The hairier the better!

Besides editing the German website, I worked on two projects last year. One was a comic strip that should explain the Euro crisis in simple terms. The other was a Facebook application for the Sakharov Human Rights Price. It was meant to give people a glimpse of what Facebook would look like without basic rights.

Both were quite different but had two things in common: they were supposed to go viral & they didn’t.

This post is meant to figure out why this happened or rather why it didn't happen, some sort of elaborate guesswork.

First Assumption: Negativity

This is a time of bad news. Your cousin cannot find a job, your friend’s uncle just lost his and you wonder whether your pension will be a worth anything in 30 years – people simply don’t need more negative messages.

Unfortunately, our video and our application do just that – spreading more bad news. The app let’s you choose among a number of ways to get in touch with friends and they all lead to failure: no birthday party during curfew; no Christmas greetings in an intolerant society; not even the freedom to choose what to do in your free time.

In the same vein our video talks about politicians spending lavishly until the financial crisis delivered a rude awakening. The Commission – the good guys – had warned them about it all along. But no one was listening. In short, we are pointing fingers and passing the blame.

Here is how I imagine the inner dialogue of a potential user:
“Wow, the Euro crisis in 1:03 min! My friends should see this! Whom do I send it first? —- Well, my mates in Greece have the crisis 24/7 anyway. —- My British friends? Na, they would only start fretting about the EU wasting money again. —- The German chaps? No way, I’d have to discuss austerity, honesty and Made in Germany for hours.”

Second Assumption: Outmoded

This one is comparable on the layman’s dream of hitting it big at the stock exchange. Every time you hear or read about a hot stock or a great investment it’s either a con or you are too late anyway, the big money has been made years ago.
Applied to Internet campaigns this means that viral campaigns were a thing of the early days of social media when MySpace was still bigger than Facebook and blogs looked more like your grandmother’s diary than the Huffington Post’s tidal wave of categories & subsections.

Third Assumption: Wrong Means

There is something awkward about a stock broker using gangster slang and a Prime Minister trying to communicate with young voters using vernacular from their text messages. The same here, the European Parliament is a serious and honourable institution that is clad in complicated procedures and jargon. No one “buys” viral content from us; people just don’t expect us to be surprising or shocking.

Fourth Assumption: Badly done

This one is the project manager’s nightmare: it could have worked, if only I had done my job properly. If the app was made of more interesting options, if the posts had been more striking, if the video was only shorter or funnier or greener or whatever…

Fifth Assumption: Wrong content

This is a variation of the one above, but with a happier ending. The problem is that this is politics and whatever we do, in the end we have to talk about tedious things like laws and procedure and democracy. If only we could use cats or babies. Things would be so much simpler.

Sixth Assumption: The Zen Way

Buddhism’s different schools all more or less evolve around the idea of life being a futile exercise and heaven a state where one is freed from ego and needs. Some belief it takes endless lives and constant practice to reach this. For Zen-Buddhists, however, it is more like an accident, a byproduct of meditation and practice.

I am not proposing a new cult of the viral, but I like the idea of it being an accident, something you cannot plan for and – even more romantic – that you cannot buy. A campaign that wants to be viral from the beginning would thus be doomed to fail. People will see the calculation and walk on.

Conclusions

We could simply stop trying to go viral.

We could keep on doing what we do and hope for a miracle.

Or, we look for really cute, young and hairy MEPs and just follow them around as they stumble through Parliament.

I can recall when the idea of promoting EP via social media was a new hot topic in the unit. Those days Obama had its successful web campaign and Web Comm was eager to follow. 

Team of stagiaires, we were responsible for series of election stories promoting EPs elections of 2009 and one of the stories was even dedicated to social media networking and to Obama's campaign.

I think I’m not totally wrong when saying that the idea of creating EPs own Facebook account was then also quietly boiling. People were considering how to serve this idea on higher level to get permission.

Obviously EP has now its Facebook account and not only – there’s active Twitter in all languages, accounts in Flickr, Youtube, etc. And this blog was there already three years ago – being like an example of how up to date is Web Comm in a governmental system like EP.

Around 0,3 million likes in Facebook, frequent daily updates in Twitter, Flickr account with notable archive: I see progress. And I can hear people saying that we have to be in line with whatever modern social networks there will start flourish.  (Another interesting question: is social media developed into a more stable phase or is it still going to grow and change in rapid way. But this is to be discussed for someone else.)

Today there's social media teams in the unit and more specialized people are dealing with special (web)projects. As the unit has gathered some expertise during the last three years I feel that I will get a sip from it. I modestly admit that I like it.

Where is the web heading? Thanks to Ludwig Gatzke for the pic @ http://bit.ly/tNLmG8

From Nicolas Princen, head of the web unit of the French Presidency

A company called Viewrz helped the French Presidency to tweet live some extracts of the video stream of the G20 meeting in Cannes. The principle is quite easy: you follow a debate, and whenever you find an extract interesting, you instantaneously send a message to the company, which will cut the last 30 seconds (or 20 seconds, one minute… this has to be decided in advance) of the video and send you a specific link to this short video. Then you just have to tweet it.

=> It would be great to use this kind of tool to cover our plenary debates. It's resource efficient (we need only one or two editors) and the format is nicer than a traditional coverage: you have a live tweet (for example one quote for each political group) and right after the debate you put it online as an article (in a kind of a Storify format). You can skip the boring/technical/empty parts of the debate and focus on the main political statements.

From TBWA 365, web agency

It was very interesting to have a look into the way of working and the logic of a private company, and I noted two things:

• They always start the briefings with their customers with a "cold", data-oriented analysis. It allows to assess the efficiency of a campaign/online strategy.
  => Maybe we should try to objectivise the efficiency of our actions in such a way. We do it but it could and should be more systematic: what were the most popular articles on the Parliament website this month? What worked on Facebook, what was the most retweeted? We need an analyst who does not work as an editor – and thus could be impartial. We could gather good practices and improve the efficiency of our coverage.
• TBWA advises to look for editorial partnerships rather than advertising campaigns. In 2014, the Parliament could write objective, neutral stories about the mandate and the upcoming elections and propose it to big newspapers. I know that journalists don't like it, but it seems newspapers do accept it for (obvious) economic reasons…

La Netscouade, web agency

Benoît Thieulin, CEO of this agency that is well-known for its involvement in the French presidential election campaign in 2007, shared his vision of the future of the web. A highly interesting speech from which I'd like to keep only the concrete points:

• The web is now coming back to more "intermédiation". In the last years, the trend was to try to communicate directly with citizens, but now people want to get some analysis. Hence the central role of journalists, bloggers etc. There is more space for indirect communication and we should not (only) aim at targeting citizens directly.

=> All our multimedia products (for example this one or this one) should clearly made available and customisable by internet users and journalists.

=> Our Facebook and Twitter content should be more "MEP-compatible" so that it can be re-used as much as possible.

• He also pointed out the "social television", i.e. the fact that people watch TV to get the news but comment at the same time on Twitter with their tablets.
  => This raise again the question of putting a twitter feed next to the plenary streaming to allow people to comment live.

Slate.fr, web newspaper

The editor in chief explained us how they explained complex issues in an easy, friendly and funny way. For example, for the scandal around French billionaire Ingrid Bettencourt, they put it in the form of a – fake – Facebook stream. It's really worth having a look!

=> Worth trying in order to explain the negotiations on the EU budget or the financial supervision package?

The Choucha refugee camp is run by the UNHCR. It hosted, when we went there, around 4,000 people. During the peak of the crisis, it had to give shelters to 20,000 refugees.

Well, in fact, it’s precisely because of the “Arab Spring” that I went there to get first-hand impressions. Democracy building is now a work in process in Tunisia and the changes brought a lot of challenges with them, not least with a sudden influx of immigrants fleeing the war in Libya. Tunisia shares 500km of borders with its neighbour and generously accepted all refugees, despite its own precarious situation.

No, I was not on holidays!

The reason why I went there is nonetheless not a personal one. An ad-hoc delegation of MEPs visited two refugee camps and met the Prime Minister and several other ministers in Tunis mid-July. This delegation was an interesting communication opportunity because it touched upon sensitive and “citizen-friendly” topics: immigration, humanitarian aid and the democratic changes in North Africa.

Hence it was decided to cover the delegation a bit more in-depth and live: a pilot project aiming at sending a Webcomm editor with the delegation was set up. I had the chance to be chosen, mainly because I was French-speaking, active in our social media activities and following quite closely the Arab revolutions. My responsibility was to underline the activities of MEPs outside Brussels, on the spot, giving a human touch and trying to make use of the possibilities of Twitter regarding live coverage and direct interactions.

A trip into distress and hopelessness

I was quite excited to leave for three days with a delegation and the reality was up to my expectations. From a personal point of view first: of course, we all see images from refugee camps on TV, we all know what happens in certain regions of the world, but it’s totally different to be on the spot, in the desert, talking to refugees whose biggest problem is, in the end, that they “lost hope”. It’s very different to sit in your sofa with a coke and some crisps, watching the news on TV, and to sit in a tent with humanitarian actors and refugees, with 43°C, in the middle of a sandstorm.

I was shocked by the living conditions in refugee camps and ashamed by the absence of reaction from the EU (this is not only a personal opinion, this is also what the whole delegation stated, asking for more resettlement). Reporting back about what I saw was a -small- consolation, but I couldn’t avoid thinking that the same evening, I could sleep in a good bed and fly back home a few days later, to find family, friends, a house, a job and, more important than everything else, dreams and projects for the weeks, months and years to come.

Communicating live on the spot, a track to follow

43°C, sandstorms every day... The hell for refugees. The Tunisian army takes care of the security of the camp since some riots led to several casualties in May.

From a professional point of view, the delegation was also a rich experience. Sharing three days, from 8AM to 11PM with MEPs allows you to develop a different relationship than the one you can have, for example, in a short interview. You’re not only facing a politician (i.e. a public figure), yourself being in an official position. You’re also facing the private person behind. Yes, our representatives are just human like you and me ;)

The communication project worked very well. It seems the Parliament’s followers on Twitter enjoyed the experience a lot. I tweeted about 170 times in the three days, sent live some 60 pictures taken on the spot with my iPhone. The followers got background information, quotes from MEPs, impressions… We also proposed to them to ask their questions to the MEPs. In the end, the feedback was very positive, from the point of view of the followers as well as from the one of MEPs.

One interpreter even came to me the third day (there was a crew of interpreters together with us), telling me that from the beginning he was quite shocked by my attitude, thinking I was taking pictures for myself and sending text messages to friends all the time! I’m afraid that he was not the only one to have this impression and some ministers could have got the same when we met in Tunis…

In conclusion, I think the experience was worth it and could be repeated regularly. The Parliament could identify a few interesting delegation to cover more in depth every year. Would you have some interest following it or would it be too much?

If you want to know a bit more about the delegation:

We published a Focus on the Parliament’s website

You can read all the tweets on the French Twitter feed Europarl_FR

You can have a look at the pictures taken on the spot

You can read the common statement made by the delegation

You can read the debates on Facebook with our fans (here or there) and read the chat with MEP Judith Sargentini

And you can have a look at the announcement Steve made on this blog in July!

The school itself is a campus located in the outskirts of Denmark’s second city, in a neatly laid out area of low-rise academic buildings, wide boulevards and extensive sports facilities. It is built in that bare-concrete, slightly brutalist style typical of its era, but which in this case is well enough done to look cool and well-maintained, rather than scruffy and hostile like so many less well-designed exemplars of the style.

At work in the Danish School of Media and Journalism (from website - photo: Anders Hviid)

I was in Aarhus as a “keynote speaker” for a “mini-conference”, this one on the potential for the creation of a European public sphere through the use of social media. The conference was a good and well-attended one, though large parts of it necessarily passed me by, being conducted in Danish. The discussion panel at the end, which included Danish MEP Morten Løkkegaard (he of the report on the future of media in the EU), and which was conducted for my benefit entirely in English, was rich, insightful, and, as always, left many interesting avenues of further discussion unexplored.

However, this post is not about the conference as such, but more to record some interesting discoveries (for me, anyway) about the Aarhus school, gathered in the margins of the conference.

1. Crisis, what crisis?

It is notoriously difficult for young European journalists to get jobs. Or so I thought. Each year, in WebCom, we host something like 8-10 trainees in two five-month batches. I am continually impressed by how good they are – motivated, hard working, quick to learn, rapidly operational and productive. I am often also struck by how experienced many of them are, unexpectedly so for people doing internships. The truth is, as many of them have told me, that it is becoming very hard to get jobs. We all know about the crisis in the news industry, particularly its newspaper component, with falling sales,  cutbacks, redundancies, retrenchment being the order of the day. It may be, as one US online editor told us, that the “panic is over“, but that doesn’t mean that the traditional economic model sustaining journalism is not in big trouble and that the new model has yet emerged to replace it.

On top of that, there are specific national issues. I cannot, for example recall an Italian trainee who hasn’t told me of the near impossibility of finding stable employment back home and a consequent search for options in Brussels, Paris, London or elsewhere. Nor are the Italians alone in this, far from it. Meanwhile, it’s a continuous round of short-term contracts, internships and hopeful freelancing.

In Colombia school of journalism in New York, we had heard that graduates were nonetheless still getting jobs, albeit mainly in “organizations which did not exist two years ago”. But that was Colombia, I was curious about Aarhus, a small-country European equivalent.

Anne-Marie Dohm, Dean of the Aarhus Campus (photo: Anders Hviid)

The answer was simple: yes they do. They all do. This remarkable fact, which so contrasts with the experience of all those Brussels trainees, deserves some explanation. According to what the Dean of the School, Anne-Marie Dohm, told me, the secret lies in a policy of selective entry and a close working relationship with the industry. Media organizations are on the board of the school and participate in the design of its courses. Every student does an 18-month period of internship during the course, and many end up working in the organizations they attended as trainees. So the Journalism school works hand in glove with the industry and, so far, a peculiarly Danish mix of investment, planning and paternalism seems to be doing the trick.

Incidentally, all this helps explain why we don’t seem to get many applications for traineeships from Denmark – they don’t need them…

2. Dream of newspapers, but go online

What do wannabe journalists, well, wannabe? One professor wryly remarked to me that, “you know, the newspaper dream is still alive”. He told me how most of the students still carried within them the romantic notion of the newspaper reporter as the ideal form of their trade, and how, in choosing their options they made sure they never shut down the possibility. “But we stop them aiming just for that, he said, we push them to learn all the online skills, because that’s what most of them will be doing in the future.”

I suppose it’s obvious, but the Aarhus course is now designed entirely to equip these young professionals for a professional world centred on the internet and a broad range of related skills. Which brings me to my third revelation, one close to my heart.

3. Journalism ain’t just journalism any more

Except once, I have referred to the Aarhus institution as a school of journalism. Most people there seemed to do the same. But, as the CEO of the School, Jens Otto Kjær Hansen, explained to me, the current institution, the Danish School of Media and Journalism is the result of a 2008 merger between the Danish School of Journalism and the Graphic Arts Institute of Denmark. The rationale for this merger is what fascinated me. “We aim,” I was told, “to provide all the editorial skills you need for journalism under one roof”.

Jens Otto Kjaer Hansen, CEO (photo: Anders Hviid)

The concept is that modern journalism is no longer only about research, facts, writing and the traditional skills of the old-fashioned newshound, but also about graphic design, web design, development of online features and apps, and all the rest of it. Aarhus doesn’t pretend to combine all these skills in one person, but considers them interlinked, mutually dependent and to belong in the same educational context.

This boldly and concretely acknowledges what we already know: the dividing lines between “media” skills and “journalism” skills are blurred. Journalists deliver media products, while graphic designers and web developers deliver journalism. Online news organizations, thus in reality all future news organizations, need to report the news using a rich variety of tools and formats. Good writing is vital, but it needs to live symbiotically with good infographics, good design, good video, good interactive interfaces, good technology and so on. The Aarhus people, who, as we saw, work hand-in-glove with the industry, get this and have acted accordingly.

Our day-to-day reality reflects this same trend. A few years back, our job was conceived essentially as a writing job – the preparation of articles, accompanied by a photo, for publication on the website. It was something we could do autonomously and is a (valuable) job we still do. However, the way we actually spend our time has changed. Most of the team are increasingly devoting their working hours to broader internet communication activities: managing social media platforms, preparing multimedia products, developing features for our website and various other online platforms, or devising online strategies within various communication campaigns. All this means we are working daily and intensively in teams with graphic artists, web designers, developers, and their ilk. We will only see more of this as we continue the process of renewing Parliament’s web presence.

4. Happy Danes

Happy Danes: journalism students with good employment prospects (photo: Anders Hviid)

I had a little side-project for my trip to Denmark – to try to work out what truth there is in the 2007 finding that the Danes are the happiest people on Earth. I have to confess that my method was unscientific, but I did ask quite a few people in the Aarhus school whether they felt as happy as we would believe them to be. I also naturally made my own observations, including at a professors-students football match which immediately followed the conferences, in which the conference speakers were cordially invited to play (on the side of the professors). Now, that’s a good sign –  it’s not every conference where the invitation is extended to sporting participation. Nor did the 12-1 thrashing the professors suffered at the hands of their students seem at all to dampen anyone’s spirits (Morten Løkkegaard played, by the way). My questions on happiness to staff members elicited remarkably similar responses: “yes, well, we are happy. I mean there’s not really very much to complain about in Denmark, all things considered…” However, most of them did also mention a thing called the “Jante Law” which I initially took to be a legal obligation on Danes to be happy, though subsequently discovered to be a bit more complicated than that.

Suffice to say, on the basis of my one-day research project in the Danish School of Media and Journalism on a beautiful June day, Danes do seem pretty happy. Maybe I’ll just leave it at that.

Finally, thanks to John Frølich and Lars Christensen, conference organisers, for their invitation, welcome, hospitality and easy-going friendliness. It was, well, a happy trip.

It all started with this post on the Parliament wall about the situation in Syria, where the government was (and is) cracking down on protesters.  Very quickly, we noticed two things: first, the comment column started filling up with comments by Facebook users in Bahrain; second, there was a jump in the number of fans on the page.

The comments, taken together, were unlike anyhing we have ever had before. They were a direct appeal to the European Parliament for help. They were not light reading. Here are just a few:

Alooy Hassan We in Bahrain, we ask you to help, the government of torturing prisoners and treat them with great violence and sentenced to death for four of them
People are treated harshly and I can not describe the situation here
Please help us.

Om Alsadah help us in Bahrain they kill us

Ahmed T. ALsaeed Before we start speaking about syria lets take a look at BAHRAIN . from the crackdown untill now tanks are everywere mosques are being razed, hospitals are surrounded

سلطان مباركي Bahrain| Death sentences given to pro-democracy protesters: Ali Singace, Abdulaziz Hussain, Qasim Matar, and Said Abduljalil
(Take action please.. Bahraini people want urgent help)

Many of the comments focused in the four death sentences handed down by a Bahraini court, others were a broader cry for help. Over the next few days, the comments kept coming, from many different users, commenting on whatever we posted, drawing attention to the situation in Bahrain and asking for the help of the European Parliament.

The unusual jump in the number of fans, which we would put at about a thousand extra in a day or two was clearly linked to the Bahrain phenomenon. Facebook “insights” data doesn’t provide precise enough detail to be certain, but our regular checks of the latest fans in that period told us that the latest joiners were overwhelmingly Arabic and mostly (where we could tell) Bahraini.

This was something a bit different, a concerted use of the page to call for political action from the Parliament

We have had passionate opinion and debate on the Facebook page before – indeed, we get it all the time – but this was something a bit different, a concerted use of the page to call for political action from the Parliament. It cried out for a direct response, though, clearly, in this case, the only valid response would be a political one. Which is why we turned to the political authorities, in particular the President and the Committee on Foreign Affairs.

In the past, we have sometimes found it hard consistently to motivate Members of Parliament to enter into discussions on the Facebook page, though we systematically notify relevant Members (committee and office holders, rapporteurs, delegation leaders, etc.) about ongoing discussions of the subjects that could concern them. It seems that the reflex is not always there yet to use this new channel in a political way. In this case, however, possibly because of the directness and urgency of the appeal, the reaction was immediate and clear.

The President was the first to react, condemning the death sentences in a statement, which we posted on Parliament’s page and the President similarly posted on his. Parliament’s post drew 814 interactions (one of the highest numbers we have had), of which, very unusually, more than half (420) were comments. The President’s post received 52 comments, most of which were variants on “thank you”. (Figures at time of writing.)

“The Bahraini population, especially young people using social networks such as Facebook, turns to the European Parliament for support”

The President is an established presence on the social media, but the reaction of the Foriegn Affairs committee, when they found out about the Bahraini pleas on Facebook, broke new ground. In a statement issued jointly by Foreign Affairs committee chairman, Gabriele Albertini; Human Rights sub-committee chair, Heidi Hautala; and Arab Peninsula delegation leader, Angelika Niebler, the three MEPs noted that “the Bahraini population, especially young people using social networks such as Facebook, turns to the European Parliament for support”, condemned the death sentences, and announced Albertini’s intention to summon the Bahraini ambassador to discuss the matter. We posted the statement in its entirety on the Facebook page, where it has again generated a high level of interaction. At the same time, Baroness Ashton, the EU High Representative on foreign policy, issued her own statement on the death sentences, substantially increasing pressure on the Bahraini authorities on this point. This statement was issued after representations from Parliament, as we have seen alerted by the Facebook Bahrainis. Ashton will be in Parliament for a major set-piece foreign affairs debate next week. Perhaps there will be more from her then.

This episode marks an important landmark in the progress of social media in the life of the Parliament

It is possible that none of this will change the course of history, but, whatever happens next, this episode at least marks an important landmark in the progress of social media in the life of the Parliament. Just as Facebook has played an undisputed role in helping the Arab Spring on its way, we now see it play an unambiguous role in the political life of the European Parliament, fittingly enough in the self-same context.

What, of course, this all underlines is the fact that the social media, unlike many traditional forms of mass communication, provide a genuinely two-way channel of communication and that this fact has potentially important ramifications for the political life of the European Parliament. We still encounter the attitude that communicating via Facebook, Twitter & co is somehow a peripheral activity, useful for talking to the kids, perhaps, but essentially a frivolous, non-serious pastime. Perhaps Parliament’s new Bahraini Facebook fans, who – yes – may even be “kids”, will help spread an understanding that these social media tools will end up being much more significant than that.

So what was it we needed so badly to know? Simply this, that social media are today where the internet was in 1996, just in existence, but long before its real potential and implications were clear to anyone.

Sree's gadget graveyard

Professor Sreenivasan has a sense of the passage of internet time. The first thing you find on entering his office in Colombia School of Journalism, on the right as you come through the door, is a small mortuary of defunct gadgets, physical testimony to the faddishness and rapid progress of communications technology. In the pile of junk you quickly discern Palm pilots, Apple Newtons, various mobile phones, portable CD players, early iPods and, somewhat to the consternation of our little European group recently issued by our employer with such technology, an iPhone 3GS, deposited by one of the professor’s students the day before as irredeemably out of date. As the prof delightedly pointed out to us, the only reliable, future-proof, functioning technology in his little gadget mausoleum were the two tin cans connected by a piece of string on the shelf at the back.

Not in 1996...

The point was well made: things move apace in the world of communications. Today’s marvel is tomorrow’s junk and no-one can predict where, and how fast, things will go. Hence the warning note in his 1996 analogy. Fifteen years ago, the essentials of the internet were in place, but its exploitation was only just beginning. In those fifteen years, the internet has simply transformed the existence of everyone in the developed world (and probably beyond) in ways that were utterly unpredictable – and unpredicted – in 1996. So it is, dixit the professor, with social media, which in his view represent as radical and as potentially transformative a development as the internet itself when it first appeared.

The consequences of this observation are twofold and paradoxical. On the one hand, it is important to keep an open mind, to be ready for anything, to believe that anything is possible, even if it sounds totally implausible. On the other, never believe what the social media gurus tell you; no-one knows what is going to happen, no-one can see reliably beyond a time horizon of six-months to a year (maybe not even those, such as Steve Jobs, who may well determine what happens). So, sayeth the guru, beware gurus, for they know not of what they speak.

If you don’t know what is going on, you are not even going potentially to make the right decisions

So how to react? How does the professional communicator, or the modern journalism student or, indeed, the miscellaneous human being in early adulthood, deal with this world of fast, unpredictable development. For Sree Sreenivasan the key has to be principally to keep track of what is going on, to stay abreast of the latest fads and developments, and try to make intelligent decisions about what is worth getting into and what isn’t. But if you don’t know what is going on, you are not even going potentially to make the right decisions.

Sree Sreenivasan

At this point, there was a somewhat reassuring turn in the conversation, a little dose of common sense realism which mitigated the growing sense of angst in three hapless Europeans (OK, the two older ones were the hapless Europeans) about how any sane human being could conceivably keep up with all this. Simply this, that it makes no sense to pitch headlong into absolutely everything that comes along, it is possible now and then to make an intelligent call, or at least bide a bit of time to see how things work out.

Second Life, anyone? There was a time when governments were investing public money in virtual citizens’ services in Second Life and when one could actually hope to meet the avatar of a French presidential candidate in the digital never-never land. Yes, there were even voices in the European Parliament urging a presence for the Institution (which prompted me to wonder at how the Bureau of Parliament, let alone its auditors, might react to real estate spending proposals in Linden dollars…). Suffice to say, it didn’t happen, and time has found the judgement to have been sound. By the same token, however, how foolish would we now look had we shied away from Facebook, Twitter et al in that brief window of opportunity which presented itself in early 2009. The key, as the professor rationalised it for us, is to detect the communications added value in a new technology or new platform. Does it allow you to extend your reach significantly; does it permit genuine new opportunities; does it, at the end of the day, make life easier or more complicated? “If you’re like me” said the prof, “especially if you’ve got kids, you don’t have time for your first life, let alone your second, but Twitter can be a very quick and efficient way of sending and receiving messages.” Quite so.

It’s a win-win: I get the messages I want and the senders get their messages through to me

But even then, the secret is not so much in adopting Twitter, but in seeing how to use it intelligently and productively. Here again, a spot of homespun wisdom from the prof. “There’s nothing worse than some-one bombarding you with irrelevant distracting messages. So I tweet what I’m working on today, so people know what I’m interested in. It’s a win-win: I get the messages I want and the senders get their messages through to me.” The implications for a press service are obvious: know what your clients want and when they want it, and supply it. Don’t spam them with extraneous or irrelevant stuff. Social media are two-way channels or communication; to use them wisely is to listen as much as to transmit.

(This reminds me of a more recent encounter with Leigh Phillips, a journalist at EU Observer, who said: “If you use Twitter to pitch a story to a journalist, do it in the morning.” In the afternoon, they’ll be writing.)

This insistence on the intelligent use of social media communication tools was a recurring theme, and came as something of a relief in a daily environment where increasingly the clamour is to “do something” on Facebook, or to attempt to prop up some hopeless communications cause through the application of the magic powder of social media.

Mention has already been made of Blue State Digital, and its founder, Joe Rospars‘ conviction that the key to the effectiveness of Facebook is getting people beyond Facebook. Something similar was to be found in our conversation, which like so many in New York was convened in an eating establishment in which people did remarkably little eating, with Rachel Sterne, she formerly of GroundReport and latterly New York City’s new Chief Digital Officer.

Rachel Sterne

GroundReport is an online news publication based on the concept of hyper-local news and the citizen journalist. There is a great deal of dispute about the very term “citizen journalist”, of course, and indeed as to whether such a thing actually exists. As Ms Sterne herself cheerily acknowledged, 80-90% of so-called citizen journalism is rubbish (David Plotz said something similar about the contents of the Huffington Post, by the way), but that is not the end of the story. Sterne’s trick was to find a way to add value to what the citizen journalists were producing, in fact by placing tight constraints on them. She took the people she perceived as having the best potential, the best stories to tell and gave them a Flip video camera (for the uninitiated, cheap and cheerful pocket-sized cameras) and a very tight brief. She wanted video reports exactly two-minutes long, rigorously on-subject and sticking to quite a number of other desiderata she outlined. This was the formula which accounted for GroundReport’s success, and reflects very similar sentiments we heard at Blue State Digital. At bottom, it’s about the importance of editorial control, of imposing editorial values on socially generated content, basically about applying old media values to a new media world. Content is king, as they say.

He floored us with a simple question: “what’s your GoogleTV strategy?

Again and again, we came across individuals who demonstrated the value of knowing what is going on and being smart about it. Ari Wallach, he of the “memes, technology and innovation“ was another. Immediately we sat down in a glass-sided meeting room in CNN’s New York office, he floored us with a simple question: “what’s your GoogleTV strategy?” What’s our what strategy? And so we learned that, as from next year, every Sony TV will come with GoogleTV incorporated. Which means that TV viewing will probably very soon almost always begin with a Google search for content, the results of which – just as with your regular Google searches today – will be tailored by clever algorithms to take account of your past viewing history, your location, other content present on your device and the colour of underwear you have on. It’s coming, said Wallach, as we floundered before him, you’d better get a strategy…

Ari Wallach

So what does it all mean? In the course of our American trip we met all kinds of smart, creative and successful people, all trying to find their way in a world which barely existed yesterday and by tomorrow will be unrecognisably different. It is nonetheless the real world, the one in which we all live and in which communicators need to make their way or fade into irrelevance.

There is no magic formula. Indeed, success seems if anything to be a outcome of very familiar, even traditional, qualities and skills. Know what’s going on, try to spot the implications quickly, be smart about diving in, and, when you do, take your common sense and your good old editorial values with you. Be imaginative and creative, sceptical and alert to the downside, spot possibilities, adopt a digital mindset. And have the right people around you – no-one can see it all (except Sree Sreenivasan, perhaps) – be like Ari Wallach and surround yourself with a “cadre of brilliant minds, tenacious doers and bespoke souls”.

That’s the secret. See you  in 2026.

The author's unremarkable digital steps since 1996

]]> http://www.writingforyeu.eu/2011/04/lessons-from-america-5-living-in-1996/feed/ 0 http://www.writingforyeu.eu/2011/04/lessons-from-america-4-why-america-loves-a-failure/ http://www.writingforyeu.eu/2011/04/lessons-from-america-4-why-america-loves-a-failure/#comments Sun, 03 Apr 2011 16:46:57 +0000 Steve http://www.writingforyeu.eu/?p=6251 Rachel Sterne is not a failure. She created and managed the famously innovative GroundReport, which rewrote the rules for online citizen journalism, and last January was appointed Chief Digital Officer of New York City by Mayor Bloomberg. She is 27 years old.

Ari Wallach is not a failure. He runs a New York consultancy company called Synthesis Corp. which provides “strategic counsel at the intersection of memes, technology and innovation”. Er, yes, presumably to people who know what that means… Amongst other clients, he was doing this for CNN last January. He is renowned among online political geeks as the creator of the memorable “Great Schlep” vote-getting campaign for Barack Obama, featuring Sarah Silverman.

Bryan Sivak is not a failure. He was, until falling victim to the US habit of reappointing entire administrations when there is a change at the top, Chief Technology Officer for the District of Colombia, fêted as a leader in the world of “Gov 2.0″.

Joe Rospars is not a failure. He is founder and CEO of Blue State Digital a top political/tech consultancy  and was previously New Media Director for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. However, his track record as a political online innovator goes back further than that, to the Howard Dean presidential run in 2004. That’s prehistory in this sector – he’s a bit like the guy who remembers doing the first cave paintings.

So why do these four eminiently successful individuals feature in a blog post with “failure” in its title? Simple: each and every one of them quite independently extolled the virtues of failure to us at our meetings in Washington and New York City.

Fans of failure: (clockwise from top left) Bryan Sivak, Rachel Sterne, Ari Wallach, Larry Page, Joe Rospars

America is of course famously, notoriously even, the country which loves a winner. Not for the Yanks that oh-so-British admiration for the “gallant loser”, they just have plain “losers”, also probably the most cutting insult which can be delivered by one American to another.  Eddie “the Eagle” Edwards (check the link, you under 35s!) could never have been an American… But we’re not talking about losers here, we’re talking about failures.

Never in America: Eddie the Eagle

All came up with variants on the theme, but perhaps the most succinct version – the one that stuck in our collective mind was from Bryan Sivak: “Fail often, fail quick, fail cheap”. However expressed, the concept was always the same; in the digital communications business, where entry barriers are generally quite low, one of the great benefits is that it is easy to try things out, and the cost of failure is  generally not too high. If your experiment doesn’t work out, it is quite easy to backtrack, learn the lessons, and try something else. Indeed, it is necessary have have a string of failures under your belt, that is the way you learn, it’s a pre-requisite of online innovation and creativity.

“Fail often, fail quick, fail cheap”

The provisos are important too, of course. “Quick” is not only about the speed with which you fail, but the speed at which you perceive the failure and correct. What that implies is high sensitivity to user feedback, the mental flexibility to accept that your idea hasn’t worked out and a certain frankness with your users/clients. “Cheap” refers, obviously, the monetary investment you make in an idea (budgets, in our case), but also points to a methdology – the idea that development should be undertaken where possible in short incremental, reversible steps. The “big bang”, the comprehensive relaunch, is simply not the smart way to operate on the web, not only because it locks you into a potentially expensive idea which may turn out to be ill-conceived, but also because fashion is fickle and even a well-conceived idea might fall by the wayside. “Often” (not “indefinite”, note!) is about persistence and, yes, optimism. Keep trying, your breakthrough will come…

All this reminds me of another successful American, one whose success, I suppose, puts even those I have cited in the shade. Larry Page, co-founder of Google, visited the European Parliament last year and held an open Q&A session with Parliament staff who were interested (nice touch, I thought, to meet the staff).  The visit happened to coincide with a bout of angst over the failure (or at least non-success, ah!) of the so-called Lisbon Agenda, Europe’s plan to become the most competitive knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010. Many questions were asked by Europeans puzzling over the terrific pace of innovation in US-based tech firms. Page’s answers were all about failure…

His case was simple, Silicon Valley produces so much innovation because of a combination of three vital factors: 1) a highly-educated, highly motivated, creative environment, 2) plenty of money available from investors for start-ups (which, helpfully, do not in this trade require huge amounts of cash to get going), and 3) a high tolerance for failure, a tolerance based moreover on the realisation that “failure” is in any cases only an stepping stone, a learning process, towards success.

It sounds bright-eyed and utopian to a jaded European mind, perhaps, but then that’s perhaps the reason it appears to work well in the US and less well in the EU.

Look for people who are interested in doing their job, not in not losing their job

In any case, the cultural effects of an attachment to risk taking and failure were more than evident during our visit to the States. It is hard to think of an interlocutor we met who had been in his/her job for more than a year or two. Even those who had more constancy (Sree Sreenivasan in academia, for example) had seemingly  dozens of sidelines going at the same time, and a varied past career . To put it simply, the Americans seemed generally pretty cool about changing jobs at startlingly regular intervals, both in the public and private sectors, and, in several cases between them. One revealing comment we heard, from Ari Wallach, was an enjoinder to us to look for “people who are interested in doing their job, not in not losing their job”. The clear implication is that to do your job well, and we were talking in the context of tech/internet jobs, is at the same time to risk it, by trying things that might not work, by being ready to fail. (At least if you are working for Ari Wallach, one supposes, this also makes you less likely to lose your job, though arguably more likely to be headhunted by a competitor.)

Remember too, that remarkable observation from Sree Sreenivasan that most of his students were entering employment with organisations which didn’t exist two years ago.

Sree Sreenivasan

Obviously, there is scope here for a huge discussion about American versus European culture, about competitiveness, security, social policy, individualism, solidarity, sustainability, growth, happiness v. wealth and much much more. Needless to say, I haven’t the slightest intention of going there. Where however I do want to go is to think about (i) the implications for running a tech/communications operation and (ii) the impact on the broader communications environment we inhabit.

It is probably best to start with the environment, and simply to point out the globalised nature of the online communications world. Though it may be true to say that Europe adopts new online trends somewhat after they have taken off in the USA, with cultural and language factors holding them up for a while, it is also true that their ultimate absorption on this side of the Atlantic is practically inevitable. (This is indeed the main reason one might consider it useful to visit the USA in this context in the first place.) It suffices to consider the extent to which any European’s contemporary internet experience, and indeed wider media consumption, is dominated by innovations from US companies such as Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, Ebay, Facebook and Twitter. It would be illusory to think that the kind of communications environment – including the new world of journalism represented by the likes of Slate, Politico, National Journal, Huffington Post et al, or indeed Facebook and Twitter themselves – which these technological innovations have created, will not also be created in Europe, albeit with some cultural tweaks.

Competitive pressures may play out differently in Europe, but the ultimate patterns of cause and effect seem pretty similar

The transition is visible in the Brussels press corps even now, with a younger, striving generation, struggling with the tough economics of modern journalism, which are denying them the sorts of jobs occupied by their older confreres, turning to a multitasking, highly digitised version of their trade to make their way. Competitive pressures may play out differently in Europe, but the ultimate patterns of cause and effect seem pretty similar.

(In passing, and fundamentally in support of the technology-drives-communications-environment argument, let it be said that there is one striking counter-example to the overall dominance of the US in technological innovation, mobile GSM technology, an example of a superior common standard, set early, creating a competitive advantage. This example was cited by several of our US interlocutors, perhaps trying to be polite, but seemingly also genuinely frustrated by having to play catch-up for once. That said, the pithiest expression of this frustration pointed not to Europe, but to the technological leapfrogging engaged in by emerging economies: “one day,” said our interloctor, ” we may have mobile communication technology at the level of Ghana.”)

But to return to our main thread, what does a failure-is-good ethos imply for an operation such as ours in the European Parliament?

It need hardly be said that such an ethos is antithetical to that prevailing not only in the EU institutions but in public administrations worldwide. There are many good reasons for such organisations to have a prudent, steady-as-she-goes modus operandi. Few citizens would welcome public administrations making up new rules as they go along, obsessing in general about fads, fashions, “memes, technology and innovation”, or spending large sums on wild-eyed, experimental schemes. Unfortunately, at least the first two of these things are what a successful digital communications operation – amongst much else – needs to do. Fortunately, as we have seen, the third is not however something which is necessary, as innovation in online communication is not as a rule very, if at all, costly.

The big question therefore, for as long as the European Parliament is expected to communicate effectively online, hence essentially to communicate at all, is of how to replicate something of the failure-is-good ethos inside the organisation. How do we build a spirit of risk-taking, of innovation, of creativity, of acceptance that failure is part of success, in our organisation? Perhaps the most important lesson from America is that we have to make these things happen if we are, in the parlance, to stay in the game.

And because these posts are so far about the lessons, not yet the conclusions, I will leave it there.

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Next time: what we’re doing in 1996.