Simon Collister, PhD

Strategy + Consulting

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Exhibition: Propaganda: Power and Persuasion

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The British Library has a fascinating exhibition opening today. Titled Propaganda: Power and Persuasion the exhibition runs from 17 May to 17 September 2013 and – quoting the BL’s website – “explores a thought-provoking range of exhibits” that will make you look anew at “the messages, methods, and media used by different states – discovering how they use propaganda through time and across cultures for both power and persuasion.” Sounds good.

The exhibition resonates well with a great book I’m reading at the moment, Public Relations and the Making of Modern Britain, which reappraises the origins of public relations in a British context. The author, Cambridge Leverhulme Fellow, Scott Antony, argues that contrary to common misconceptions of its hard-nosed Bernaysian origins, PR in the UK emerged from a distinctly cultural and governmental agenda. Education, information and ‘improving’ society were imperatives baked into PR from the outset, Antony argues.

Aside from helpfully taking contemporary definitions of PR full circle, such a conception chimes wonderfully with the rest of the BL’s exhibition narrative:

“It is used to fight wars and fight disease, build unity and create division. Whether monumental or commonplace, sincere or insidious, propaganda is often surprising, sometimes horrific and occasionally humorous. […] Propaganda: Power and Persuasion is the first exhibition to explore international state propaganda from the 20th and 21st centuries. From the eye-opening to the mind-boggling, from the beautiful to the surprising, posters, films, cartoons, sounds and texts reveal the myriad ways that states try to influence and persuade their citizens.”

Tickets are £9 (under 18s free) and concessions are available. Check it!

Demos’ Virtually Members report is virtually useful

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The centre-left [sic] think-tank, Demos, has a new report out presenting some interesting insights about the virtual ‘membership’ of the UK’s three main political parties. Titled, Virtually Members: The Facebook and Twitter Followers of UK Political Parties, the briefing paper is the latest publication to come from Demos’ Centre for Social Media Analysis. I’ve embedded the full paper below:

Virtually Members by Simon Collister

Despite, however, the snazzy name and Demos’ past reputation for leading-edge research into social media (I can remember attending a number of briefing events about social media and political engagement back in 2009/10) the report feels fairly lightweight – even if it is a vaguely dressed up corporate sponsorship vehicle for Tweetminster which provides the authors with analytics technology.

For example, in 2013 after two US election cycles and a UK general election with social media playing a central part; the coalition embedding edemocracy into parliamentary process; not to mention the numerous examples of social media empowered social movements, such as UKUncut, 38 Degrees, etc, the report’s opening statement hardly sets the pulse racing:

“The internet and social media are having a profound effect on British politics: it will re-shape the way elections are won and lost, how policy is made, and how people get involved in formal and informal politics.”

Equally disappointing is the report’s focus on evaluating social media quantities (fans, followers, etc) for main political parties and attempting to equate these with some comparable measure of party membership. Didn’t we move beyond such quantitative fixations years ago? Even with caveats adopting such a straw man position risks undermining the overall findings – which do make some salient points about political participation and mobilisation – from the outset.

More worryingly, I can’t see any attempt in the analysis to account for the spam followers we know most (if not all) Twitter account accrue; not to mention the phantom ‘Likes’ Facebook (or third parties) seem to generate, thus boosting fans and skewing quantitative analyses. And this isn’t a particularly low key phenomenon at the moment.

Maybe I’m being overly harsh, but a failure to acknowledge and engage with the messy realities of social media in a post-IPO world make the Demos paper difficult to take too seriously, which is a shame as the CASM (and the team behind it) appears to have a lot of potential.

Nic Newman’s Journalism, Media and Technology Predictions 2013 is a must read

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I missed this when it first came out but Nic Newman‘s Journalism, Media and Technology Predictions 2013 is a must read.

There’s lots of detailed fascinating insight and analysis with case studies and examples and I’ve shared the executive summary below:

  • The coming year will mark the BIG switch to mobile computing. It will overtake desktop use for news – in turn driving more mobile first media
  • Improving video capability and data graphics will be a major theme for news organisations aiming to engage audiences using better screens and faster connections
  • Live pages, live streams and live workflows become a key focus in newsrooms – with newformats emerging for bite-sized news
  • The phablet is coming – a mix between a smartphone and tablet. Mid sized screens andaffordability will hit the sweet spot for many consumers
  • We’ll see a further deepening of the social revolution across all platforms – accompanied by a growing debate about the implications – privacy, control and all the new skills required to manage it (we said this last year but it is worth repeating)
  • In technology expect big advances in gesture control (LeapMotion), indoor location, 3D Printers – and the beginnings of wearable computing
  • More disruption in banking & finance, retailing and higher education as the Internet revolution begins to bite

While the document is really an analysis of the media and journalism sector it doesn’t take a leap of imagination for PR professionals to recognise the impact the predicted transformations will have on communications planning. There may well be  future post in this – distilling the technology-led disruptions re-shaping the media/journalism space and what it means for PR practitioners. For now let’s just note that Nic’s prediction that at least two UK national newspapers will go behind paywalls in 2013 has already come to pass!

Help needed: What do PR practitioners need to know about monitoring and analytics?

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The CIPR’s Social Media Panel has announced an ambitious programme of activity for 2013. Working with newly elected Chair, Stephen Waddington, the Panel are pushing forward on a number of projects, including:

  • Updating and expanding the CIPR’s Social Media Guidelines
  • Updating the CIPR’s Wikipedia Best Practice Guideline
  • Developing a guide to social media and the law for PR practitioners
  • Mapping the roles and skill sets for future PR pratitioners in a digital media environment
  • Not to mention the launch of Share This Too, a follow-up to last year’s Share This: The Social Media Handbook for PR Professionals

One other work stream (that I’m taking a lead role in helping scope and develop) is the creation of a directory of social media monitoring and analytics tools to support modern public relations practice. While there are a number of ‘buyers guides’ for social media monitoring tools out there, one of the most frequent enquiries from PR practitioners to the CIPR is for guidance on monitoring and analytics, understandable given it’s a crucial activity for planning, managing and evaluating campaigns, its a rapidly growing field and an increasingly specialised areas of practice.

The scope for this document is still be scoped out by the team working on the document, but is likely to cover:

  • Use cases for and the role of social media monitoring in PR
  • Some commercial context to help practitioners understand the monitoring/analytics technology marketplace
  • Best practice case studies

As I say, the final document will be finalised shortly – but there is still time to gather input into what a successful document might look like from broader sources.And this is where you come in! To help ensure the final document is as useful and up-to-date as possible I’d love it if you had suggestions or ideas as to what information you think PR practitioners should know about social media monitoring and analytics. What should be covered? What do you want to know?

I should stress this isn’t going to be a totally comprehensive offering – it’s designed to be practical and useful without covering all angles – but the more insight we can gather from practitioners the more robust it will be. Please leave any comments below.

I’d be particularly interested if you had case studies to share? Feel free to drop me an email at simon [dot] collister [at] gmail [dot] com. Looking forward to hearing from you!

Hansard Society report on Parliament and #futurenews

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The Hansard Society has published an interesting report, #futurenews – The Communication of Parliamentary Democracy in a Digital World, that examines the ways in which Parliament can (and should) adapt to social media to enhance its communication and engagement with the public.

Future News: Can Parliament seize the opportunity to better communicate parliamentary democracy

The reports main findings are that:

  • Parliament needs to adopt to social, mobile, data and video-led digital communications
  • Parliament has the potential to play a crucial part as “authoritative place at the apex of our democracy” – but one which is largely absent from popular political debate
  • Parliament needs to spend time identifying key online communities and developing ways to communicate better with them (i.e. faster and using more granular, social content)

In order to step up and start meeting these challenges, the reports authors argue that the following actions must be prioritised and implemented:

  1. “Appoint a Community Team (for each House or on a bi-cameral basis) to build links with online communities with specific audience interests and an AV media officer to produce rich in-house content to populate the website and be disseminated to a variety of audiences
  2. Invest in its broadcasting and digital infrastructure to enable a wider range of online sites to take its material
  3. Produce contextualised video news releases and make video of up to two minutes’ duration available copyright free, with attribution for any user to download and embed
  4. Revise the  broadcasting rules, particularly for regional select committee visits
  5. Live-log, time-code, tag and key-word Hansard, and improve the website search functionality in order to enable people to access relevant material more quickly”

These findings and recommendations are interesting for a number of reasons. Firstly, I think it’s fair to say that none of results and outcomes are particularly ground-breaking – at least if you work in a digital PR or social media agency. But it is striking that none of the, even fundamental steps, have yet to be considered let alone implemented by an institution described by the report authors as the “apex of our democracy”!

Secondly, a lot of this reminds me of the work I delivered with We Are Social as part of a project with Parliamentary Outreach, the marketing arm – if you will – of Parliament*. This project was focused on opening up the work and processes of Parliamentary committees – and as an aside, it’s interesting to note that the report intimates the ethos and perhaps some of the original actions from the project have filtered through to a practical level within Committee business (see p.37 and the #askgove example). One key learning from this project – and something commonly experienced across established institutions – was that while the recommended actions were widely recognised as imperative for engaging digitally and opening up the organisation, dominant cultures and stakeholders prevailed, limiting the potential of the project.

This latter point is one issue that the report needs to consider as a next step for ensuring its accurate recommendations become reality. There are, of course, many ways to embed social norms within traditionally hierarchical organisations but I think another factor that the Hansard Society and Parliament need to consider is the presumption of centrality and self-importance of Parliament and by extension, democracy.

The report itself describes Parliament as occupying an “authoritative place at the apex of our democracy”. But is this a risky start point for socialising Parliament’s communication (and by necessity, Parliament itself)? Based on both the disintegration of public trust in Parliament and democratic institutions as well as the empowering of ‘ordinary citizens’ through social technologies surely a more appropriate starting point would one of deference and a recognition that both in terms of political purpose and social media knowledge and practice, Parliament has a lot of catching up to with wider society.

 

* It always amused me that Parliamentary Outreach’s portcullis logo on We Are Social’s client page was consistently mistaken for Ministry of Sound!

Conference presentation: Re-Assembling Mediated Power

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I was meant to give this presentation last week at the SEDTC conference at Royal Holloway last week but unfortunately wasn’t able to. I thought I’d share it here anyway.

The original abstract is here to give the presentation some context and I’ll hopefully uploading the full paper in due course.