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.

It just goes to show

I liked David Mitchell’s column in Sunday’s Observer about the torrents  of personal abuse and naked aggression that seems to be unleashed in those who post comments on newspaper articles and blogs.  His suggestion is that the sane and reasonable among us should post “It just goes to show you can’t be too careful” whenever threads seem to be taking a nasty turn, in the  hope that it will exert a calming influence.  Pleasingly his column is now the most popular on the Guardian site with a string of more than 1400 posts, all saying the same thing, meandering over a couple of pages of virtual space.

Not that I’m a victim of this myself, in this safe and stodgy backwater of wordpress’s empire; but for various reasons I’ve been looking at the message boards on a number of sites about civil liberties and the “surveillance state” recently.  Frankly I’ve rarely come across a bunch of people I would like less to be trapped in a lift with – and it depresses me hugely because it’s  a really important subject and the Convention on Liberty which kicked off my recent reading was addressed by almost every person in public life I still respect.  Some of the comments however – jeez.  When did reasoned argument, respect for the facts and a willingness to see another person’s point of view cease to be the way that political points are made?  (I know I sound like Colonel Blimp as I type this, but one of the points of  that rather wonderful film is that we  lose the civilty that Blimp stands for at our peril.  I  cling defiantly to my status as a crusted bore.) 

I love the idea that technology offers a democratising tool by which everyone can take part in public debate.  But blimey, we need to get our acts together and start using it like grown ups before the whole process is so degraded that it is easily ignored.

Old and new media

I’be been pondering the challenge Richard has set in his latest post - trying to decide whether or not social media means the death of PR.  The huge effort that the Obama campaign is still putting into new media (yes, I know not all of it can be defined as “social media”) seems to suggest that for PRs this is just a new channel – albeit  of a new and so-far unpredicatable type – which they can use if they know what they’re doing.  There’s a piece in today’s Observer which details the enormous returns Obama got from his very well crafted online campaigning which tends to suggest that, IF the message you are trying to spread resonates with the audience you are trying to reach AND members of that audience use social media networks to communicate with each other, then social media can be a means of spreading a PR message which is exponentially more powerful than more traditional methods.  So the answer to Richard’s question is : no,  as long as the PR is adept at finding messages which resonate – and that’s always been the trick that good PRs know how to work.  Right?

My pondering has been interrupted by my niggling doubts as to why Arianna Huffington, queen of bloggers, is advertising a proper, old-fashioned  book she has written about how to be a blogger.  Surely, if you want to be a blogger you already know that such things exist, so you’ve seen them online, so you are web savvy enough to use the internet.  So, wouldn’t you use google to find a site that tells you…  I appreciate that won’t have the Arianna Huffington seal of approval on it, and I’m quite cheered to see that books still count, even on HuffPo but I can’t stop wondering about who on earth is going to read this.  What have I missed?

Thinking out loud

This is more writing therapy for me than a considered blog entry – but your thoughts and  suggestions would be very welcome…

I am about to start working on  an internal comms programme for a public body which is both security conscious and has offices widely dispersed across the country.  One of the things I’ve been asked to look at is developing the intranet and making it into a more vibrant form of cross-departmental communication.  I am convinced that the words “vibrant” and “intranet” don’t generally belong in the same sentence – no organisation I’ve ever worked for has had such a thing,  and some have sunk large amounts of money into failing to develop one.  I’ve used systems where the intranet is the compulsory first screen on everyone’s pc so company messages can be shoved in front of people as they log in, but that’s always seemed to be easily ignorable – for most people the log-on process is as automatic (and memorable) as brushing their teeth.   So, examples, please of intranet systems which really work and which can be set up and maintained with a minimum of woman-power in the back office. I evidently shouldn’t have opted out of the internal comms module on the course! 

I’d love to find a way to make it a properly participatory network, but the spectre of the Virgin Facebook debacle keeps floating in front of my eyes.   With this in mind, I was intrigued to see reports of a Demos pamphlet about the impact of social media in improving collaboration within organisations.  The public sector seems to come out as mistrusting the use of social media networking tools by staff.  Admittedly the stuff I’ve seen about this is from New Zealand rather than the UK, but I find it hard to believe that the UK is more adventurous! So, is anyone aware of any innovative use of this stuff in the public sector – which preferably won’t land me on the front page of every newspaper in the country as a threat to the nation’s security?

So that’s how you do it…

I was wondering how I was going to keep up my conversion to social media without having to give up my day job and leave the children to fend for themselves.  Then I found this on PROpenMic , five easy steps to managing a tidal wave of information whilst still leaving you time to wash, sleep and eat.   Shared in a spirit of community – I hope it helps someone!