First blood to Labour in the use of consumer empowerment to undermine its rivals. The repurposing of David Cameron’s “We can’t go on like this” airbrushed poster, both online, via www.mydavidcameron.com and on the streets, is a great example of how to appeal to peoples’ subversive streak. Barbera Ellen in yesterday’s Observer described how “this was the public channelling its ‘inner Banksy.’ Here’s the best version so far, courtesy of one creative soul in Hereford:
One of the first signs that a company is in trouble it when tries to regulated its less formal communications channels with external stakeholders. We saw it with the banks last year, all of whom started to micro-manage every communication from the outside world. Unless it came from the c-suite and had been scrutinised at length by corporate corporations and legal experts, it wasn’t going out of the building.
Ironically, this was the worst thing they could have done. No one these days trusts official communication, especially when it comes from the men in suits at the top of an organisation. Conversely, other less formal communication, between people on the inside and people on the outside of a corporation, tends to be more trusted. Microsoft and Sun Microsystems learned this lesson years ago, which is why they allow thousands of their employees to blog, Twitter and chat, without any corporate interference.
Unfortunately the marketing people at Manchester United haven’t learned this lesson. It was revealed today that the Twitter accounts of their leading stars have been closed down and from now on, all communications with fans has to go through the official Man United website. This is the reaction of a corporate communications team in complete panic mode. At a time when the club needs to win the trust of its fans, in the face of escalating protests against the Glazer family’s ownership, closing down one of the few credible and trusted links between the club and its fan-base is not the cleverest of moves.
Student facing the next round of job interviews can now get the inside track on likely questions, thanks to a new website – http://www.whatwilltheyask.co.uk/- set up by a bunch of enterprising economics students from Bristol University. Another great example of how the crowd is increasingly able to subvert the procedures of even the most powerful corporation and change the balance of power between interviewer and interviewee. When the job market starts to pick up and companies once again find themselves in a ‘war for talent’, this site will become even more influential.
A backlash is gathering pace against the naive belief in the wisdom of crowds and the inate righteousness of the Open Source movement. Jaron Lanier is one of the original new media thinkers – he is credited with popularising the term ‘virtual reality.’ In his new book, “You are not a gadget”, he criticises the impact of what he terms “hive thinking and “digital Maoism” – open source software, the belief in the rights of free access to creative content – on individual creativity.
Lanier also takes issue with the what reviewer John Tierney, in a great article in the New York Times, labels the “viscious pack behaviour on blogs, forums and social networks - the meanness of mobs.”
The Open Source/”free content for all” philosophy represents the first time since the days of Robin Hood, that the theft of other people’s property (creative content) has been allowed to assume the moral high ground. Lanier’s book is a smart reminder that even some of the most enlightened web minds, fear that this might prove to be a destructive force.
Despite what the social media evangelists would like to claim, the forthcoming election will not be won through tweets, postings and blogs. It will generate much social media debate – and a painful amount of bullshit – but just like in the US, it will ultimately be a battle of mobilisation.
Obama didn’t win because he used Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and Facebook. He won because his team had worked out exactly the best way to turn peoples’ interest into action. Admittedly, much of that interest, especially from younger voters, was generated and expressed through social media, but ultimately it was the millions of telephone calls and visits to peoples’ houses that mobilised the Democratic vote.
This point of view appears to be shared by Matthew McGregor from Blue State Digital (Obama’s digital gurus). In an Observer article, ironically entitled, ‘How the 2010 election will be won by blogs and tweets’ he said, “Blogs and politicians twittering get most attention, but under the radar a new form of organising supporters is happening. By energising people, and then giving them the tools to get involved and become advocates for the party, thousands of people are talking to volunteers, passionate about the issues and ready for a conversation. It is a new way of doing traditional politics.”
It is wonderfully appropriate the my final post of the year should celebrate the consumer power that helped ‘Rage Against the Machine’ beat the X-Factor juggernaut to become the Christmas number one. If anything demonstrated the spirit of the times, this was it: collective action – starting with a couple of grassroots activists, Jon & Tracy Morter, and using the power of social media to recruit a mass movement – focused single-mindedly on a campaign that appealed to the subversive streak that doesn’t lie very deep within the British psyche. We wrote Crowd Surfing for days like these. Happy Christmas.
Jo Swinson, Scottish Liberal Democrat MP, has clearly read her marketing case studies. In her crusade against the retouching of images by the beauty industry, Swinson adopted the template provided by Dove’s ‘Campaign for real beauty.’ She launched her own Real Women campaign in August – with the aim of trying to combat body image stereotypes by ‘injecting some realism’ into media images of women – and then set up a dedicated website and Twitter feed to recruit like-minded supporters.
The result? A P&G ad campaign, featuring an air-brushed Twiggy, has been deemed misleading by the ASA, after receiving more than 700 complaints and Swinson’s credentials as a smart political campaigner have been enhanced. A great example of how to enlist the support of the crowd to win an argument against a powerful corporation.
The UK government seems particularly keen to encourage consumer empowerment. We’ve already had the GP patient survey – an opportunity for patients to rate the performance of GPs – and now we have OnePlace – designed by the Audit Commission to highlight and compare the performance of local councils, hospitals and police, across a range of measures, such as traffic accidents, child protection, teenage pregnancy and Co2 emissions.
Predictably, the ratings system used on the OnePlace site has been criticised by many local authorities as inaccurate, unfair and expensive. But it reflects the prevailing political view that providing easy access to information is the best way to encourage all of us to become more active and demanding citizens, which will, in turn, drive up standards within the public sector.
We devoted a whole chapter in the book to Dell’s transition from bloggers’ pariah to Crowd Surfing hero. Some of the statistics we quoted are inevitably out of date, so here’s the latest numbers, courtesy of Gordon Macmillan at Brand Republic:
Not bad for a business, run by a self confessed control freak, that was almost brought to its knees four years ago by Jeff Jarvis’ Dell Hell rants.
General Motors’ champion of openness, Fritz Henderson, has been fired, so it seems perfectly appropriate that his daughter publicly criticised the decision on the company’s own Facebook page. Her offending comments (including rude words and poor spelling) were quickly removed, although not before they had been picked up by sharp-eyed bloggers.
Predictably, many commentators have suggested that this highlights the dangers for corporations of using social media, although GM must be one hell of a weak company if the comments of an angry daughter are enough to give it sleepless nights. If anything, the young Henderson’s comments add a degree of authenticity to the often bland and over-polished outpourings from GM HQ.