Author: Steffen

How to move the public opinion pin and drive political change: maintain issue momentum through dialogue

Here’s something we hear all the time: “Our issue is really important but public awareness of the threat (or opportunity) isn’t great enough. For this reason there isn’t enough pressure on politicians for them to place it high in their agendas. What do we do?”

PA types have traditionally had a media “plus” approach to this sort of conundrum. They’ll make sure they have some sound collateral to demonstrate why the issue is important (facts and figures, reports and the like) and feed this to media and policy types. This approach is fine, but it’s usually not enough to move the public opinion pin because of the nature of media cycles. The issue collateral might be very good and get media pick-up and be big news for a few days if not weeks, but it then flounders again. And when momentum drops, so does the likelihood that the pin will shift, and policy makers invariably lose interest too.

What’s needed to shift the pin? Sustained dialogue and momentum around the issue over a protracted period of time, and this is incredibly difficult to attain with a media plus approach only, given that momentum tends to run in tandem with media cycles.

Enter digital. Creating and fostering a really compelling ongoing narrative around an issue online, and engaging with people in the online space who are interested in the same issue, can be a more effective way of maintaining momentum. And in no way does this approach preclude traditional tactics like government relations or media engagement. In fact, it strengthens both because there is more input to feed into the storyline which is shared with policy-makers and media i.e. the narrative has gone from being about just the collateral i.e. the report, facts and figures (whatever) to being about the conversation and whatever can be gleaned from it, which makes a more compelling story and helps maintain issue momentum (and ultimately shift the pin.)

Threat vs. opportunity in digital

When organisations think digital (especially for PA purposes) there’s always too much focus on threats:

  1. We’ll avoid the digital space because we might put our foot in it by saying or doing the wrong thing.
  2. We need to understand who matters in the digital space because someone might be a threat to us.
  3. We need to have a full-on online content and SEO strategy so we’ll dominate the search rankings and keep threatening stuff at bay.

1 is a miserable excuse in anyone’s book. 2 and 3 are pretty valid. But why focus just on threats with all the opportunities on offer?

  1. Embrace digital as it’ll make your intelligence-gathering and research more complete, easier, cheaper and faster.
  2. Embrace digital as it’ll allow you to be in more places where your audiences are present (including policy-makers.)
  3. Embrace digital as you might find supporters willing to back you up.
  4. Embrace digital as it might make it easier for you to manage relationships.
  5. Embrace digital as it’ll make it easier for you to tell your side of the story (and quicker.)

In short, are you selling digital within your organisation or your client? Think more happy thoughts, not just impending doom.

In policy-land, your opponents want you off the radar

One thing to never forget in policy-land is that opponents want you off the radar. Too much traditional PA relies on damage limitation or maintaining the status-quo as near as possible to where it’s been before. Fine for now perhaps, but it’s a short term fix: opponents will keep coming back for more. You’ve reduced something or other by 10% and yet a couple of years later they’re back demanding another 10% – and given that all you’ve ever done is reactive damage-control lobbying, they’ll win again, and keep doing so until you’re off the radar. Do you really think they’re ever going to go away? No. They only asked for 10% because they knew they wouldn’t get 20% – but they also know they can keep doing more of the same. Why? Because they own the public narrative while you’re completely eschewing it. Solution? Think big. Tell a story not a key message. Think global not Brussels. Think your entire industry not just your organisation. Be a CAMPAIGNER not a lobbyist.

Why PA struggles to adapt to digital: don’t blame it all on the old fogeys

I just re-read my last post and had a thought. Point two – in which I state that PA professionals increasingly need to think issues and reputation management rather than pure government relations, and hence should embrace the campaigner’s toolkit, including digital – sounds simple enough (the concept, but certainly not the execution.) However, although I imply that it’s because people aren’t moving with the times, I’m now thinking this – as easy as it is for young whippersnappers like me to blame old-school PA types for the fact that Brussels and other PA hubs are lagging, two other issues are no doubt key in determining why organisations aren’t more visionary in their PA approach:

  1. The nature of the game: short-term legislative priorities over long-term reputation. Countering Directive X is more pressing today, frankly. And as soon as Directive X is dealt with, along comes Directive Y to soak up all your time. With a PA team consisting of 5 people and 1 consultant on call whose hours are nearly all used up, it’s no surprise that organisations struggle to think long-term.
  2. It’s not you but your entire sector that needs rebranding. A lot of organisations struggle with long-term reputation because they operate within a tiny niche of a far bigger sector. They produce chemical X or energy resource Y or financial tool Z; but no one has ever heard of any of them. Yet they’re getting hammered because chemicals, energy and financial services at large have reputational issues. Why should they, representing 0.1% of a far bigger industry, be leading the charge? Quite.

Many would no doubt add another reason for PA’s struggles with digital: the fact that many issues are off the public radar and don’t need a campaign element given that “we know our entire target audience” or “our audiences don’t use the web.” Whatever. Sure, 90% of the issues I work on don’t require campaign elements suited to digital, like mobilisation and community building, but NO ONE can possibly think they are maximising their chances of success without backing up their offline narrative with a good online content strategy, supported by at least a search strategy to ensure maximum visibility amongst target audiences.

Digital in PA: why?

At its very very basest, I’d centre on two arguments:

  1. 93%. In Fleishman-Hillard’s survey of the online habits of MEPs last year we found that they pretty much all use web search every day to conduct research on policy issues (the aforementioned 93%). That in itself is immensely important; and presumably, figures for other politicians, key officials at EU or national level and members of the press are equally unambiguous. Organisations conducting Public Affairs thus need to have a presence online if they want their views to be seen, which in practice requires strategies covering: a) content; and b) visibility to target audiences (especially search, and in most cases, engagement.)
  2. The growing convergence of government relations and bigger world issues and reputation, as represented by this basic visual. Meaning what? That issues that affect public opinion and consequently an industry or organisation’s reputation must be addressed in a government relations context more so than has been the case in the past. Put simply, convincing policy-makers is not enough anymore; you need to persuade numerous stakeholders, and then consequently prove you’ve done so to the policy-makers. In practice, this is far broader than just digital: it involves employing the whole communications toolkit to listen to, reach and engage a far wider set of stakeholders than before. To conclude: mastering policy minutiae and the policy-making process are essential, but PA professionals need to pick a leaf out of the NGO handbook and think like campaigners, on and offline.

“We do government relations, we don’t need digital”

To people in PA hubs like Brussels who understand the value of communicating on issues (fewer than you’d think, given the status of traditional government relations), digital is no longer treated with suspicion. Although there is plenty of confusion around what digital actually entails and an annoying propensity to approach it tactically rather than strategically (i.e. “let’s do Twitter” rather than “who do we need to talk to and what do we need to say”), it’s generally regarded as an important part of the toolbox.

And yet “we do government relations, we don’t need digital” is still frequently heard around Brussels. Why? In actual fact, it’s got anything to with digital per se: the people who say it used to claim, “we do government relations, we don’t need communications.” In an environment where that just won’t stick anymore, given that the need for integration of government relations/advocacy and wider communications can not be disputed in polite company, the naysayers have found something new to dismiss: digital. They like the comfort zone they’ve developed over the years. One where long-term client reputation matters little compared to the ability to get a half-hour sit-down with the right official or MEP.

Wake up and smell the coffee. The sit-down will not matter if you haven’t got a credible storyline to back it up. The storyline needs to respond to real-world matters, and should be delivered to the right audiences via the right channels – including digital.

A joke about a goat (and a reflection)

Nick told us a joke yesterday:

A scraggly old Greek man in a dusty village speaks to a group of strangers.

“See that school? I built that school – with my own hands. Ten years it took, and thousands of children have been schooled there, but nobody talks about Stavros the school-builder. Nobody!

See that hospital? I built it with these very hands. Fifteen years it took. Countless lives have been saved there, children born, the sick cured, but nobody ever talks about Stavros the man who built the hospital. Nobody!

But f*** just one goat…”

Now for the reflective bit. Great men and women are often remembered for one soundbite, one event, or like Stavros, one faux-pas. In the Internet age, how is the latter affected, if at all? Are people or organisations more or less likely to be tarnished by a one-off occurrence which reflects poorly on them?

Half-glass empty Steff would say the risk is even greater, considering the ease with which events, soundbites etc. can hit the public domain. There are countless examples of individuals or companies that have suffered at the hands of simple publication and viral, as only available in the Internet age. Domino’s Pizza anyone?

Half-glass full Steff would say the risk is diminished. Given that it is so easy to publish online and build a profile across multiple online channels, it’s also surely easier to create a positive impression or persona. Public profile-building does not need to rely on unpredictable, one-off 3rd party output anymore (primarily by media) but can be conducted by the person or organisation itself, and their networks, over time. Perhaps not just yet, but certainly down the line, will web-natives (which we’ll all be by then) not have developed into creatures who shun soundbites and spin and are more likely to believe an ongoing narrative by the person/organisation in question, assuming their online network backs them up? I’d like to think so.

Which is it really? Probably a bit of both; currently more half-glass empty, but in time, more of the half-glass full version perhaps?

Online campaigning: avoid the “accruing worthless mass” temptation

Eurotypes – myself included – have often cited Oneseat as an example of a successful online campaign. It was (is) in a sense: it drummed up support for a popular cause to the tune of 1.2 million people signing a petition to have the European Parliament’s seat in Brussels only. What’s next? Not sure.

That’s one issue with the web: it’s just too easy. Tick a box and send an email – hey presto – you’ve lent your support to a worthy cause and mobilised your peers. But as with so much else online, the question is: so what? In truth, not much (usually.)

For this reason, campaigners should avoid the worthless mass temptation when seeking to mobilise people online in order to help drive meaningful political change: what’s important is what the figures mean, not how many zeroes they contain.

In a presentation I recently saw by Clay Shirky, author of multiple bestsellers on the web (look him up on YouTube and Amazon: highly recommended), he rightly states that you need to make people DO something that actually requires some effort. Just ticking a box may provide people with a warm fuzzy sense of having done their good deed for the day, but the fact of the matter is, it’s too easy and won’t usually carry any clout. If you’re trying to institute meaningful change through the actions of many, they’ll need to do something more.

Like what? Not just “tick this box to send an automated email to your parliamentarian” but writing a heartfelt personalised email/letter including quotes, photos, videos. Not just following a stream of content but contributing to it. Not just connecting to people in an online community but organising offline meet-ups. And so forth.

Your job as a communicator/campaigner? Provide the means and the encouragement, but make your audience do most of the hard work.

Quality and quantity? No, quality AND quantity

How many times have you heard the old maxim: quality NOT quantity. Thing is, in communications at least, you can’t get away with just quality.

Two reasons:

  • People need to hear something 3-5 times to believe it.
  • The multitude of channels means you can’t reach critical mass (even if your target audience is relatively small) unless you’re communicating in multiple spaces.

By all means, quality of content needs to be exceptional to get through the clutter; but it will need to do so again and again and again. There’s no escaping it: perseverance is a key quality of the successful communicator (along with creativity, a strategic mindset and a knack for understanding audiences.)

Ignore the idiots with placards

Idiots with placards are given too much visibility. Every time some contentious issue makes the headlines there’ll be 20 of them holding up home-made signs bemoaning a loss of morals, demanding that someone be banished from somewhere, or proclaiming the apocalypse. And rather than be ignored, they’ll feature prominently in reporting of whatever event they crashed, and somehow be declared the face of public opinion.

Same thing online. Anything written in a prominent blog will undoubtedly attract scores of nut-jobs declaring that the author is an evil, brainless heathen whose opinions would spell the end of humanity as we know it; and yet normal people respond to these morons and even often refer to them in follow-up content as the face of public opinion. In my line of work it equates to clients saying: they all hate us, just look at the 20 critical tweets and blog comments.

It’s too easy to make a lot of noise and somehow become the face of an issue. A plea: ignore the nut-jobs, or we end up giving them credibility and lure more nut-jobs into the public space (think the fringes of the Tea-Party in the US.) Let them have their say, but let’s please not forget most people are moderate and sensible. What’s real public opinion? A million people on the streets of London to protest against an impending war. Even better, results of surveys where a proper cross-section of people are polled.

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