterbox.
So, what’s the answer?
There needs to be a balance of the social and the stuff you want people to sign up for, buy or do.
Often in training I’ll refer to an 80-20 split. The 80 per cent is conversational and engaging content. The 20 per cent is the things you’d like people to do.
In a fascinating interview on BBC Radio 4’s ‘The Bottom Line’ Asda’s social manager puts the balance at 10 to 1.
Dominic Birch, Asda senior director of marketing, innovation and new revenue, said that the social media team has now become part of the wider PR team.
“We didn’t have a budget. So it wasn’t the case of advertising that we were on Facebook. Each time we posted some content we had to rely on even a very small number of people at first liking it for that content to be seen my anyone else otherwise we would be speaking to ourselves.
“We averaged two or three posts a day, every day, so maybe 20 posts a week.
It started to get interesting when they started to get customers to chip in with decisions. Nothing big. Customers chose the design for Christmas tea towels.
“What was really interesting was that 4,500 people went to the bother of asking whether they liked design ‘a’, ‘b’ or ‘c’. Actually, it was that moment that with 18 million customers we understood that if you connect to the right ones they really do care about what you do, what they say and why wouldn’t they? Ultimately, they’re going to come into your shop and choose to buy it.”
Big numbers is not the answer as fewer people see the posts. If the people who like your page are true customers it’ll cost you less effectively to reach them through Facebook ads.
“There is a danger that social media becomes diarrhea. We had a rule of thumb that for every post we wanted to push or sell something to be very blunt about it we had to put 10 other posts in the bank. They are there solely to engage our customers. We have to have done hard work talking about what the customers wanted to talk about before we have the right or licence to push something out.
“It’s a two-way dialogue social media. It just is. Our starting point is not to sell. It’s to listen. A few years ago we had a Christmas ad that was based on insight that it was Mum who does the heavy lifting, organises the present, gets the tree, cooks the meal and we depicted this advert and were met with a media backlash. Some people thought this was filmed in the 1950s and Fathers for Justice were going to do protests in the turkey aisle but we had three or four thousand comments saying things like ‘I nudged my husband awake when that came on the TV and said:L ‘that’s how it really feels.’ If you’d have gone back two or three years there would have been a high level meeting and the advert would have been pulled.”
That’s useful insight. Are you getting the balance right?
