Press officers in an age of twitter

Great post here about whether (and if so, how) press officers within government should respond to stories/debates circulating among digital communities on blogs and via Twitter.  Inevitably there is real frustration about how slow press officers can be to react to the head of steam which can build up around key issues online before they hit the mainstream.  The argument that online inactivity damages departmental reputation must be right.  But it does misunderstand, I think, the key reality of a press officer’s life, which is that they must please their Minister.  On the whole Ministers still don’t get  this stuff and don’t believe that their constituents do either. Some of them blog, a couple are on Twitter (Ben Bradshaw and Harriet Harman, take a bow) But generally their key concern is tomorrow’s front page – in particular the front page of the Mail – or Newsnight, which is why so much actitivy is short term and reactive rather than designed to build relationships and alliances and deliver a long-term strategy.  Many press officers find this frustrating - although a frighteningly large number still don’t get it either. There’s a serious job to be done in some departments to educate press teams as well as policy leads on the possibilities.

Burn baby, burn

The bonfire of the qangos might not be such a popular rallying cry if the quangos themselves could  point to some hard evidence of their own achievement.  As David Cameron gets his matches ready, there’s a desperate need for NDPBs (and grant-funded voluntary sector bodies too) to be able to demonstrate that they represent value for money.  Sadly, in my experience, staff in bodies like this are happiest when they’re talking about the (undoubted) social need for their services and the benefits they were set up to deliver.  Mention of evaluation, demonstrating value for money, even – heaven forbid – the need to become self-supporting by selling commercial services, makes them come over giddy as a Victorian vicar accidentally catching sight of an uncovered table leg.  They should all be in a tearing hurry to get measures in place which demonstrate hard evidence of their usefulness.  If they can’t it’ll be hard to grieve too much when they start to smoulder.

Stakeholder Management – Lesson One, Not Like This

Government comms isn’t what it was in its Campbell prime; but even accepting that the control freakery of yesteryear is out of place now, the  performance over the Iraq inquiry has been even more dismal than usual.

Even if they don’t care about the democratic principles at stake (depressing enough in itself), have these people not learned anything about dealing with their stakeholders?  Do they not realise that making a major announcement without (seemingly) discussing it with anyone who might have an opinion on it is insane?  Having promised to increase openness to restore public faith in politics, did no-one  think that announcing a secret inquiry with a hand-picked chair   into the most controversial political decision of the past decade was risky?  Didn’t they think to line up some allies to come out in support? (And if they tried and couldn’t find any, shouldn’t that have set some alarm bells ringing?)  Isn’t rigging it so it won’t report until after the election a little, well, rubbish,  presentationally?  Especially as it now looks as though they are rowing back on what they’ve announced – another nail in the coffin of  basic government competence. 

When even the Lib Dems are credibly pointing out that the government is “weak and pathetic”  things look pretty bleak.  I  now support the Labour Party  the way my Dad supports West Brom – he’s been doing it a long time, it’s a  habit and a reliable family joke; but he didn’t really care when they were relegated.  At the moment I could seriously use some good reasons to get enthusiastic about Labour.

Eulalie

There is no point throwing eggs at Nick Griffin.  Just crack jokes over him.  He’s a ridiculous little man who should be allowed to prove how stupid he is  in debate.    

I’ve been wondering who he reminded me of and it suddenly dawned – he’s Roderick Spode minus the ladies underwear (I assume, although I suppose you never know…)

The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you’re someone. You hear them shouting “Heil, Spode!” and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: “Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?”

 

My dear! The noise! The people!

In what feels like the equivalent of sticking my fingers in my ears and singing loudly, I’m not blogging about the Labour party, the economy, the loathsome emergence of the BNP from under its stone, or indeed any of the other things that have been keeping me awake at night recently. Instead I’m  trying to recapture the euphoria of watching A Little Night Music in the West End on Friday.  Just, please, go and see it. You’ll thank me.  It has wit,  it has intelligence, it has charm.  It has fabulous frocks and Maureen Lipman being grand underneath a very big wig.  Its central conceit is that the fresh-faced charms of youth just can’t compare with the allure of an intelligent, mature woman (an argument I find completely persuasive). 

Floating out of the theatre I was even reconciled to the horror that is the West End now.  Being out on a Saturday night these days increasingly makes me feel like an easily shockable maiden aunt up from the sticks for a spree.  Why is the music from all the bars so LOUD? Why do all those nice young girls wear clothes that are two sizes too small?  Why is everyone so drunk? (and how the hell do they afford it at those prices?  £7.60 for two cups of coffee.  £7.60.  For coffee.) And where did all those bicycle-rickshaws come from?  When I used to go out regularly  – some time back in the late Jurassic – there were one or two of them hanging about near Leicester Square tube and they looked quite cute.  They have evidently bred like rabbits in the intervening years, turned ferral, and now infest every street in Soho.  If you just give me a minute to lace my stays and button my boots, I shall write to Boris. Something Must Be Done.

Running the whelk stall

Yesterday was the last day of the government contract I’ve been working on since last year.  Coincidentally the day I left my civil service job to go freelance  was the day Tony Blair stood down.  In a very different way yesterday also felt like the end of an era for Labour, even though the fall out this time round will be messier, more rancourous and (almost certainly) fatal for the party.

The permanent replacement in my role has just come into the civil service from a job in the private sector and evidently couldn’t believe the Looking Glass world I was briefing him about. (‘But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ said Alice. ‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the cat. ‘We’re all mad here.‘ ) 

It’s not at all impossible that everything I’ve been doing for the past six months will be torn up and thrown away by an incoming Minister after the reshuffle, not because it’s bad or wrong, but because the points have changed and we’re all off on another track as of Monday.  In the meantime, at least in our case yesterday, we carry on as though nothing at all had changed – making arrangements for a Ministerial visit next month, even though there is no Minister, no agreed policy, no diary to fix a date in and no idea of whether or not the policy will survive the week. Or as Lewis Carroll would have it – I can’t go back to yesterday – because I was a different person then.

Bless you

 While every one else in the country is absorbed in MPs’ expenses and Joanna Lumley, there is one corner of a Whitehall comms office that is still fighting the battle against swine flu. You can’t open a paper these days without seeing that revolting picture of that man sneezing all over you. 

This seems to me to be a “damned if they do, damned if they don’t” situation for government.  If there isn’t a pandemic then they will eventually be roasted for wasting public money. If there is they will be roasted for not doing enough to warn us.  But is it really necessary for DH to have to spend money on a leaflet telling people, with diagrams, how to wash their hands? And do you think they’re downhearted that no-one else in the country seems to care?

Passionate about communications solutions

David Mitchell got in before me (and is infinitely funnier than I could have been) about the use and abuse of the word “passionate”.  I feel much the same about “solutions” – as in information solutions  (1,060,000 hits on Google), communications solutions (1,180,000), new media solutions (550,000), security solutions (3,260,000), technology solutions 6,860,000). There is now an event called Procurement Solutions Live “the annual event for buying solutions”.

Last summer when I was trying to find an events company to deliver some conferences for a client, I refused on principle to invite any company to pitch whose website promised that they could deliver “event solutions”.  It’s as good a way of sorting the wheat from the chaff as any – and we found a brilliant company to do the job.  I was almost inspired by this to re-name my business the No Solutions Communications Company – but felt in the end it might be misunderstood…

Evaluation

Interesting piece in PR Week about the evaluation of PR campaigns and how long agencies can or should keep using the advertising value equivalent figure as a measure of success. The piece repeats all the reasons I’ve always mistrusted AVE as a measure – just colonising space in a paper for an article is no guarantee that anyone reads it, agrees with it or acts on it; it doesn’t offer a means of measuring social media comment; and for obvious reasons it can’t measure one of the key activities of a good PR – keeping bad stories out of the papers. How much might it have been worth to the BBC if the PR response to the Ross/Brand row had been niftier and those acres of press coverage about declining moral standards hadn’t been printed? How could you have measured it if it had happened?

Evaluation gets even harder when the campaign you are evaluating is trying to generate long-lasting behavioural/attitudinal change, as many of the campaigns run by government are. It takes years to achieve real social change – it’s taken decades for drink-driving to have become socially unacceptable, for example.  No client is going to pay for tracking research over a decade to prove whether or not they achieved their objective.  And no agency could wait that long to be paid. Who decides that social change has taken place?  As an agency, how do we demonstrate that the change was due to us and wouldn’t have happened anyway? Ultimately we’re forced back on easy to measure indicators: the delivery of materials on time/  budget, target take-up rates of info packs or testing kits among certain sections of the audience, an agreed level of media coverage measured through AVE or WOTS (weighted opportunities to see – which can generate their own meaninglessly surreal statistics, apparently there were 1.4billion WOTS for stories about bird flu in this country (pop 60m) during the last time we had a health scare).  On the occasions when I’ve been sitting on the client’s rather than the agency’s side of the process, I’ve always had my doubts that I’d be able to really measure the success of what I was being offered. COI were making a big noise about their new evaluation process, Artemis, a while ago – does it work?

Hating the Daily Mail – a game for all the family

Read over someone’s shoulder on the tube an ad  in Metro for today’s Daily Mail:  “What to do when your daughter is obsessed with her weight - AT JUST SEVEN?” .  And I think we can all agree that poor body image, an obsession with weight and diet and an unhealthy fixation on being thin are a curse affecting women from an increasingly young  age.

 Can I suggest that one answer for the writer of the article is “don’t ever let her look at the Daily Mail”?  Yesterday’s Metro (seen the same way, I never actually pick the damn thing up) carried an ad for the Mail crowing:  “The brilliant article all women should read – what’s YOUR fat age?”  Apparently Carol Vorderman is really 48 but has a fat age of 50 – evidently got some work to do, eh Carol?  I looked at the site to get the link and saw that the top picture on the home page is of actress Kirstie Alley (or “bloated yo-yo dieter Kirstie Alley” as they describe her) grimly promising to get back into her bikini.

Why any woman should read the Mail – far less write for it – is a mystery to me.  It hates us for being too fat and too thin; for worrying too much about our weight and for not caring enough;  for going out to work thus neglecting our children and for staying at home and wasting our potential.  It thinks we dress too young for our age and too frumpily, and  is constantly on guard to warn us about the horrible diseases of mind and body that we poor weak creatures are prone too. 

The Mail is so successful among women that we must really like this stuff.  Perhaps the female equivalent of Englishmen  who like to be spanked is women who like to be told by Paul Dacre that they are rubbish. I remember reading an interview by Irma Kurtz, who used to write the agony column for Cosmo in the UK and US edition.  She said that the big difference between the two sets of readers was that while  an American would ask “why on  earth is my boyfriend treating me like this?” the Brits would ask “what did I do wrong to make my boyfriend treat me like this?”  But at least the Mail is always on hand to  point out our errors. As it said in my favourite  Mail headline of all time, last summer “Why single women who think they’re happy are WRONG”  (I can’t find a link to prove that this is true but it is. I put “single women who think” into the Mail search engine and the page crashed…)