Simonsays

EXCLUSIVE: Dick Fedorcio, Met Police blogger engagement and my part in it...

 figures likely to show rise.....   Queen at First World War memorial.....   Childcare tax breaks revolt grows.....   DNA profile database plans unveiled.....   Washington sniper put to death.....   46% think war is increasing threat.....   Anti-monarchy demo on Charles visit.....   Pilot charged after airport arrest.....   Three more drug advisers quit.....   Social worker backlash after Baby P.....   

I published a blog post earlier this year in which I questioned the Metropolitan Police's approach to social media and criticised what I perceived to be the wrong organisational attitude.

Rather than looking to embrace social media, listen, adapt and respond to the public and earn the reputation it deserves, comments made by the Met's Director of External Affairs, Dick Fedoricio, in a PR Week interview suggested otherwise:

"If I was seeking to manipulate people, it would raise a question about how that reduced our integrity. To be leaning on someone to say "give us a good blog" starts to raise some ethical issues."

I wanted to return to this issue for a couple of reasons. Primarily, I was shocked (but unsurprised) to see that according the Evening Standard, the Met has now requested that all imagery of its officers hiding or obscuring their badges be removed from photo libraries and image databases (hiding numbers means officers can't be (easily) identified and is an illegal tactic usually performed to allow police to act with impunity while committing - often violent - offences against the public).

While the Standard accuses the Met of trying to "re-write history", a member of the public gets it right in a comment posted on the story:

"If people start uploading such images to Facebook and Twitter, will they get their collars felt? We seem to be heading in that direction."

Leaving aside the jusdgement of which direction society is heading, the issue of whether material incriminating authorities published publicly in the social web can be removed remains - as does the question: what power do authorities have to, in DIck's words, "manipulate" or "lean on" someone to force removal?

Following the G20 the Met has signed up 6Consulting and Radian6 to run social media monitoring for the force so it's very likely that any 'offending' material will certainly be identified. That said, I return to the point I made originally which was that this approach reveals a traditional command and control communications culture at the Met which will not fit in the distributed, complex, networked world in which we now live.

I mentioned there were a couple of reasons I wanted to blog about this topic again. That's the first, the second is much more personal.

After my previous post in which the Met's Dick Fedorcio told PR Week that he will "not go as far as interacting with bloggers" he went right ahead by 'interacting' with me.

So how did he interact with me? Was it a comment left on my blog post examining the Met's approach to social media? Was it an email explaining the Met's decision not to interact with bloggers? 

No. Instead Dick left me a voicemail on my work phone. Why he phoned me at work I don't know (especially given my blog states clearly it's a personal site and encourages contact via my personal email address).

Dick's voicemail was rather aggressive (I'm sure this was unintentional) and stated that he worked for Scotland Yard (again, this is confusing, but I'm sure he meant the Metropolitan Police).

He advised me, in a rather intimidating fashion, that if I planned on blogging about the Met againI  should give him a call in advance.

Now I'm sure Dick meant only well by his inadvertently aggressive and intimidating phonecall advising I seek permission before blogging about the Met, but it seems clear to me that the Met are doing blogger engagement, despite what they tell PR Week.

Plus ca change...

Technorati tags: Dick Fedorcio, Metropolitan Police, blogger engagement

Online monitoring and political behaviour: survey of UK political parties

The role of online monitoring in influencing political behaviour: an exploratory survey of UK political parties

View more presentations from Simon Collister.

I popped along to give the keynote speech at a symposium on measuring online political behaviour yesterday organised by Royal Holloway University’s New Political Communications Unit.

In keeping with true keynote style I only managed to get along to the afternoon sessions at the event, but I still managed to catch a couple of interesting presentations: one from Rob Pearson at the UK’s Foreign & Commonwealth Office examining the evaluation of its G20 London Summit web presence; the second from Simon Bergman from strategic communications outfit, Information Options.

I was presenting findings from some research I’ve been conducting into the use of online monitoring by the UK’s three main political parties: The Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats which is an area without any in-depth study to date.

I’ve embedded my presentation above, but be warned – it’s text heavy (hey, it’s tricky articulating research findings using fancy images) – but here are some of my main findings:

• All political parties report that they track online influencers qualitatively (e.g. Iain Dale, Guido, Political Betting, etc) but they also reported that they engage with these blogs to help set the national media-agenda (which nicely supports my earlier research). Equally, all online or influencer monitoring by parties is performed informally – that is, not using paid for or third party tracking tools.

• One respondent told me that monitoring is about “a gut feeling about what’s going on” and also the UK political blogosphere is small and well organised. In my opinion, using influencers this way suggests that parties are perhaps only scratching the surface of influencer engagement. In my day job I would advise clients to establish a conversational position within influencer networks and build trusted relationships.  This is key to developing successful long-term engagement programmes – arguably the only real way to change behaviour.

• Parties do engage directly to a limited extent with individuals online, particularly at a local level. However, The Labour Party appears to be closest to participating in real-time within online networks by engaging non-political networks, e.g. marketing/PR and media networks to leverage news or content.


• Interestingly Labour also use quantitative tracking to identify popular or trending issues and content on the Labour Party website and to identify ‘content gaps’ on the Labour website. This insight is used to create new content to meet demand.

• The Liberal Democrats use qualitative monitoring in a different way altogether: as an internal communications or customer service tool. By reading and staying on top of what Lib Dem campaigners and activists are saying, thinking and doing, the party can help out or resolve any issues that are emerging at a grassroots level. Really interesting use of monitoring.

My presentation also tried to fit these findings into a critical framework based on the work Manuel Castells has completed in mapping and analysing the Network Society.

I started from the position that political parties monitor online networks to ensure they can engage effectively with the aim being to exert influence influence in the network.

One of the most important measures of influence – or more accurately – power in networks is defined by Castells as “networking-making power” - that is the ability to establish and control particular networks.

This ability is further categorised into two processes: programmers and switchers.

1. Programmers have “the ability to constitute network(s), and to program/reprogram the network(s) in terms of goals assigned to the network”
2. Switchers have “the ability to connect and ensure cooperation of different networks by sharing common goals and combining resources, while fending off competition from other networks by setting up strategic cooperation”

Based on my findings I hypothesise that the Tories are Programmers while Labour are Switchers:

• Conservatives – early political online networks in the UK were (and still are to an extent) right-wing or anti-Government. This meant that the Conservatives were able to program the network and assign goals that were largely identical to its own. This would potentially explain why the Conservatives focus online engagement with influential nodes in the network rather and not primarily engaging in wider debate around issues.


• Labour – Labour are Switchers as they are seeking to cooperate with strategic partner networks through shared goals. For example, identifying media networks interested in specific issues and leveraging them by combining resources.

Anyway. Those are my main findings. Feel free to challenge, share, agree with, etc. As always, they open up more questions for further examination than they answer. But that’s the beauty of research.

Cross-posted to We Are Social.

Tags: online monitoring, politics, Labour Party, Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, Network Society, Manuel Castells

Behold! The Voicebot: bringng young people, democracy and technology together

I popped over to see Adil and Charlotte at Sidekick Studios on Tuesday and to check out the awesome power of the Voicebot.

The Voicebot is a project being developed by Sidekick and V, the youth volunteering organisation.
More importantly, it's an *actual* robot that allows young people to submit a message in 160 characters Twitter-stylee to the Voicebox website which is then written out by the robot. You can have a go here.

From October the aforementioned robot will be a central feature in the Houses of Parliament allowing young people to have their voice heard in the corridors of power.

In the spirit of community and sharing (and to prove your message is actually gets written) each message is photographed and submitted to a Flickr group.

I had a go and here's the result here's a link to the result (turns out it isn't *that* sharing - images are all rights reserved :( ).

And for the geeks in the house, here's a video of the Voicebot in action.

The Voicebot pt II from sidekick studios on Vimeo.

In addition to being awestruck at a robot I partook in some fantastic discussions with V's Adam Short as well as Sidekick's Adil which were continued on ther blog.

Great ideas; great work. Look forward to seeing where this project and the passion behind it ends up.

Tags: Voicebot, Sidekick Studios, democracy, young peoplet

Programmers and Switchers: Shaping power in networks

As mentioned in a previous post, I'm presenting a paper on online monitoring and UK political parties at a forthcoming event.

This post is sort of a work-in-progress/thinking out loud series of notes leading up to that paper. It draws on recent work by Manuel Castell's and seeks to clarify how power functions in networks. Alternatively, you could substitute the term 'influence' for 'power' - but fundamentally we're taking about power however it's dressed up.

If you're interested in politics or digital communications and networks then read on.

Based on earlier work by Geoff Mulgan, Castells argues that the state has the capacity to exercise power “through the articulation of three sources of power: violence, money and trust.”

Mulgan states:

“Of the three sources of power the most important for sovereignty is the power over the thoughts that give rise to trust. Violence can only be used negatively, money can only be used in two dimensions, giving and taking away. But knowledge and thoughts can transform things, move mountains and make ephemeral power appear permanent.”

Castells argues that the third power, trust, is critical to the network society. He believes that while Mulgan’s perspective on state power is broadly accurate it is traditional (i.e. industrial). In the networked society the ability of individual actors to control communication and knowledge, which leads to trust, is being changed.

According to Castells, the most crucial forms of power in the networked society follow the logic of “network-making power” – that is, the most important power within networks is the ability to establish and control the particular network.

The ability to do this is based on two basic mechanisms:

“(1) the ability to constitute network(s), and to program/reprogram the network(s) in terms of goals assigned to the network

(2) the ability to connect and ensure cooperation of different networks by sharing common goals and combining resources, while fending off competition from other networks by setting up strategic cooperation”

Castells calls actors in the first mechanism ‘programmers’ and those in the second mechanism, ‘switchers’.

If we apply this to the example of political blogging networks in the UK then the logic runs as follows:

Those that ‘program’ the network typically establish who links to whom and what people blog about. The UK’s primary political blogging network has arguably emerged from the early, influential bloggers, e.g. Guido Fawkes, Iain Dale, Political Betting, etc. These bloggers have constituted the network and thus are the programmers.

If you are a political party then this network is likely to operate outside of your control. Coercion (i.e. legal or technical take-down) won’t work as power is distributed among the network.

There are two options then that political parties could explore to change the network-making power:

1)   Establish their own network of political bloggers in an attempt to reprogram the political blogging network. This has been attempted by some political parties, e.g. LabourHome; Lib Dem Voice, but these have seemingly not accrued enough influence/power in the network to re-program it as of yet.

2)   They could attempt to establish strategic partnerships with key networks and attempt to ‘switch’ the flow of power. Examples of this include providing bloggers with exclusive information or news and inviting them party conferences etc.

With some luck I’ll be presenting some more conclusive findings relating this theory to actual practice within UK political parties later this month.

Feedback welcome.

Tags: Manuel Castells, Networks, Power

Social Media Battle Today: Cops vs Activists

There looks set to be a fascinating social media showdown today as Climate Camp activists attempt to 'swoop' at a secret London location while the police attempt to prevent them - or at least manage the process.

The 'swoop' takes place from a number of locations across the city and is being coordinated and publicised via a number of social media channels:

• Live video of the swoop is being Qik'd
• Live tweets from the swoop are being published at http://twitter.com/climatecamp - the hashtag climatecamp is being used for general updates while each swoop location has been given its own unique hashtag.
• The swoop location is being announced at midday via SMS and the Climate Camp Facebook group

Conversely the Met Police are using their own Twitter feed to coordinate and publish live information (although they say they won't be responding to replies and DMs) and using monitoring tool Radian 6 to track online conversations.

This should all make for exciting spectating. Tune in from midday for the latest action - or get along yourself!

Tags: social media, policing, activism, monitoring

SuperThirdThursday Podcast: Me on eDemocracy

As mentioned in my previous post, I spoke at an event in the Isle of Man last month about edemocracy (thnks to Sherrilynn for hosting and Charterhouse International for sponsoring). You can get my presentation over at Slideshare.

I was also interviewed by the local radio station for their current affairs programme and Sherrilyne has kindly uploaded audio to share.

Tags: Super Third Thursday, Isle of Man, edemocracy, Strive PR, Charterhouse International

T.I.A.A.*: Voting, The Internet & Democracy

I have been taken aback today by the number of people tweeting or texting me to check that I have voted. This is a really interesting phenomenon.

I don’t think I can recall as many people putting out the call to become politically active before. But what’s the driver for this? Is it public disenfranchisement with the political status quo following recent political scandals?

Or is it something much broader – perhaps the trend that people are becoming more and empowered in everything from purchasing decisions to political choice?

There’s probably a bit of both at play and I believe (of coruse!) that this is being catalysed by the Internet. But while the Internet is perhaos galvanising these emotions, their roots lie deeper in the drive for accountability (thus transparency) and a fundamental desire for empowerment - both political (with a small 'p') and personal.

These thoughts were most recently crystallised in a presentation on the Internet and democracy I delivered in the Isle of Man, which - funnily enough - is the world’s oldest, continuous parliamentary democracy.

What follows is blog short-hand for many rambling, overlapping and unexplored ideas knocking around in my head so please excuse any non sequiturs!

I began by looking at two great scholars of the Internet and the Information Age: Manuel Castells and Yochai Benkler.

To grossly précis and paraphrase the pair, Castell’s argues that networked organisation in society is greatly reducing the validity of the state, government and political parties; Benkler argues that the Internet is creating a new ‘commons’ enabling peer production of economic and cultural good and increasing democratic freedoms.

Put together we can plot major faultlines opening in the traditional role of institutions (state, government, political parties and even NGOs) to govern and conversely significant opportunities emerging for individuals and communities to self-govern.

Or rather not 'govern' as we traditional conceive of it as 'governing' implies a hierarchical organisation that uses power over others to achieve organisation.

I appreciate that non-hierarchical organisation is not as simple as this sentence implies (the Tyranny of Structurelessness' for starters - although I also believe the Internet can help overcome this** - see below if you're interested) but the idea of self-organisation has a much more deep-rooted basis than that espoused by Clay Shirky.

What we perceive as contemporary political democracy originates more or less in the Enlightenment and is best exemplified by Jurgen Habermas's vision of the 'public sphere' where civil society was created by consensus.

However, contemporary French philosopher, Jacques Ranciere, has ideated a vision of democracy that is rooted in dissensus, rather than consensus. For Ranciere, consensus is not true democracy, but rather compromise based on the way civil society is framed by its historical institutions e.g. the state, political parties, NGOs, etc.

This is what brings - eventually - back around to 'real' democracy and the Internet. Ranciere sees democracy as unmediated - direct connections between individuals or even loosely affiliated, affinity groups. Does the internet help people achieve this?

It was Jeff Jarvis who wrote (in The Guardian) back in early 2006 that:

"The internet ... disaggregates elements and then enables these free atoms to reaggregate into new molecules; it fragments the old and unifies the new. So in the end, the internet gives us the opportunity to make more nuanced expressions of our political worldview, which makes obsolete old orthodox"

Is this not dissensus-based politics? And is it not potentially driving a societal shift towards a world where people want political engagement and democracy to be on an individual level? Without party politics and ingrained corruption and unchecked power? I dunno. I'm only asking!

* T.I.A.A. - There is always an alternative: my interpretation of Thatcher's T.I.N.A.

** The Tyrany of Structurelessness (TToS) - For those interested I believe that the paradox inherent within (my reading) of TToS could potentially be (and, indeed, is) overcome by the Internet and self-organising, horizontal networks. The original issue in TToS was that attempts to create a structureless (i.e. non-hierarchical) organisation in the physical world became undone as groups spend there efforts at creating a structureless organisation, rather than achieving anything through that structurelessness.

However, as the Internet in instrumentally structureless, any organising done using the Internet is inherently structureless also. Therefore it removes the need to artificially create a structureless organisation allowing the group to organise non-hierarchically and achieve things.

Tags: democracy, elections Tyranny of Structurelessness, Jacques Ranciere, Jurgen Habermas

New Statesman misses the point on political blogging

The New Statesman has published an article on political blogging which, while I'm all for MSM coverage of the great political communications stuff going on at the moment, kind of misses the point a bit.

Having followed (and studied) political blogging since 2006 it pisses me off that this sort of who has more blgogers than who argument still gains credence.

Political blogging has a UK legacy from at least 2003 - and earlier in the US - so why then, in 2009, are we getting articles that cover old ground or make sweeping judgements with little evidence or insight.

The answer is perhaps simple: that's what journalism (or at least a lot of modern 'churnalism') does. And ironically this sort of lazy shorthand reporting is onen reason blogs and social media prolifereated in the first place.

The article in particular regurgitates the line from a press release (I presume there was a press release as the story is based on report by a compnay that offers a commerical product) that there are more Tory bloggers that Labour and Lib Dem ones because:

"the [Red Flag] email smears scandal, which forced LabourList editor Derek Draper to resign, ha[s] stunted Labour’s online efforts."

The thing is: there's no evidence in the article to suggest that Labour's online growth has slowed. I would argue it's a fairly common belief that the Tories were generally ahead online (for a number of inconclusive, complex reasons) which is why Labour retaliated with LabourList and other digital grassroots initiatives.

What really annoys me though is the presumption that the perceived values of traditional media simply transfer of the networked space with an emphasis on successful examples being celebrity. Former Daily Mirror reporter and Labour's best known liar spin doctor, Alistair Campbell, is described as: "one of Labour’s most prominent bloggers". I would suggest that while Campbell is a prominent person associated with Labour, he isn't one of their most prominent bloggers. That would be Recess Monkey or Tom Watson.

Maybe I'm splitting heirs here, but I think it's justified to make the point: social media isn't about numbers or celebrity. It isn't about which party has the msot MP's blogging. It is about conversation, debate, transparency, authenticity, accountability and social production of knowledge.

These are things traditional media (or even traditional democracy) can't deliver. And this is what makes social media one of the key driving forces for the future of not just our media, but for our democratic existence.

*UPDATED* I've just spotted Stuart Bruce (political blogger since 2003) has posted on the subject too.

Tags: New Statesman, political blogging, democracy

Metropolitan Police's turn to social media after G20 policing scandal likely to fail, IMHO

As an interesting footnote to my post below about the need for the Metropolitan Police to make significant changes to its organisational communications culture the force's Director of Public Affairs and Corporate Communications, Dick Fedorcio, is interviewed in this week's PR Week.

From my reading and expert opinion form others Fedorcio's comments indicate that the Met is unable or unwilling to make the real changes necessary.

In a telling statement, Fedorcio, tells PR Week that he won't be looking to run a blogger engagement programme any time soon as:

"If I was seeking to manipulate people, it would raise a question about how that reduced our integrity. To be leaning on someone to say "give us a good blog" starts to raise some ethical issues."

This is a damning insight into the Met's current communications practice as it suggests that its media strategy is built on manipulation.

Commenting on the interview, Diffusion's Ivan Ristic, adds his expert comment that when an organisation has a "reputation of stonewalling" it "makes it difficult in a social marketing context." Too true. You need to tell your story as openly as possible and engage and empower others to help tell your story.

However, while what Ivan says is correct I disagree with his reading of the situation. The Met does not have a reputation to stonewall - at least in the G20/Tomlinson context.

Here the Met/City police and IPCC were extremely proactive in issuing media releases and briefings to frame the story based on what has emerged as an untrue account of events.

Admitedly organisational change isn't easy and takes time and resources - something Fedorcio claims is currently lacking. But stepping into the social media space without evening considering what adaptions you need to make to your corporate communications strategy is setting yourself up to fail - or at least be burned very publicly before you get your strategy right.

I wonder if Dick or the Met will ever monitor this psot and respond? :)

Tags: Metropolitan Police, Dick Fedorcio, PR Week, blogger engagement, social media strategy

Organising in the age of Networked Movements

I posted last week about my decision to not renew my membership of the UK’s PR trade body, the CIPR for various reasons.

I'm currently re-considering (more to come on that one hopefully) my lapsed membership, but weighing up the pros and cons of why I didn’t renew my membership helped me crystallise a line of thought I’ve had for a few weeks.

This thought is thus: the primary problem with trade organisations such as the CIPR or NUJ is quite simply that they are organisations.

That is, they struggle (or appear to be struggling) to adapt to the challenges posed by a socially-enabled Internet precisely because their organisational structure is geared towards fulfilling a role in an industrial, non-networked world.

For example, I don’t need the CIPR to co-ordinate a venue, guestlist, speaker and refreshments in order to attend a networking vent because a network of 50 people connected via the Internet can achieve something similar – moreover, they can achieve something better by co-creating the event.

This idea is also relevant when thinking about the way political parties (in the UK) are adapting to social media. While the Labour Party is making great strides in freeing up debate and campaigning I stand by the argument that they are never going to really get social until they do one of two things.

The first, is to radically restructure the way the party organises itself. That is, turn the party from a top-down campaigning body to a purely bottom-up network of campaigners. The difference may appear subtle but the effect is radically different.

Secondly, they could do what Obama did with the Democrat Party in the 2008 Presidential Election campaign. Rather than restructure the party (although there were definitely some changes made to the way to party operates), the Obama team centralised a large part of the campaign organisation but significantly they devolved a lot of the on-the-ground ‘campaigning’ activity to its networks of supporters.

For example, quoting Micah Sifry in an excellent essay, Sarah Oates, notes “campaigns are designed to share tasks, but not authority”. Conversely “networks share authority but not tasks”. The real test, for the Obama team, Sifry notes, will come when his team looks how to carry forward the ‘shared authority’ created during the campaign into the White House. I suspect that the Obama movement will struggle to integrate its decentralised, networked, informal organisation into the traditionally top-down formality of government.

Of course, I may be wrong and we have already seen Obama’s Change.gov programme initiate attempts to crowd-source policy making. But how successful this will be over the longer-term remains to be seen (and is the topic of another post!).

More significantly, this idea of sharing ‘authority’ vs sharing ‘activity’ (or tasks) illustrates that real political co-creation and networked campaigning appears – so far - to work best in opposition where parties and organisations are not fettered by the constraints of top-down government.

Having said that, I appreciate Obama is trying to change this and the UK government has a number of great social media thinkers and doers currently engaged in trying to make Government more networked. This is an interesting space and will continue to become curiouser and curioser. I plan to track progress in the UK and on the other side of the Atlantic and keep you posted on developments.

Technorati tags: Organisation, Barack Obama, CIPR, Micah Sifry, Paula Oates