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It's not about technology - a day at Don't Panic's guide to social media

Stuart Bruce suggests the next big thing: mobile and location centred social media 

Don't Panic has won a reputation as a talented event company that has led the way in explaining social media to a sometime sceptical PR world.

Today saw the latest in the series, held in the cavernous Barbican Centre in the City of London. Any of the delegates wanting to try out citizen journalism couldn't have had a better venue, as just a mile away the police had their hands full handling demonstrators against this week's London G20 summit! First speaker Marshall Manson from Edelman remarked it was like Saigon with helicopters everywhere.

How times change. When I went to the University of Sunderland's Delivering the New PR event in London in 2006, managed by Don't Panic, the speakers had to explain what a blog was - and ran a 'try blogging yourself' session. Today, The Guardian's April Fool story claimed the paper was to publish exclusively via Twitter. It didn't fool anyone, but the fact it chose a microblogging site as the subject shows how far we have come.

My favourite sessions at today's conference were by people working in the public sector. Simon Wakeman explained how Medway Council in Kent has tried new ways of communicating, including podcasts and Twitter. he convinced sceptical councillors and officials about the value of using Twitter by showing how 'retweets' - others forwarding the council's Twitter messages - had widened the audience Medway was reaching with its opposition to a new airport in the Thames estuary.

Mark Payne from West Midlands Police joked he was the only policeman in the City today not in riot gear. But he had a serious message: that social media enables the police to engage with younger audiences indifferent or hostile to the police. He also told the tale of the murderer caught when the police found a video of the scene the killer had posted on YouTube. "As a seasoned detective, I thought that was a clue!" Mark admitted police bureaucracy was a barrier at times - he had to send detectives home to search for clues on Facebook and YouTube as access was blocked at work.

The speakers were passionate about the potential of social media, but sensible to tell us to think before diving in. As Wolfstar's Stuart Bruce said, "You can do a lot of damage in 140 characters!" (The maximum Twitter message.) And above all, they agreed social media isn't about the technology. The medium isn't the message. Craig Elder, the Conservative Party's head of online communities, suggested that Barack Obama may not be the social media role model some have thought - after his prolific stream of tweets on the campaign trail, 'he' has posted just four since taking office.

I'll leave the last word to Robin Wilson from McCann Erickson. When Robin began, I thought we were in for a useful if a little dry session about measuring the impact of social media work. But he then launched into a tale about female orgasms, prompted by a campaign his agency had handled for Durex's female lubricant. As Nicky Wake from Don't Panic observed, today's event was a little x-rated!

An apology from Gordon Brown? Just Westminster chatter

The Guardian's Jonathan Freedland today joined the call for Gordon Brown to say sorry.

"It needn't be a sackcloth and ashes apology but an admission that the entire political and financial establishment erred when it believed in the infallibility of the market, and that New Labour's love affair with the City was part of that error."

He goes on to swallow the idea that Labour is simply suffering a communications problem. Tell the story, and Labour is in with a chance at next year's general election, he argues.

I expect a far more perceptive analysis from Freedland, usually one of Britain's best political commentators. The clamour for an apology is a classic Westminster village obsession. It wouldn't make the slightest impression on voters, who regard politicians' apologies as sceptically as their promises. (And it could make matters worse - just look at the reaction to the contrived apologies from disgraced bankers last month.)

Labour's problems are far more serious. It continues to disillusion voters with disastrous policy decisions, such as Peter Mandelson's part privatisation of the Royal Mail. Harriet Harman's empty promise to cut ex RBS chief executive Red Goodwin's promise showed the impotence of ministers who did nothing to stop Goodwin being rewarded for failure when they rescued RBS with billions of our money.

Dying governments often make catastrophic mistakes - wasting taxpayers' money: Margaret Thatcher's was the poll tax. I suspect the Royal Mail sell off will begin to look like Labour's equivalent of John Major's rail privatisation. We're still paying the price of that piece of prime ministerial stupidity 15 years later. 

Technorati Tags: Jonathan Freedland,Gordon Brown,Fred Goodwin,Royal Mail

Our survey said: time for PR people to kick their addiction to research stories

If you hear or read the words 'according to a poll' in a broadcast or newspaper story, it's likely that the story is a result of a news release. All of us working in PR have resorted to research stories to get coverage for our organisations. I'm certainly no exception. When judgement day comes, I'll confess to the Valentine's day story I did for Eagle Star life assurance in 1997, claiming that women would love a pension plan for Valentine's day. The shame.

These non stories are a conspiracy between PR people and the media. They rarely have any substance to them, even though they abide by the rules governing market research. But I sense we are all getting bored by the tactic. My 1997 story was picked up by a stack of radio stations and the national press. Were I to repeat it now, I doubt any national would touch it. In the last week, journalists on Metro and The Observer I've spoken to have agreed with my view, even saying they delete emails from a certain insurance company because of the number of silly surveys.

The tactic can result in ridicule. Two weeks ago, the insurer LV issued a story claiming that inexperienced cyclists taking to the roads had resulted in a 29% increase in the number of road accidents involving cyclists. The Independent's report on the story carried the dramatic headline Credit crunch cyclists causing chaos on roads. The CTC, Britain's national cyclists' organisation, quickly condemned LV's story as Mickey Mouse research. Roger Geffen, CTC's respected campaigns manager, said LV's alarming figures appeared to no more than the difference between casualties in winter, when fewer people cycle, and the summer, when more of us take to our bikes. CTC's rebuttal was widely reported in the cycling press. In the words of Roger Geffen:

"Manipulating statistics for a PR stunt wastes the time of the people who took part in the survey. By demonising cyclists and scaring people into staying in their cars, it also undermines the efforts of charities like CTC to encourage more cycling and improve road safety for all”.

Things got worse for LV's PR team. In last Saturday's Guardian, Ben Goldacre devoted his Bad Science column to LV's story, under the headline Perils on the road to PR-reviewed data. Goldacre began:  "I've always fantasised that the insurance industry must possess a vast repository of useful data: the experience of centuries, carefully tabulated by actuaries into secret commercial databases containing a truth about human behaviour and risk that most epidemiologists and social scientists would kill for." LV's story destroyed that illusion, leading him to add, "I shall not be buying shares in this insurance company". (He couldn't anyway, as LV is actually a mutually owned friendly society, but he got his point across.)

LV achieved some media coverage. But it has alienated a sizeable group of people, and damaged its efforts to establish itself as expert on road safety. Not very smart. The release has now disappeared from LV's media centre but the damage has been done.

Don't shoot the messenger: the banks protest too much

I was amazed by PR Week's lead story today: 'Banking industry lashes out at negative media coverage'.

It quotes the British Bankers' Association's comms director Lesley McLeod criticising many journalists for not understanding the issues.

In my time as a PR manager in the banking industry, I worked with Lesley from time to time and regarded her as a professional spokesperson for the industry. I don't underestimate the huge challenge facing the BBA, and think chief executive Angela Knight has raised the association's game since joining two years ago.

But PR Week's article reflects badly on the banks. While I know how tough it is explaining complex issues to general reporters, the huge irony is that the banks themselves failed to understand their own activities, leading to the sorry state we all find ourselves in. The industry is in no position to lecture the media on a lack of understanding. And although I have criticised commentators like Robert Peston for revelling in gloom, it's hard to imagine how banking PR professionals could take issue with negative reporting of the sector given the daily stream of disastrous developments at many of our top banks. To paraphrase Clement Attlee, a period of silence (rather than protest) would be most welcome.

"Please don't": Today's Evan Davies tries to keep Gordon Brown under control

I can't say I rush to watch or listen to Gordon Brown being interviewed. Britain's prime minister tries to win a debate by boring the interviewer, never mind the audience. Great slabs of dull dialogue, delivered in a monotone voice, don't make great listening at breakfast time.

So I only listened to part of his 17 minute interview with Evan Davies on Radio 4's Today programme this morning. Davies valiantly tried to keep the interview on track, pleading "please don't" when Brown was about to repeat a long, long answer about the Government's bank rescue.

But the really interesting bit was when Brown insisted that his oft-repeated claim to have ended economic boom and bust hadn't proved mistaken. Not a bit of it: this recession is a global crisis, said Brown. So that's all right then. I'm sure the tens of thousands who have lost their jobs this winter will feel a lot better that the prime minister thinks that the boom and bust cycle remains vanquished despite the fact we're now in recession.

Why do politicians insist on these rhetorical games? Who do they think they're kidding? I still think Labour deserves some credit for the longest period of economic growth for decades, but the Government wins no friends for insisting that black is white.

Green shoots and unanswered questions: Labour's ministers wilt under media fire

Few voters had heard of Baroness Vadera until the low profile government minister yesterday repeated Norman Lamont's 1991 gaffe of claiming to spot green shoots of economic recovery, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary - thousands of job losses the very day she was interviewed by ITV.

It's difficult to believe that Vadera was unaware of the huge embarrassment Lamont's comments caused John Major's government at the height of the last recession. Yet she fell into the trap ITV's interviewer set for her. 

Listening to BBC Radio 5 Live's Drive show covering the story at great length made me think the subject didn't deserve that much attention. For I was much more irritated by business secretary Peter Mandelson's total failure to answer two key questions in his interview with Radio 4's Today programme earlier the same day.

Interviewer Sarah Montague asked Mandelson why the government couldn't just tell partly state-owned banks like RBS to lend more to hard pressed small businesses, rather than spend yet more taxpayers' money on a loan scheme. Mandelson ploughed on with his own lengthy monologue rather than offer an answer. Montague was equally ineffective in allowing the minister to duck her query of his claim that each taxpayer will be £270 a year better off because of the Government's one year cut in the VAT rate. It's difficult to imagine John Humphrys allowing a politician to get away with that old trick. But as a voter, my view of slippery Mandelson slipped further.

PS: don't get the idea I felt sorry for Vadera as she was humiliated. This, after all, was the woman who pushed through the disastrous part privatisation of the London Underground.

PR Week's Danny Rogers gets caught out - by a carrier bag

PR Week's editor, Danny Rogers, showed today the dangers of giving an interview when you're not an expert on the subject being discussed.

He was speaking on BBC Radio 5 Live's Breakfast show. The subject was Sainsbury's move to hide free carrier bags from its supermarket checkouts, in a bid to cut the number of bags used. Rogers contrasted Sainsbury's move unfavourably with Marks & Spencer's bolder move to charge for food carrier bags under the retailer's Plan A initiative. But he then demonstrated his lack of knowledge of M&S's initiative, suggesting that anyone who hadn't brought their own bag would have to pay a sizeable sum (I think he said £2) for a bag to carry their shopping home. Not true. M&S actually charges 5p, with the profit going to the environmental charity Groundwork.

Rogers also failed to mention that Sainsbury's is starting free text messages to remind people to bring their old bags with them when they go shopping. This strikes me as a great move, as I'm always forgetting to do this. Overall, though, I think M&S's approach is more comprehensive, as part of a much wider environmental and health initiative - Plan A. But you wouldn't have known this from Rogers' less than authoritative interview.

I'm sure Rogers thought this was a great opportunity to say what he thought about the PR and reputational impact of Sainsbury's move. But you can hardly make a proper assessment without knowing the details. 

Disclosure: I am a former head of PR for Marks & Spencer Money.

The worst economic crisis for 60 years? Labour's chancellor as doomsayer

You'd expect a finance minister to exude calm not crisis. Yet Alistair Darling, Britain's chancellor of the exchequer, has ominously told The Guardian that we face the worst economic conditions for sixty years.

Darling gave the paper a surprisingly candid interview, in which he came across as a decent man who wasn't really cut out for the unattractive world of politics. It's hard to see what possessed him to talk up the crisis facing Britain's economy. While conditions are hardly rosy, few who lived through the late 1980s recession, let alone the 1970s, could accept the idea that we are yet in comparable straits. The 1989 crisis was a perfect storm: interest rates doubled in 18 months while unemployment soared. So far, we've experienced nothing like those grim events.

I had a ringside seat as the 1980s housing boom turned sour. I was press officer for Nationwide Building Society, and issued a series of news releases about the state of the housing market. At the end of 1988, I issued a story that claimed the peak of the market (absolutely right) and predicted a soft landing for house prices in 1989. The expected soft landing turned out to be the worst housing market crash since the second world war. Some 18 months later, I issued a release proclaiming that the first time buyer was back, and suggesting that the market would begin to recover. That recovery took over three years to materialise as thousands of borrowers had their homes repossessed. (In my defence, I should add that I was simply communicating the views of Nationwide's housing economists. But few commentators were more prescient.)

The moral of the story? Take very little notice of anyone's predictions about house prices or interest rates.

PS: The Guardian's Decca Aitkenhead quotes a Treasury press officer advising the chancellor to "tell her [Aitkenhead] everything. Make sure you tell her everything." I suspect that Darling will be cursing that advice this weekend.

Is Gordon Brown the new John Major?

May has been the cruellest month for Gordon Brown. Thursday's defeat in the Crewe and Nantwich by election followed similar embarrassments in the local and London elections three weeks ago. After less than a year, Brown's premiership is looking doomed.

Comparisons are being made with John Major, who led the Conservatives to their worst defeat since the 19th century in 1997. For much of his last five years in power, Major looked out of his depth, without the authority to pull his party back from the brink. The 1997 general election was, if anything, worse than many pundits and psephologists predicted. So Labour shouldn't bank on bouncing back over the next couple of years.

I wrote yesterday that many are arguing that the rise of social media means that political parties have to accept that authenticity is the key to successful communication, rather than spin. Labour's disastrous attempt to dismiss the Tory candidate as a 'toff' suggests that the party haven't kicked the spinning habit. Take this comment from Labour vice chairman Stephen Ladyman:

"He's a rich man and he won't understand the problems that people face day-to-day," Labour vice-chairman Stephen Ladyman said.

This was crass and patronising - and hypocritical from a government that increased the tax burden on the poorest by axing the 10p tax rate. Voters are capable of deciding if a candidate is out of touch.

Where did it all go wrong for Labour? How did the high hopes of 1997 turn to ashes? My view is that Labour was handicapped by its failure to set out a compelling vision for the country. The death of ideology may be welcome - most of us never embraced the dogma of left or right - but its replacement by managerialism was never going to capture hearts and minds. Throwing money at public services, as Labour did after 2000, was hardly a philosophy, especially when so many doubted how effectively the money had been spent.

Labour's other failing was in communications. As I wrote after meeting him in 2006, Alistair Campbell made the critical mistake of not realising that a different approach was needed in government. Campbell's aggressive style actually prevented Labour from telling its story. The government's admirable work in helping the poor went untold, which compounded the impact of the terrible mistake over the 10p tax rate. Labour spent a decade bad mouthing the state of public services - small wonder few thought those services may have improved.

If, as seems likely, the Conservatives win a landslide in 2010, a new pattern will have been established in British politics. For the second time in a row, power will have changed hands by a landslide: almost unheard of before Blair's triumph in 1997. (Labour's huge victory in 1945 was hardly typical, coming at the end of the second world war, ten years after the previous election. And Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979 with a majority of just 44.) The 1997 and (likely) 2010 big wins suggest something else: that parties are finding it hard to renew themselves in government, and instead become remote and out of touch. But are voters becoming more fickle, switching allegiance as they grow bored with a party? There must be some truth in this, especially as the three main UK-wide parties have lost their distinctiveness.

The other lesson is the danger of alienating grass root supporters. The Thatcher-Major governments were the arch centralisers, ultimately destroying the Conservatives' base in local government - and demoralising the supporters they needed in the 1997 general election. Labour failed to learn from the Tory mistake, leaving the party vulnerable to a similar wipe-out in local government. The local election results in England and Wales earlier this month suggested that history is repeating itself. This does not bode well for Labour in the next general election.   

Social Media: the new era of authentic communication?

Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are taking the world by storm. So I was lucky to spend Friday learning more at Don't Panic's Guide to Social Media in London.

I've got to know Nicky and Andy from Don't Panic over the last couple of years after they asked me to speak at the CIPR Northern Conference in 2006 - and at Don't Panic's first 'own brand' events on crisis communications in May 2007 and January 2008. (The imminent birth of our baby means I can't take part in July's crisis comms event in my second home, Leeds!) Don't Panic is a very impressive event management company that has led the way in exploring how social media is changing the nature of PR.

Friday's event was, in my view, Don't Panic's best yet on the 'new PR' and social media. Earlier events in 2006 and 2007 for Sunderland University had set the scene in fascinating and compelling fashion without quite moving from theory to 'how to' manage PR in the Facebook era. Friday's event moved things on significantly, with some great examples of how to connect with social media. It also suggested the Facebook world marked the death of command communication ('this is the truth') and the triumph of authenticity. In short, companies and political parties can't hope to control the message. Consumers and voters can now overcome any attempts to spin the message.

This has long been my view of PR. I have always urged my organisations to 'tell it like it is'. When first direct briefly pulled out of the mortgage market in April because we were overwhelmed by demand, I made sure we said sorry to customers for giving them poor service. After all, we're famous for getting it right - so why wouldn't we say sorry when we didn't live up to our normal standards?

Friday's event brought together an interesting group of speakers. My favourite was Meg Pickard, head of communities and user experience at guardian.co.uk. Meg explained the Guardian's journey to interactivity in a social media world. It was interesting that when conference chair Neville Hobson asked who blogged, twittered, was on Facebook (the list goes on), Mary's hand went up every time.

Graham Googkind from Frank PR gave some classic examples of campaigns that connected with the Facebook generation. My concern was that most of his campaigns seemed to be all about lad culture, belittling women. Perhaps that's right for his clients. It just seemed horribly anachronistic.

Is rude the new polite?

Quite a few delegates, including Stuart Bruce from Wolfstar, blogged and twittered during the event. It confirmed that social etiquette is changing quickly. Not long ago, conference speakers would have been horrified to see delegates typing on their laptops or texting on their phones or BlackBerries during an event. Now, they're delighted that their words of wisdom are reported live.

Is politics ready for authenticity?

A decade ago, New Labour was the triumphant icon of the new politics. The party engaged with voters disillusioned with John Major's Conservatives. An ultra aggressive PR operation hassled the Tories and intimidated the media. Roll forward to the present day and Labour is as stunned by its unpopularity as Major's Tories were. I'll write more about this later this weekend in a post reflecting on the Crewe and Nantwich by-election. But the lesson for Labour from the Don't Panic event on social media is that the era of brutal spin is over. That's why the crass attack on Tory candidate Edward Timson as a 'toff' was doomed. Voters will decide whether they think a candidate is out of touch. They don't need a party that has swooned before millionaire businessmen to tell them.