No we don't need state-funded journalists, we need content people want to buy

Local newspapers are dying. This death is accompanied by a great wailing from the usual sources who argue (without really explaining why) that local papers - even ones that are hardly read at all by the public, even on-line - are "vital to a functioning democracy". The government last year set on Dame Frances Caincross, a left-wing journalist, to look at what could be done to rescue local papers from their impending doom.

Unsurprisingly our journalist concludes that the only solution is state-funded journalism, a new regulator (staffed by worthy lefties like Dame Frances no doubt) and assorted enquiries into the evil that is Facebook (and other monstrous tech giants like Google). It is also unsurprising that, aside from one chap from the Advertising Association, the entire panel of 'experts' advising Dame Frances were journalists or media owners. The outcome of the commission is entirely predictable and won't serve, in any way, to rescue the local press.

The problem is that, despite working in businesses that depend to a greater or lesser extent on advertising, journalists seem not to have the slightest clue as to why advertisers invest their cash in the manner they do. Here's one pretty typical example from Twitter:

I think most journalists know that. They’re at the mercy of hapless publishing giants and similarly incompetent media buying agencies who are so obsessed by Facebook et al that they’ve stopped investing in what’s important.

As you can see journalism ("quality journalism" is the official management term here) is dying because those naive advertisers have been duped by Facebook and Google into shifting their spending there rather than leaving it with publications that nobody reads. Now it's true that marketers, for brand advertising at least, are pulling back from relying on Facebook and Google, but they are not shifting their spend back into print newspapers (magazines are a different matters - take note that the top four TV listings magazines sell nearly 4 million copies every week).

The reason brands are pulling away from social media is that the owners of that media are limiting the advertising's reach by manipulating the algorithms - where once millions of likes meant millions in reach, it now means thousands. Plus, with consumers shifting their attention to other social media, the responsiveness of Facebook advertising degrades - even with supposedly sophisticated targeting Facebook is using a heavy roller to crack walnuts.

There is an old joke about newspapers that the purpose of the journalism is to fill in the gaps between the advertising. We shouldn't forget that most local papers exist because they provided a vehicle for local businesses to advertise. Yes those newspapers did journalism but much of the point for the journalism was to get folk to buy the paper. I recall being told by one former local paper editor about his first assignment as a junior reporter - go to a funeral with the instruction to write down the name of as many people attending as possible. Local papers carried photographs with lots of people in because those people - and their nearest and dearest - would buy the paper.

The stock in trade of local newspapers wasn't "quality journalism", it was births, deaths and marriages, cars for sales, cinema listings, job adverts, sports results, school prize givings and evening classes. The sale adverts from the local department store were just as important (probably more so) than the report of what Alderman Smith had said about the parks department at Wednesday's Council meeting. The paper was a record of the boring mundanities of life in a community - Bradford's Telegraph & Argus has been sharing online some images from the past: football teams, ballet classes, scout troops and girl guides not councillors or MPs.

People still want all these lists, this record of everyday life, it's just that so much of it has moved elsewhere - not to Facebook (although a glimpse through community pages will show that they absolutely capture those everyday events and happenings) but to job sites and car sales sites, to direct messaging and to email. If local papers want to do their "quality journalism" maybe they need to think about how to get back the bread and butter of past times rather than try to blame social media for a demise that was predictable in the 1990s at the outset of the 'world wide web' - long before Facebook or Google came to dominate the world.

It is crazy to see the solution as some sort of state-funded cadre of local journalists producing copy that nobody reads because someone has decided that it is "quality journalism". Instead news media need to turn off the button marked "free" (and it would help here if the BBC didn't crowd out so much on-line, something Cairncross does note) and start expecting the public to pay for news. Most of them won't because they're not really that interested but if the cost is low enough there's no reason why local media cannot work. What we can't have, however, is journalists believing they've some sort of privileged position in society (all the guff about democracy and so forth) and expecting taxes to provide for them.

Oh, and next time we have an enquiry into an area where advertising is central perhaps we should put marketers in charge? What Dame Frances and her advisors have shown us is that they - mostly journalists - really haven't the faintest idea why advertisers make the spending decision they make. And I hope such a panel would conclude that we don't need state-funded journalists, we need content people want to buy.

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Vote Leave's "sophisticated" campaign was the Internet age equivalent of junk mailing

Back in the day we had two sorts of client - ones who paid lip service to the idea of targeted marketing and those who tried to use targeting to improve results. The former - typically financial services businesses of one sort or another - were great clients as what they really wanted to do was shove out their sales message through every available direct marketing medium regardless of any nuanced assessment of responsiveness. Mostly this is because the levels of response that made credit card applications, investment bonds and mortgages cost-effective was very low. This is (for those who remember back then) why everyone got so royally pissed off with the likes of American Express - except us direct marketers, we were making lots of lovely print margin for churning out essentially untargeted material.

The second bunch were much more difficult as conversion to sales, cost per response, cost per new order and so forth really mattered. They used agencies like us because we were (or so we said) at the cutting edge of sophisticated targeting making use of databases, expert systems, geodemographics, psychographics and other of the assorted computer dark arts. We used all those tricks, tests and personalised gimmicks - "Yes, SIMON COOKE, you could already have won FIFTY THOUSAND POUNDS in our preselected prize draw..." - we were the Red Sparrows of marketing. Today we'd probably have strangely coloured hair but back then we were more Mad Men in our dress style.

Recently a bunch of people who, it seems, hadn't realised that careful, targeted marketing doesn't require Facebook, have discovered that those databases, expert systems, geodemographics and psychometrics really do exist and have been used to target advertising by political campaigners. Indeed, today's marketing Red Sparrows have cluttered up UK and US airwaves - besplendid in their best red hair - spinning the same bollocks we were spinning back in 1992. Carefully selected statistics - "using geodemographic targeting has been shown to lift response rate by up to 150%" (from nearly nothing to very slightly more than nearly nothing) - are wheeled out wrapped in words that probably mean little in this context but sound good - algorithm, profiling, psychology. Add to this how we continue to believe Vance Packard's nonsense about secret and hidden techniques used by marketers to trick us into buying stuff we don't want to buy, and you've a recipe for otherwise intelligent people believing that somehow the Brexit vote was all down to this occult science rather than a whole load of people, for whatever reason, really not liking the European Union very much.

What's come out now is some of the detail of Vote Leave's targeted advertising. And, it seems that Vote Leave - led by a man who tells us Marvin's brain is tiny next to his - were the sort of client we loved. The supposedly sophisticated targeting based on cunning psychology and profiling turns out to be broad brush targeting - "older men", "women", "middle aged people" and so forth. Here's a journalist completely failing to understand the entire point of marketing but, in doing so, revealing how simplistic Vote Leave's targeting was:









There's more but this will do. We were told - stern, questioning MPs interrogated visiting "experts" to ascertain this - that the Brexit campaign was uniquely cunning and sophisticated to the point of being sinister. Yet the truth is that they used the same level of targeting sophistication as Amex did in 1992 - not very much at all. This isn't to say that Vote Leave's online advertising didn't work but what's clear from this revelation is that it wasn't targeted at any level below the sort of broad brush demographics - men, women, old, young - that were used to target TV ads in the age of mass marketing. To put it another way, Vote Leave spent a lot of money flooding facebook with ads in the same manner that Amex leaflets flooded through your letter box back in the early 1990s. It wasn't sophisticated at all - for all the talk of physicists - it was the Internet age version of junk mailing, essentially spam.

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Don't burn the platform - social media, ad fraud and regulation

Look I know you don't like advertising (or at least lots of you say you don't) and get irritated by men in ill-fitting suits and bad shirts telling you that "the brand must be a hero" or some such nonsense, but can we stop shooting the messenger please? Advertising is not the reason why Google and Facebook dominate social media, advertising is not the reason why kids are fat (if indeed they are), and advertising is not some sort of sinister manipulative force responsible for all the evils of capitalism. Nope - advertising is just businesses talking to you.

Even the FT, what was once capitalism's leading journal, is at it:

The need to sell advertising is at the heart of the toxic behaviour of many of the social media companies. The online ad market is dominated by Facebook and Google, and appears to be fraught with bots and fraudulent clicks. Hence France, Germany and Australia are all conducting inquiries into online advertising.

First let's get one thing clear, online ad fraud is a problem and one that is more of a threat to the advertising business than to us as consumers (and because of this - it's a threat to Google and Facebook's revenue streams as well):

According to a 2016 report from The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and WhiteOps, the loss from ad fraud was $7.2 billion in 2015—primarily from bots. To put that into perspective, total spend on display advertising, according to the 2015 report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers, was only $12 billion, excluding Google and Facebook.

Note the last part of this - the largest part of online ad fraud takes place elsewhere than Google and Facebook (or for that matter Twitter, LinkedIn and so forth) because these are 'walled gardens' - closed platforms - that control what you and I see. That's not to say there's none of this stuff on Google and Facebook - online advertising (operationally and in terms of regulation) is still in its infancy with the technology options and the creativity of fraudsters running ahead of those policing the system. It's probably more important to focus on the shared interests of advertisers and consumers (neither of whom like fraud) rather than seek to break up, control or regulate the platforms.

One of the issues here is that regulatory regimes for advertising vary enormously and there is very little international cooperation - ICAS (the International Council on Advertising Standards) was set up in 2008 but only formalised with an independent secretariat in 2017 and, as yet, doesn't include China or Japan (the biggest source of on line ad fraud). Moreover, advertising standards regimes have historically been far more focused on advertising content - 'legal, decent and honest' - than on the sort of technological deception that is undermining online advertising effectiveness. This is made more difficult by the fact that much ad fraud is not illegal (or it's hard to prove ill intent):

One of the biggest reasons fraud is so rampant is simply that it’s not illegal. Unlike credit card fraud, nobody is going to jail for ad fraud, and it’s not exactly the sort of activity that elicits a crackdown from law enforcement, which means there is significantly less risk involved. And yet it’s extremely lucrative.

Imagine a bad actor is weighing their options. On one hand there is credit card fraud, which has modest rewards and very high risks. On the other is ad fraud, which is very lucrative and very low risk. It’s a no-brainer.

Partly this is because of online purchasing models (PPC and variants) but mostly it's because governments have focused attention on other online risks (terrorism, pornography, communication with minors) rather than on advertisers getting some of their payments scammed. As the FT observed governments are now conducting enquiries into ad fraud but this has got little or nothing to do with allegations of "toxic behaviour" levelled at social media companies. That makes for a cool headline, gets you (ironic) clicks but completely misses both the problem and the solution. Regulators and governments need to be working with the platforms rather than seeing them as the problem - they have as much interest in dealing with ad fraud as any government.

In calling (foolishly I believe) for a "publicly funded model" to compete with Facebook, the FT and Diane Coyle confuse two issues and in doing so suggest that Facebook, Google and other 'walled garden' platforms are at best turning a blind eye to fraud and at worst complicit in that deception. Coyle further confuses the issue by talking about using "competition powers" to 'break up' Google and Facebook - quite whose competition powers she wants to use escapes me - when the issue isn't competition but public confidence and the lack of effective legal recourse against fraudsters (after all the BBC, Coyle's much-loved institution, enjoys a de facto news monopoly in the UK).

And, to cap it all, the online market is international so requires international responses - setting up some sort of taxpayer-funded mini-Google in the UK simply isn't the answer. Perhaps a thoughtful government (this may already be happening) might consider using the WTO - or some other international body - as a means of looking at how to coordinate online advertising regulation? Google and Facebook are not angels but it is misleading to suggest that they are complicit in online fraud - more than anything they stand to lose out from fraud as advertisers look for different ways to engage online.

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Facebook isn't the bad guy. Facebook makes the world (and our lives) better.

I know, this isn't the received wisdom. We're supposed to believe that Facebook is some sort of evil wall garden created to harvest our 'data' so it can make millions from 'selling that 'data'. I have to be honest here, I think that this is nonsense. For all that we should have protections from abuse, stalkers and so forth, the reality is that we get a huge social benefit from the existence of Facebook (otherwise we wouldn't all - or lots of us - be using it). Here's Alex Tabbarok with the basis for this, seemingly unpopular, opinion:

What could be more ours than our friends? Yet I have hundreds of friends on Facebook, most of whom I don’t know well and have never met. But my Facebook friends are friends. We share common interests and, most of the time, I’m happy to see what they are thinking and doing and I’m pleased when they show interest in what I’m up to. If, before Facebook existed, I had been asked to list “my friends,” I would have had a hard time naming ten friends, let alone hundreds. My Facebook friends didn’t exist before Facebook. My Facebook friendships are not simply my data—they are a unique co-creation of myself, my friends, and, yes, Facebook.

So when some self-appointed and probably self-important person tells you that Facebook should 'pay' to use you 'data' tell them (because this is true) that Facebook have paid us. They paid us by providing us with Facebook, with its social interaction, jokes, daft quizzes, community forums and cat videos. It brilliant. As Alex concluded: "Facebook hasn’t taken our data—they have created it."

And one last point, one I've being making since my direct marketing days back in the 1990s: commercial organisations want information about us (data if you insist) for one reason alone - to sell us stuff. We should be a lot more worried about why government seems to want loads of information about us - they don't want to sell us stuff, they want to control us.

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More lies about advertising - this time from the Children's Food Trust

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The Children's Food Trust are back again with their proposals for advertising bans and controls. And, since it's the enemy of choice, the attack on advertising is couched in terms of a criticism of self-regulation.

“The ASA has proved itself unwilling and unable to fulfil this role,” he added.

“In industry after industry – from MPs’ expenses, to phone-hacking, to banks, and now in online marketing – self-regulation has proven to be a failed model. More of the same is not what is needed to protect children’s health or to give parents more help in making healthy choices for their family.”

The problem, we're told, is that the self-regulation of advertising (remember that broadcast advertising isn't self-regulated but regulated by statute) under the aegis of the Committee of Advertising Practice has allowed advertisers of food products to use online advertising. This, of course, means that some of the adverts are seen by children.

What struck me about the reports from the Trust is that the main evidence it presents (about four or five websites) simply doesn't indicate anything different from what is allowable in broadcast advertising already. However, they also demonstrate the scale of parental irresponsibility when it comes to Internet use:

Social networking websites, like Facebook, are especially popular amongst children and young people, 28 per cent of 8–11 year olds and 75 per cent of 12–15 year olds have an active social networking site profile. One third of 8–12 year olds have a profile on sites that require users to register as being aged 13 or over.

So let's be clear about this - Rowntree, Krave, Cheesestrings and Nesquik are advertising in media that have a 13 age minimum. But because irresponsible parents allow their under-13 children to use those sites those advertisers should be banned from doing so?

Yet again we are seeing the use of poor quality research - with no peer review and no robust methodology - to justify arguments for advertising bans. Controls proposed solely because some parents can't say 'no' to their children. Meaning that children see advertising that they would not see on a commercial children's TV channel - advertising that complies with the agree codes of practice. Indeed, because the websites all show TV advertisements, these are codes of practice subject to statutory regulation.

But I guess that blaming advertising gets a better headline than blaming parents for letting their ten year olds go on Facebook (where an advert for Sugar Puffs is probably the least of worries).

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"Reining in Twitter..."

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....seems to be the big challenge for Leveson today - and what a challenge!

Senior MPs have said that Lord Justice Leveson must find a way to stop people from wrongly identifying people using social media channels, after Lord McAlpine was falsely accused of being a paedophile.

And what a silly "senior MP" - one Conor Burns:

"We are going to have to bring Facebook and Twitter under the same laws as libels committed by newspapers or television channels.”

Er, Mr Burns. Facebook and Twitter - as well as this blog and your secretary - are already subject to the same libel laws.

We elect these people but who selects them?

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The Internet is corrupting our youth!

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Or so says celebrity brain expert, Baroness Greenfield. After all it has been a few weeks since her last national news headline! Children are being damaged by Twitter she says:

Baroness Greenfield, professor of pharmacology at Oxford University, said a decline in physical human contact meant children struggled to formulate basic social skills and emotional reactions.

She criticised the “unhealthy” addiction to Twitter among some users who resort to increasingly nasty outbursts under the “sanitised and often anonymous guise of the web”. 

Did someone have a go at the Baroness on Twitter? Or is she merely surfing on the Twitter brand - after all, her main beef is about the social development of children. And Twitter is full of children!

Baroness Greenfield quoted figures showing that more than half of 13- to 17-year-olds now spend more than 30 hours a week using video games, computers, e-readers, mobile phones and other screen-based technology. 

Apparently all this stuff is making children less well-behaved, is turning them into a bunch of narcissists and creating a generation of cyber-bullies. Doubtless something must be done!
 

“To have this ultimate beauty contest showing how much better you are than everyone else can only lead to sadness because there will always be someone who scores higher than you," she said. "It means you are constantly lacking in self-esteem, over narcissistic and, at the same time, in constant anxiety.”

Baroness Greenfield also warned that social networking websites were fuelling bullying, adding: “The anonymity of the web can make it easier to do and also removes the constraints that would normally apply for what one might regard as human nature.” 

The good Baroness presents no evidence at all to support her contentions - not a single study, nothing that has been through that pesky peer review process. This is just comment made in an interview ahead of Baroness Greenfield presenting her "findings" (also known as her "opinion"). The only piece of "evidence" is a report of an opinion survey of English teachers who think kids have shorter attention spans. Now I love opinion polls but this isn't evidence of anything other than the informed prejudice of one set of teachers.

What seems to be bothering the Baroness is that children are less likely to sit like supine sheep awaiting the latest dollop of whatever their elders and betters believe they should be fed. The choice and liberty that "screen-based technology" provides makes it harder to socialise young people into a particular set of behaviours. It seems to me that young people can (and do) pay attention but that having alternatives to hand means that they are less tolerant of boring lectures.

Finally, Baroness greenfield seems to think that children are spending the sixty-odd hours of the week when they aren't looking at a screen or sleeping doing absolutely nothing. Perhaps gazing blankly into space or wandering zombie-like round the house. Funnily enough those children are spending that time in a social environment surrounded by and interacting with their peers, their parents and their teachers.

The Internet  - whether its Twitter, Facebook or something with penguins - isn't corrupting our youth. In fact it might just be liberating them!

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The Peterborough Pravda. Is this what Louise Mensch wants from local media?

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Yesterday, Louise Mensch – the MP for Corby – argued that local newspapers are an essential cog in our democracy:

She called on the government to conduct a review into "local democracy and the local press" to see if there might be some sort of direct or indirect subsidy that could support the sector.

She attacked plans for local TV stations, which will compete against newspapers, because the proposed funding plans include using part of the licence fee as well as BBC content.

Now there are a few obvious things that might be said about Mrs Mensch’s suggestions not least that Tory MPs calling for business subsidies is a wholly new experience for this very long-standing Tory member.

However, at the heart of this isn’t the question of whether we have a local press – in my view we have as vibrant a local debate as we’ve had in a very long while. But here in Bradford very little of that debate is down to the local evening paper.

Local papers have declined, many have merged, closed or become mere shadows – more advertising sheets that newspapers. And that decline continues – think for a second or two where you go to look for a job, a car, a house or the cinema listings? In times past you bought the local rag on the appropriate day and looked in the class ads. Now you use your lap top or your iPhone – tomorrow you’ll be using the telly in your living room.

Local newspapers have become ever more reliant on the money that local councils spend – the statutory notices, job ads and theatre listings. Without this cash, many more local papers would go to the wall. Maybe this would be a loss but it is the market that is killing these papers not the choices or decisions of local councils. People no longer buy the evening paper – 30 years ago the penetration of the York Evening Press was up at around 80%. Hardly a house in the City didn’t receive the paper. Today that paper sells around 25,000 copies each day (as it happens about the same as Bradford’s Telegraph & Argus). The Doncaster Star sells fewer than 3,000 copies.

It seems to me that, for all her good intentions, Mrs Mensch is railing against the wind – for sure, stopping councils from producing their own free newspapers and not using the license fee to support local TV might slow the decline a little. But the decline will continue for the simple reason that people no longer buy the local paper and local businesses no longer advertise in the local paper. And while this is happening local papers reduce their editorial staff – I fear that many will simply be desk-bound churners of press releases (which isn’t why anyone went to journalism school) – to the point where they simply don’t have the resource to cover stories.

However, public subsidy – using taxpayers’ money to stop local papers closing – seems like a recipe for a supine, state-directed newspaper. Something of a Pravda of Peterborough or Isvestia of Ipswich – regurgitating the tractor stats produced by the local authorities and printing without question or challenge the words of the local MP. A ghastly shade of the challenging, offending and investigating local paper of legend.

Maybe that’s what Mrs Mensch wants but for me, I’ll take my changes with bloggers, Facebook and citizen journalism. That might just be the better future don’t you think?

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Sorry, Dame Stella, but you're wrong about children reading - and about social media

Dame Stella Rimmington, former head girl and ex-spy is chairing the judging panel for this year’s Man Booker Prize. I suspect that part of the job description for this chairing role is to say something controversial about literature or reading or the general state of the world through the eyes of bookish folk. And Dame Stella has obliged with a gentle rant about twitter:

Dame Stella said that while she was confident a market for fiction would still exist in 100 years, she feared many children were not growing up to be book lovers. “I think much of the Twittering and emailing and texting and all that sort of stuff that children go in for now may be taking their eyes off reading fiction. When I was young we read more than the average child reads now.”

Now I don’t wish to be too critical of such an eminent lady but she’s talking nonsense:

In the UK, the value of publishers’ sales of children’s books actually increased in 2010 by 2%, to £242m. The report shows that the value of publishers’ UK sales has been increasing year on year over the last three years, from £236m in 2008.

And this represents some 60 million books sold which makes for five books on average for each of the UK’s roughly 12 million children. OK, the kids aren’t devouring hundreds of books in the manner that Dame Stella doubtless did as a girl but they are definitely reading.

More importantly however social media – all that twittering, emailing and texting – means that children are doing something we never did (and which I suspect Dame Stella’s contemporaries didn’t do either). Children are writing to eachother. OK, they’re writing in a language that only just approximates to English and is replete with acronyms, shortened words and peculiar codes but it is written communication.

If – twenty years ago - we’d have said that the most common form of communication between young people would be written communication, the experts would have looked at us, shaken their heads and called for the men in white coats. Yet that is the reality – we have replaced the verbal communication, whether directly or via the telephone, that was the dominant feature of the decades from the 1960s to the 1990s with a mish-mash of written forms.

It seems to me that, regardless of the oddity of language involved, the growth of social media forms – facebook, twitter and so forth – makes a positive contribution to the literacy levels of young people. After all you can't play in the sandpit of social media if you can’t read or write can you!

Dame Stella’s comments reveal yet again the extent to which the literary elite are out of touch – not just with the facts about books and literacy but with what interests and excites young people about reading and writing. Yet again much chatter will be expended on the Man Booker Prize – chatter that will sail completely by the majority of folk. Why?

Because the literature involved presents an impenetrable arrogance that covers up the deeper truth – it is indulgent literary fiction that is dying out not reading. And this is because the books promoted by the literary elite are not what most people want to read. If the Man Booker Prize is to mean more it has to break out from the narrow genre into which is has crawled – it has to embrace popular fiction and recognise that just because a book doesn’t use three words that aren’t in the Concise Oxford Dictionary on the first page and has fun things like spies or wizards or vampires in it, that doesn’t make it a bad book.

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Social media, politics and the capacity of our gobs!

Yesterday saw the last in our CllrSocMed tour of Yorkshire (and that oddity of a place “The Humber”) during which we’ve talked to – and with – around 80 councillors from different political parties about that strange old beast, “social media”. From my perspective it has been an education and, I hope, those councillors who came along got some value from my inanities, prejudices and bad jokes.

It seemed right to reflect on the whole “social media” thing – on its ups and downs, on the way in which it has caught a few politicians out and how it just might be pretty useful. One thing though that is abundantly clear is that the political party panjandrums neither ‘get’ nor like social media (or indeed the idea of a ‘blogosphere’). All they see are problems – councillors, MPs, candidates opening their gobs and inserting size 10 hobnails, gangs of opponents bombarding the world with attacking comments and, above all, something that can’t be controlled, can’t be put into a tidy communications grid.

Unfortunately the genie is out of the bottle, has a headache and isn’t about to be bossed around by former journalists and lobbyists employed by the big political parties. And here’s why:

• There are 500 million people worldwide using Facebook, 175 million on Twitter and hundreds of thousands blogging. Add in MySpace, Flickr, YouTube and other places and spaces and you have a mob environment that cannot be directed or controlled by the politicians – other than by stopping or blocking.
• The game has changed – we’re right back to response, interaction and engagement and away from message management, targeting and mass communications. Success will come from understanding what makes people respond positively rather than from repetition and saturation.
• Whether something or someone is ‘liked’ has become important – as significant as message content. And being liked comes from exchange and interaction not from polish and presentation alone. While being tall and having good hair still matters, it is joined by being witty, responding to those around and not being an obsessive or a bore.
• Politics is boring – for plenty of people it has always been boring – and most folk don’t like it. While the charmed circle of Westminster controlled debate this didn’t matter but now boredom has triumphed. The bloke outside Number Ten can be – and is – ignored as we seek our information and pleasure elsewhere.

There are some changes that still need to happen – political parties need to be less obsessed with whether something someone once said was “offensive”. The next generation – a generation brought up with Facebook and Twitter – will not be either interested or impressed with the singling out of an unfortunate tweet or slightly off Facebook photo. The current approach of trying to remove all media risk not only doesn’t work but is crass and ridiculous. It is ironic that our kids have grown up in this respect – can accept and forgive the odd social faux pas – whereas us older folk remain “offended” and “appalled”. There is surely a good case for political party bosses to grow a sense of humour and to learn what the words, “I’m sorry” mean. The public – the folk on Facebook and Twitter – get this, it’s about time our lords and masters did too.

In the mean time I’ll leave you with Simon’s “How not to do Twitter” for politicians:

• Attack the man not the ball. That’s right go for the jugular folks, forget about honest debate and go for your opponent on the basis of where he was born, the colour of his hair, the car he drives or what he said ten years ago when he wasn’t a Councillor. The audience will love all that, they’ll think you a really nice, pleasant person who they’d love as their Councillor or MP!
• Tell risky jokes – you know the ones about wishing Maggie were dead or Mandelson’s dog. You’ll get a laugh – lots of people will send your jolly witticism round the airwaves which will be great. Except you’re not Jimmy Carr or Frankie Boyle are you? They can do it because they’re comedians – you’re not are you!
• Swear a lot. Well everyone does, don’t they? The twitterfeed is full of cussing, of ‘c’ words and ‘f’ words competing for space. If you swear a little it shows you’re normal but look at the fuss when Cameron said “twat”! You don’t need to swear to get your point across and, if you do it right, other folk will do all your swearing for you anyway.
• Call people names. Somebody tweets about housing and you respond with a pithy comment capped off with “you idiot”. Now that will work won’t it, you’ve put the other side firmly in their place. A bit like Barnsley’s chief executive calling Eric Pickles a ‘clown’ – not exactly the best idea really!

Now before you all go crawling through my tweets, let me say that I’ve done all these things – sometimes in the heat of the moment, sometimes with malice aforethought. This changes nothing and I don’t set myself up as exemplary or even especially expert – the advice is what it is, gleaned from having sent 30,000 tweets a handful of which, in the glory of hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have sent.

Whatever you do, don’t ignore social media – it is too important for that. But understand that when you, as a politician, are using social media you are ‘on parade’ not in the pub with your mates. It’s a forgiving parade but, as someone once said, don’t tweet anything you wouldn’t want your mum to see!


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So will social media make us more tolerant (at least in public)?

Today I spent a thoroughly enjoyable day in Scarborough speaking with Councillors about social media. Alongside all the usual subjects – how to do it, what the risks are, how councils get in the way of local councillors making best use of social media and how it’s all so scary – was a subject that I find quite fascinating. This is the distinction between public and private – the whole question of our media profile and the degree to which we are tolerant of perceived societal sins.

There are plenty of examples of these perceived sins – threatening in jest to blow up airports or stone journalists, dressing up in WWII German uniforms for parties* (and, of course, the dreadful ‘Nazi salute’) and our back catalogue of misbehaviour.

We’ve seen how the misdeeds of Cameron and Osborne are used as a stick to beat them with (especially as a great deal of such bad behaviour involves dressing up in penguin suits and wearing embroidered waistcoats – a sin of terrible poshness). But the question for future generations of politicians – if you like, the ‘Facebook’ generation is just how we will deal with the silly antics, the photographs of semi-naked dances in fountains and the louche photographs of drunkenness and seeming debauchery. All great fun for 19 year olds enjoying university or 25 year olds on the office Christmas night out but what about those who go on to be cabinet ministers, bishops or diplomats?

Will we as a society still drag out photos from 20 years ago – or even newspaper reports from ten years past – as the basis for active, current political campaigns? Will we still say that such and such a politician should be sacked or has bad judgment because of some drunken photos that appeared on Facebook twenty years previously? Or will the fact that Facebook – and other social media – provide such a public record of everyone that the response will be “so what”?

I suspect we won’t grow up. We’ll still seek political advantage from other past pranks and misdeeds. The apology will be ignored and the opportunity to look at the whole person ignored in the search for a clever comment, a good spread in the papers or a cutting blog post.

…but I can hope!

*Always wondered why it was OK to dress up as Stalin, Moa or even Pol Pot but not Hitler?

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Do social media campaigns fit the centralised, controlling, presidential party campaign strategies?

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The Institute of Direct Marketing (a fine body of men and women) have commented on the emerging social media campaigns at the election. The gist of the observation is firstly:

“Marketing Week reports social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter will be primarily used to attack the opposition in the run up to the May 6th polling day.”

And secondly – by way of warning:

“Ivan Ristic, director and co-founder at Diffusion, recently warned that political parties need to be careful in their use of social media during the campaign as there is much less "command and control" of the platform compared to political spin seen in previous eras.”

Which presents an interesting dilemma for the parties given the extent to which they have been trying to direct campaigning centrally. The traditional media demand a centralised campaign as local paper and broadcast media (outside London) has very little impact and the approach adopted by the parties suits this demand. But emerging alternative media – including social media, the world of blogging and specialist publishing – does not fit into this neat paradigm.

The election may – as Iain Dale has observed – have become more “presidential” in nature but alternative media are beginning to shred that cosy, London-centric model. Indeed, twitter, facebook and the blogs are more akin to the old-fashioned street corner soapbox hustings that to the sleek, besuited, controlled media message of the Mandelson-Campbell era in campaigning.

The fall out will be interesting to watch.