Blog Relations
Gordon Brown and Social Media
Gordon Brown has his flickr account, his twitter stream, and his forthcoming WordPress site. (Built by New Media Maze)
Cool.
But where is it getting him? He’s the most unpopular prime minister in history.
Let’s face it, the Great Gordo is hardly a ringing endorsement for social media.
I don’t mean to be ungrateful. He’s helping make social media respectable -which is great for all of us who are in it – but what is social media doing for him? Not much.
The truth is, that all the social media efforts coming out of Number 10 are driven by advisers and consultants. Yes, it is more cost-effective and cooler than traditional marketing. But in the end, it doesn’t make an impact unless the personality involved is actually writing the twitters and WordPress posts and the captions under the Flickr Pictures.
This is the problem with Social Media and big institutions and big people. The medium is intimate and personal. Even if you just blog a few opinions, your audience gets a sense of who you really are. If you already have a Big Media presence, perhaps you want to hold more of yourself back, rather than give more of yourself away.
Of if you do, like David Cameron, allow the press to know about your family and children, you want to do it in a controlled sort of way. You don’t want to risk writing something thoughtless before breakfast, and then find that the Today Programme has just picked up your gaff.
It would be a huge risk for a politician to be so up close and personal as required by Social Media. A blog by a PM could degenerate into a sort of Dear Bill column, that used to adorn Private Eye in the days when it was funny.
But then one has to ask, What has Gordon got to lose?
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I think it’s important to appreciate what the various Number 10 ‘2.0′ channels are trying to achieve.
The Twitter account explicitly belongs to the @DowningStreet digital team, as opposed to the PM himself; and I actually think they do a damn fine job with it. It’s often personal, interesting, amusing, trivial (in a good way) and – most importantly – two-way. I don’t know of any corporate entity doing a better job.
Flickr is really just an outsourced photo library app; and if it gets the pictures out to a wider audience, then great.
(For the record – neither the Twitter nor Flickr activity has been ‘driven by advisers and consultants’: it’s been at the initiative of the recently-appointed, full-time head of digital media.)
I’ve been personally involved in the move to WordPress. But let’s be clear, it’s not going to be ‘Gordon Brown’s blog’. We’re using WordPress as it’s a simple-to-use, flexible and (yes) free publishing platform. The results will ostensibly be a classic corporate website; the benefits, initially at least, will be ‘under the hood’, and on the balance sheet.
So let’s be absolutely clear. None of these are trying to be something they aren’t. They don’t claim to be blogged, tweeted or snapped personally by the PM himself. (And as the ‘6am phone calls’ story showed, even if they were personally done by the PM, they’d be ridiculed anyway.)
Will all this transform his poll ratings? It’s technically an irrelevant point, since the activity is being done by the politically neutral civil servants in his office.
But one thing I guarantee, is that it sets a precedent for every other comms team in government – many of whom should be making more use of ’social’ tools to work with their customers and stakeholders. If No10 is doing something, that’s generally taken as permission for anyone else in HMG to do it too… with less headline-grabbing, but almost certainly more substantial outcomes.
Hi Simon
Thanks for your interesting response. I don’t mean to belittle the great achievement of the Number 10 team and Government taking part in Social Media. It is a big step forward.
However, I can’t help noticing that nearly all the pictures are of Gordon Brown. I suppose that’s inevitable as he is the big public personality.
If it’s really about Number 10, rather than the PM, it would be great for the Governmental personalities to come out of the shadows more.
I agree that if the PM blogged he could be ridiculed – it could become a Dear Bill column.
Perhaps it’s unrealistic for civil servants to be more “social” and more public.
I’m just pointing out the difficulties that have to be overcome. It will probably take time for attitudes to change. I very much hope that bit by bit, it will all help to humanise and democratise government.
I’m absolutely convinced that civil servants need to become more public, as you say. But I see this happening at the ’stakeholder communication’ level primarily.
I can entirely understand why the No10 (civil servant) staff want to remain anonymous. No10 is the PM, end of. There’s no front-line delivery per se, and hence nobody on that front line. (Plus there are real questions of personal security.)
But I could imagine a scenario where the PM’s media adviser might want to blog, almost as a rebuttal channel. It’s always been a shadowy role, even though the names – Alastair Campbell, Damian McBride – have become relatively well-known. But now the correspondents are all blogging, it might be a natural move for McBride’s successor?
It would indeed be fascinating if the PM’s media adviser were to start taking an active role blogging and commenting on journalists’ blogs and bloggers’ blogs too – rebutting and arguing with them. It’s what politics needs to make it more sparky and interesting.
And I don’t see why,just on special occasions, the PM himself can’t weigh in with a post or comment to make an extra big impression. If he has something very personal and important to say – perhaps a statement of his core beliefs – putting it out on the Number 10 blog might make a big impact and get a very direct and honest response from the public.
In the past, politicians have tested the political waters by leaking stories to the press. This is a little shady. A blog might be a good place for a Media Adviser to openly test an idea and get direct feedback.
At the moment, I think the social media experiment in politics has given us more detail of the PM’s diary – the close ups that don’t make it into the press. This is good stuff, and a great start, but it’s really for political junkies. Hopefully more interesting and bolder things will come.