Big conference

Social Media World Forum Europe

On Monday (14th) I will be attending the Social Media World Forum Europe conference, at London’s Olympia venue. It looks like quite a big do.

I’m also going to appear on a couple of panels, one in the morning and one in the afternoon.

The morning’s panel – at 10:30 – is a workshop on ‘What are Politicians doing in Web 2.0?’ focusing in on:

  • What tools Obama and his team used to gain success in social media space
  • Who’s tweeting?
  • Number 10 – how the prime minister’s office are embracing social media

I’ll be sharing a stage with Paul Staines (aka Guido Fawkes), Scott Redding of the Green Party and my good pal Simon Dickson off of Puffbox.

In the afternoon – at about 5pm –  I’ll be discussing the use of social tools behind the firewall as part of the Enterprise Social Media Forum, in a session called ‘The integration of social business software with Social Media feedback to building your business and brand’.

With me on the panel will be luminaries of the enterprise 2.0 scene David Terrar, Andy McLoughlin and Per Rombouts.

Other sessions I’ve spotted featuring friends of DavePress are Ingrid Koehler, who will be on a workshop panel discussing the impact of social media on elections, at about 11am, and Jemima Gibbons, who is discussing how to write the case for using online communities in business, sometime in the morning (it’s not quite clear on the agenda – PDF warning).

Flaming for Obama

Lovely piece in Prospect this month from Peter Jukes, talking about the occasionally fractious community of Democrat bloggers in the US:

For many in Britain, blogging, especially political blogging, is a bit of a disappointment. Many of our political sites are tacked on to party websites, or are simply online versions of established media outlets. They tend to be either controlled, conformist and rather dull, or unmoderated rants, the kind of online graffiti rightly parodied by Private Eye.

These sites in the US foster a real community spirit and encourage the best material to float to the top:

On first view, websites like Daily Kos and MyDD may look like simple news providers, but underneath they are powered by a specific community and its democratic preferences. Soon after joining, you can write your own piece, or “diary.” With enough interest from other users, your diary can rise quickly up the recommended list or “rec list” until you are ushered on to the front page. In their comments, other readers can annotate and correct your piece, provide new links and background, “flame” you with insults, heap you with praise or just crack a joke. These comments are themselves subject to voting. The more votes you acquire the more privileges you get—a privileged user can, for example, hide the abusive or unsubstantiated comments they receive from others. Becoming a member of these sites is like joining the editorial board of an interactive newspaper or, with the increased popularity of embedded YouTube videos, the news team of a television network.

Jukes laments the lack of such communities in this country:

There is nothing in Britain that replicates the passion and activism of these sites. The nearest equivalent is ConservativeHome—and perhaps it is no surprise that an opposition party latches on to this alternative form of communication. I still wait for real signs of a popular centre-left blog in Britain. (If you want to start one up, let me know.)

Learning from Obama

One of the interesting topics to emerge from 2gether08, specifically the sessions on whether UK politics is ‘big enough’ for the web, and ‘egov to wegov‘, was where we stand on campaigning online, especially in comparison with the US.

This ties in neatly with a speech made by the Skills Minister, David Lammy, last week:

The danger, in a world where Westminster has created its own industry of think-tanks, lobbying firms, PR agencies and media outlets, is that we lose the rich diversity to a generation of politicians who have emerged not from the professions, the business community or the unions but from within Westminster itself.

It’s dangerous because people struggle to find the connections with this political class that seems to operate in a different world.

This has been picked up by a few commentators, such as Simon Dickson:

But he’s absolutely right: the [online] tools are cheap, often free, and easy. It’s not whether you can do it, it’s what you do with it. It’s also quite interesting to see him talking in terms of a ‘fightback’. It’s often said that campaigning is easier when you’re in opposition: by pre-emptively accepting defeat, could that kickstart Labour’s online efforts?

Andrew Grice in The Independant:

Mr Lammy was calling for a cultural revolution in our politics to reconnect it with the people, as Mr Obama has done. New Labour, he admitted, was never “a movement that filtered down to ordinary people”.

Andrew Sparrow in The Guardian:

It was a speech about the lessons to be learnt from the US presidential elections and Lammy’s intention, I’m sure, was to promote a debate about the way Labour should change, not to deliver any coded criticism of the prime minister.

But his message, or at least one of them, was that “the political messages and methods of the 1990s are beginning to look very tired and dated”, and time and time again he made points that it would be impossible to imagine Brown saying, or even supporting.

Paul Canning has written regularly about the Obama campaign, too:

In the UK internet use is already by a majority, is growing over other media use and is only going one way – up. I would imagine that the Tories are ahead of the game on this (my impression, though I’m advised it may well be the Libdems – it’s definitely not Labour) but once the real facts have been unpacked it would be a huge mistake for the other parties to just think ‘fundraising’ and not recognise that – as well as having a compelling candidate – running from the bottom-up, empowering supporters and making use of the Web’s power is really what’s behind Obama’s success.

So here’s the thing. Politicians need to connect with people through conversation, conversation that can be messy and result in a loss of control. It means that the politicians go on a journey themselves through their campaigns, learning from their electorate rather than lecturing them – and they need to tell the story of that journey so that others may connect with them.

The web provides the tools for this to happen, and can be deployed quickly and pretty cheaply. All the political parties should be looking across the Atlantic and identifying the lessons they could learn from both the primary elections just finished, and the presidential election to come.

They also need to be planning this now, because while this stuff is dead easy to do, it’s damn hard to do it well.

Who’s left blogging?

Charlie Beckett writes entertainingly about the state of the presence of the political left in the UK blogosphere:

The Online Socialists have various problems.

No-one reads them. Guido Fawkes and his wicked Right-wing pals are far more entertaining and they know how to write for an online audience: scurriously, succinctly, directly. They are much more committed and actually contribute facts, stories and vitriol to the debate…

The Left bloggers want to change the world but they don’t want any responsibility. In this they are a mirror image of the right-wing blogosphere in the States.

This is a topic that Simon Dickson has picked up on several occasions, once pointing the finger at The Guardian‘s Comment is Free platform as overly-dominating online debate amongst liberals and left-wingers:

My theory, still in development, is that Comment Is Free is too big. If you want to read left-leaning blog content, you could start and finish on that one website, and wouldn’t miss much. And if you’re a leftie blogger, getting an item on Comment Is Free would put your rant in front of many times more readers than any solo blog.

It’s an interesting discussion. Can conservatives really be better at online than lefties in this country? And does it fit with other media – newspapers, magazines etc? I think there is probably an argument that The Spectator is a better read than The New Statesman, but then Prospect is better than Standpoint, so that’s kind of cancels itself out.

Online is important though, especially at time of political change, and of course we have one of those coming up in the next couple of years when we have a general election. Not only will comment-based blogs come to the fore, but parties and candidates will need to leverage the online during their campaigns just as Obama and others did in the States. I would hope they are planning what they are going to do now, otherwise it can end up being a bit of a mess.

Postscript: Charlie Beckett is going to be talking at 2gether08. Am signed up to go along for what should be a really interesting session.