Public relations, social media and word of mouth
Government
PDF General Election 2010 – Action Replay
May 13th
I’m looking forward to tonight’s Personal Democracy Forum General Election 2010 – Action Replay at the Royal Society of the Arts.
Speakers include two the leading political strategists in the USA – Mindy Finn and Joe Trippi, along with PDF’s founder Andrew Rasiej. From the UK there is Stella Creasy MP, Labour’s new MP in Walthamstow and the senior strategists behind the online campaigns from the three main parties: Labour’s Mark Hanson, (Deputy MD of Wolfstar and Labour new media strategist), Conservative’s Craig Elder (Online Communities Editor at the Conservative Party) and the Liberal Democrat’s Mark Pack (Head of Digital at Mandate Communications and co-editor Lib Dem Voice www.LibDemVoice.org). There’s also Harry Cole (editor of ToryBear.com), Anthony Painter (commentator and journalist), Alberto Nardelli (creator of Tweetminster) and Prospect Magazine’s James Crabtree.
The event will be chaired by Charlie Beckett the Director of POLIS.
The organisers say It’s seriously oversubscribed, even with a waiting list and overflow room. If you aren’t on the guest list you can still follow it at Amplified (there will be live streaming of the event and I presume the link will appear here.)
The hash tag to follow it on Twitter is #pdfge2010.
Seven years today since my first blog
Apr 24th
It was seven years ago today (on April 24, 2003) when I started my first blog. Little did I know at the time what an amazing effect it would have on my life and career.
If I hadn’t started that blog I might never have started Wolfstar. It would be great to be able to say that I started the blog because of my amazing intuition and foresight. But unfortunately it wouldn’t be true.
In truth it was probably laziness that made me start the blog. From 1998 to 2005 I was a elected local councillor on Leeds City Council. When I was first elected as a councillor I did something that was extremely unusual at the time and started a councillor website. As I’m not a professional designer or coder this was actually quite hard work and if I’m honest wasn’t particularly brilliant.
That’s why when I first came across ‘blogging’ I was intrigued as I thought, that sounds a lot easier than running my website. And so my first blog was born. It was the first councillor blog in the UK and the third political blog – former Lib Dem MP Richard Allan (now European Head of Public Policy for Facebook) and Labour MP Tom Watson were first and second respectively.
It didn’t take long for The Guardian to find my blog and in July 2003 it ran a profile about the UK’s first blogging councillor. As The Guardian article indicates my councillor blog deliberately wasn’t like many of today’s political blogs. It was determinedly focused on local issues that mattered to people in Leeds and more specifically my ward of Middleton (later Middleton Park) in south Leeds.
But my blog wasn’t just about the minutia of being a local councillor. That sort of the thing is for officers. You can’t run a good councillor blog without being political. It was when I was being highly political about local issues that my blog always received the most attention and engagement. Despite popular belief local politics is party political. That’s one of the problems with many of the official efforts to get councillors blogging. Because they are official they have to be a politics free zone (otherwise the local authority would be accused of funding party political campaigning). But you can’t take the politics out of it. Even seemingly mundane decisions such as when the road sweepers visit can actually be highly political (the Tories want the leafy suburbs to be pristine and don’t care about the council estates).
The other important thing I learnt from my councillor blog was the massive impact what you do online can have on what happens offline. The intention of my councillor blog was never to get all 16,000 of the local electors to read it. What I did want (and succeeded in) was to get local ‘influencers’ to read it. If they knew properly about what I was doing then they could talk face to face to other people in the community. That’s why I was pleased that people like the chairs and secretaries of residents associations read it, the local vicar read it, the local neighbourhood policing team read it (and even asked me to write about them!) All these people then went out and spread the word for me.
The success of my councillor blog meant that it didn’t take long before it dawned on me that blogs weren’t just about making my life easier, but also had enormous potential for my day job as a public relations consultant… but that’s a story for another blog post.
Cross-posted to Stuart Bruce on the World, my political blog.
Social media and YouTube to get you voting
Apr 20th
Iain Dale and Total Politics magazine have released a cracking YouTube video of Bucks Fizz’s Eurovison winner ‘Making Your Mind Up’ to encourage people to vote.
It features a host of famous political figures and celebrities including Alastair Campbell, Ann Widdicombe, Nigel Farage, Chris Mullin, Phil Willis, Peter Tatchell, Lynne Featherstone, all-party band MP4 and Anne Diamond.
Lots of political bloggers also make an appearance, my personal favourite has to be Guido Fawkes having his skirt whipped off!
Three of the original Bucks Fizz also appear, with Iain Dale himself making up the quartet.
Remember today’s the last day to register to vote. You can download a form at About My Vote and then you need to hand-deliver it to your local elections office (probably in the Civic Hall or Town Hall, depending on which local council area you live in.) If you’re at work ask your boss for a long lunch hour or if you can leave early. It’s essential to vote.
Remember “If you don’t vote, you can’t complain.”
