I posted yesterday about the efforts that the Democrats/Google are making to facilitate ordinary bloggers at the Democrat National Convention in Denver. There is a huge resource called the Big Tent, sponsored by Google, complete with broadband access, editing kit and access to the politicians. 

Guardian have posted a cracking video report from inside Google’s Big Tent. Its 4 minutes+ so it won’t eat up too much of the day.  Last year I had a press pass for the Labour and Lib Dem conferences, so I spent a lot of time inside the facilities they provide for the UK mainstream media. Their bloggers tent is a 5 star hotel versus our political parties’ version of Fawlty Towers!

I often talk about how politicians can use new media to connect better to Party members. Here’s an enterprising Tory who has set up Tory Radio, an online radio station dedicated to doing just that. In the spirit of Tories online, here’s Iain Dale  interviewing him on Telegraph TV.

The eyes of the world’s media are trained on Denver, the scene of the Democrat National Convention (DNC), where Barack Obama aims to show everyone that he can hold the most powerful (elected) role on the planet. You would expect it to be a media circus but lets peak behind the curtains a bit.

This race has seen relations with the blogosphere professionalised in a way that holds many lessons for corporate and public bodies over here in the UK. Here’s an example. According to the Wall Street Journal, Google is investing big in a media centre for bloggers at the DNC. Highlights;

 Google Inc. will help set up a two-story, 8,000 square-foot headquarters for hundreds of bloggers descending on the Democratic convention in Denver next week, and it will offer similar services at the Republican convention in September, as new media gain influence in politics.With its financial support for the “Big Tent” blogger facility at the Democratic convention, Google stands to gain exposure and goodwill from 500 or so bloggers who paid $100 for access to the facility, run by a coalition of bloggers. Google’s software and services will be featured, including a kiosk in the public area of the tent where anyone can post videos on YouTube. “Four years ago, YouTube hadn’t been founded yet. Now, it will have booths at each convention to help delegates and bloggers upload videos taken on the floor or at events around town.

“It’s an amazing opportunity for us. You don’t get all these people in one place but every four years,” says Robert Boorstin, director of corporate and policy communications in Google’s Washington office and a former Clinton administration official.

Not only will bloggers have Internet access, workspaces and couches for napping in the “Big Tent” headquarters, they will be provided food and beverages, Google-sponsored massages, smoothies and a candy buffet. On the final night of the convention, Google is co-sponsoring a bash with Vanity Fair magazine for convention-goers and journalists that has become one of the hottest party invites.

Google will offer similar amenities for bloggers and new-media reporters who attend the Republican convention in St. Paul, Minn., company officials say. It will demo a variety of new political tools next week, including a search function on YouTube that will offer almost real-time keyword searches of convention speech videos.

The fascinating bit is that McCain’s team actually have set up base just a few blocks from the convention centre to counter the messaging! What does that involve? Well, you hire a big venue, invite all your mainstream media chums (don’t really have to invite - they’ll come automatically once you tell them where you’re gonna be), give bloggers free hotel rooms, and make sure you’ve got big trucks with satellite dishes on them.

Also bring along a few protestors who have some beef with Obama (either they’re “pro-Hillary” or “pro-life” or something or other), and then bring a few far left anarchist protestors as well (just to spice things up). Then go around the city and shake hands and kiss babies, making you look like the man on the street, and the black guy is made to look like an elitist rock-star.

They’ve set up this site as a focus for the ‘counter-messaging’ (great American-type term that will inevitably surface here!).

They’ve posted the reaction from Fox News’ Brit Hume on the home page:

“What’s interesting about this to me is I have never seen the campaign that is idle, if you will, during the other candidate’s nominating convention have as much of an impact before, and I think it owes something to the phenomenon of these what we call ads, and I guess in some broad sense they are. But what they really are, are Internet videos that are being published to the Internet and they spread around in this day and age very quickly and are probably as good as paid ads and I guess there’s some paid advertising going on. But, this is, wouldn’t you say Carl, from your experience, that this has been remarkable the extent to which the McCain camp has succeeded in intervening, so to speak, in this convention?”

Spent the bank holiday at the Edinburgh Fringe. Me and the wife go every year. She’s a financial journalist and is invited as a guest of Intelligent Finance, who have a press trip comprising of about 20 financial journalists plus partners:)

The brand link is through IF’s sponsorship of the fringe comedy awards, which used to be the Perrier awards and are now the IF.comedy awards. Great idea to link to something that could be described as a very popular niche! IF are a Scottish based company, owned by HBOS, and this kind of hospitality is a fantastic excuse to get their core, largely London based media away to a weekend on their home patch.

They always take us to see a top comedian on the Saturday night after a slap-up dinner at the Scotsman hotel and the evening culminates in the IF.comedy awards ceremony at the Jamhouse. Its a good way to finish off the evening - drinks, canapes, VIP section, Neil and Christine Hamilton (?!). But the awards themselves lasted about 15 minutes and were basically a 5 minute bite of last year’s winners announcing this year’s winners. They could have done so much more with it. Made it a real event that everyone wants to be at regardless of any free drinks.

I actually spent the whole weekend thinking what I’d do with the fringe for the benefit of my clients. I know, I know its sad but I blame too much creative stimulation and the coffee and toffee muffins at our basecamp, the excellent Chocolate Soup.

Ok, so what would I do if IF were a client? Why not involve your customers in the brand and get them to rate a group of up and coming comedians via YouTube? Budding comics would post 5 minute demos of themselves on an IF.comedy channel.

This thing would be worth doing because all the finalists would end up doing a turn at an enhanced IF.comedy awards evening. with stronger press profile (great for the brand) and possibly televised via the web, attracting traffic to an IF branded web presence. The IF.comedy site is great but could have more ongoing interaction. There is a Facebook group but its got barely 200 members and again, not a lot regularly going on that would incentivise you tell your friends. Is there any blogger outreach?

Whenever we’re at the Fringe we always disregard the official brochure. Its a doorstop and picking shows is the proverbial needle in haystack job. So you ask other folk. People in the same hotel, people who were there last weekend. Or you walk up and down the Royal Mile, chatting to budding producers and performers. But there still hundreds of shows and fresh talent that you’ll miss. Surely this is screaming out for a Tripadvisor type service, where folk post about acts/shows they’ve seen and other people can agree/disagree? Well promoted this would attract critical mass and you could plan your w/end well in advance.

I Googled but couldn’t find one. Can anyone let me know if I’ve missed it before I put my life savings into starting one (that’s a joke, Boss:))  

Other highlights:

- A drama called Borough High Street - dark drama about two gay students and cocaine addiction. Acting, direction and writing excellent! What drew me in? It was well promoted by the flyers, guys who were chatting to us on the street and the chalk outlines all over town pointing towards the venue.

- Chocolate and cinnemon soups at Chocolate Soup.

- RANDOM EXCLUSIVE: Got talking to a source ‘extremely close’ to Simon Fuller who says that Fuller and David Beckham plan to buy a US soccer team when Beckham retires and basically use all of their combined stardust to create an international football hub that competes in the Champions League……

You may remember the story of the graduate who broke the bank!? Not a story about unpaid library fines but an enterprising young guy who used new media, particularly Facebook, to organise a protest against HSBC levvying charges on its graduate accounts. View our interview with him here. He found many, many people who felt as strongly as him and they organised petitions, flash-mobbed flagship branches, got mainstream media interested and HSBC blinked first.

Well he’s up to his old tricks again! He’s working as Campaigns Officer for the Burma Campaign  using new media to mobilise protest against human rights abuses in Burma (check out their activities and huge member base on Facebook). Finding supporters in the country who feed stories out that he uses to funnel to UK media, who then build up trust a mutually beneficial relationship with him. It also keeps people talking and focusing attention on what’s going on ie a truly terrible situation that can easily be forgotten about due to its geographical distance from here.

His latest trick is to name and shame British insurers that are profiting from doing business in Burma. Already two insurers, XL and Chubb, have pulled out of Burma and it’s causing a kerfuffle amongst the bowler hats in the City of London. They’ll keep up the pressure by exploiting their supporter base on/offline. They recently asked over 20,000 supporters to contact the ‘Dirty Insurance Companies’ via email/post, urging them to pull out.

Also check out the kinds of people they’re getting behind their campaigns.

Yesterday I posted about how a serious brand can get involved in serious discussions online and how a serious brand can use YouTube to respond to a mass petition.

I wanted to follow up on an example of where a brand can respond to a video, posted from grassroots, that is about them. This guy posted a spoof of Tiger Woods playing a shot while walking on water. Great, loads of hits (88,000), bit of a laugh!

10 out 10 though, to the bright spark at EA Sports who decided to get Tiger involved in a YouTube response, playing along with the theme and showing HOW you play a shot while walking on water. Its got loads and loads of hits, (156,000) bit of a laugh! BUT it also shows Tiger/EA share the sense of humour of their target audience, makes you feel a bit closer to them because they’ve played along with something you have generated.

It pulls off a neat trick by making Tiger feel like a man of the people, difficult when you consider the phenomenal money he’s earning and the protected lifetsyle he leads ie he’s anything but like you and me! This is a marketing lesson that some Premiership footballers could learn. 

There’s a lot of hesitation when it comes to joining in conversations online through blogs, forums etc. Questions I get asked include - are there enough readers to make it worthwhile? will we get a barrage of abuse from other commenters?

An organisation I occasionally work with is the Centre For Cities, a think tank spun out from the IPPR. Their media strategy is innovative and I often natter to Claire Hibbit and Rosi Taylor, who head up their PR team, about innovating in new media channels.

The last couple of days has seen cities policy shoot up the agenda thanks to the Policy Exchange’s, ahem… contraversial report suggesting some Northern cities be closed down and the population bussed down to the south east.

The reaction of Centre For Cities was interesting. They responded via traditional media, as you’d expect. But they were also savvy enough to realise that opinion is influenced via online discussion. You can reach your opinion leader audience by joining discussion online, just like meeting up for coffee or speaking at a conference or being interviewed on the Today programme.

You just have to understand the media you are dealing with. Rosi was monitoring discussion and offering the expertise of Head of Policy, Adam Marshall, to contribute insight to the discussions. Adam is genuinely an expert here and has done some high quality work but he remembered that this was a conversation. He was using accessible language and then linking off to an epolitix article for anyone that wanted a more in-depth analysis.

By posting, quickly, here, here, here, here and here, many MPs, councillors, journalists and policy wonks (ie their target market) have quickly got Centre For Cities on their radar, what their expertise and knowledge is and that they are responsive.

Just thought it was worth sharing as its an example that can be applied in any area…..

Social media is still vastly under-exploited as a tool for empowering individuals and groups behind a common aim and actually getting them to DO something. Picket, canvass, attend an event or raise money. To make it work though, you have to bring people with you, motivate them and not just use the web as another channel to ’send’ them things.

The prospect of getting funds in, that are not donated by a powerful interest group, has been the incentive for US political campaigns to cede a bit of control down to grassroots. Howard Dean/Joe Trippi did it with devastating success in 2004 and now Obama is taking that on. British politicians have been skeptical of the potential for ordinary folk to bring in cash so have shied away from any attempt to engage properly in new media.

However you CAN motivate people behind specific appeals or campaigns. As long as you target properly and show people they can make a difference so a SPECIFIC aim that they care about. Step forward Compass, the left wing pressure group. They sent an email to a targeted group of supporters asking them to donate a small amount towards a small sum, needed to do some research that might unlock a campaign for a windfall tax on energy companies.

edited highlights…..

“Our windfall tax campaign is really gaining momentum. Thanks to your lobbying we’ve now got over 55 Labour MPs supporting us and the number is still growing! We’ve also received a wave of new media coverage in recent days.

We urgently need YouGov to run a poll of UK voters to demonstrate electoral support for a windfall tax, this will cost £1000 - the same amount in profit that Centrica, BP and Shell make every second of every day, but unlike them we don’t have any budget for this. Fortunately UNISON has kindly pledged £500 on the basis that our members and supporters collectively pledge the same – this is a call to help us release this funding.

Please donate to our campaign today. Don’t let the oil and energy lobby win – we need just 50 people to donate £10 today - less for those on tight incomes, or more if you can afford it, any surplus above £500 will fund more campaign work. Go to the website now and make a special donation to this important campaign: http://www.compassonline.org.uk/donate.asp. Or make cheques payable to ‘Compass’ and send first-class to the address below.Please do it this second and don’t leave it to someone else to do! Its time to ‘be the change you wish to see in the world’.”  Well it WORKED! The email went out midday last Friday. So far they’ve raised £3,500  from individual donors in addition to the £500 pledged by UNISON. That includes 76 donations that came in immediately by Paypal included in above figures. Donations are still coming in. Given the email went out on a Friday / over a weekend in August they are quite pleased with this response.

Full marks to Number Ten comms team for producing a witty response to a petition on the No 10 website calling for Jeremy Clarkson to be Prime Minister. It got 49,447 signatories. They could have offered the usual toffee-nosed response. But No!

They have produced a witty spoof video that didn’t cost much time and money to make and proves those guys do have a sense of humour. As it gets passed around the web it might, just might be the kind of thing that draws a few ordinary people into the Number 10 site. They could then be encouraged to engage more with Gordon in new media ways. OK it might take a few of these kinds of videos to whizz round but its a great start. Reaction has been fairly good.

So all good for Gordon? Well, check the date on the Clarkson petition. It closed in April this year. I have it from a well-placed source that this idea was raised with Gordon back in April. A light hearted, quick and easy viral. Gordon went away to consider and consider and then refused to countenance it going out.

Interestingly, according to my source, as soon as Gordon swapped his tie for bucket and spade and went off on hols, the staff decided just to go ahead and do it….

A good PR consultant is a good communicator. To do that well we have to understand all our audiences. What do they want from our brand and when. Its not what we say to them its what they hear.

We have a society that is less deferent. They don’t want to be fobbed off with a script and they don’t want to be talked down to. Yet this what so many public and private sector organisations do, increasingly so as so many retreat from talking to customers or service users in physical locations.

I had a ding-dong with a Virgin Trains call centre person who refused to give me their advertised complimentary first class ticket, as an apology for leaving me stranded for hours and hours and hours on the West Coast mainline, during the Network Rail fiasco in the new year. I qualified, I endured the pain and had the ticket stamp to prove it, I have spent thousands with Virgin over the past few years and could prove it through my online account…..but applied for the offer after the deadline. It was entirely possible for them to adopt a human, commonsense approach based upon the degree to which they valued me as a customer. But Computer Said No!

OK, I won’t exactly take my custom elsewhere but in my job, I speak to politicians, journalists, regeneration professionals all the time. I used to always remark how great the West Coast upgrade was in conversations. Now I’ll remark on Virgin’s rubbish customer approach.

However at least this wasn’t a life or death situation. I was appalled to read the harrowing account, by Jenni Russell in the Guardian, of her inability to reach her elderly mother, living many miles away in a rural location, desperately trying to help her elderly father who was having a stroke.  There was a fault on the BT line. When she called BT’s customer ‘help’ centre to fix it they couldn’t help because it wasn’t in the script, the right person had gone home for his tea, computer basically said no!

This is wrong on so many communications, professional and humanitarian levels but like Jenni says, the response from consumers should be to vote with their feet and reward a brand that treats its customers like people rather than a cost. I hope to be advising the comms of organisations like that. I’ve got a few ideas………