Nick Booth from over at Podnosh has tried to answer the questions of “Why leaders should blog?”. He goes into some depth and backs his arguments with evidence from other sources. Paul Caplan from Internationale is slightly more blunt summarising his arguments as if they don’t “they will be sitting in their corner of the party – Billy no-mates, talking to themselves.”
I left a comment somewhere in between:
I think the issue is simpler. Leaders lead by being visible and inspiring. It is a rare leader who hides away without communicating.
Take local Councillors. They lead by being in their community holding conversations, doing radio and press interviews, writing letters, attending and speaking at public meetings. It is their bread and butter.
They, and other leaders, are being left behind though. Those conversations, those public meetings are happening online too. In blogs, in forums on email groups. Leaders need to participate in those conversations too or risk becoming half a leader. It is difficult to participate fully without being there with your own blog.
Therefore leaders must blog or ignore a significant and increasingly important part of their leadership role.
The Daily Telegraph writer Robert Colvile has written a cogent paper for the Centre for Policy Studies about the way the internet is changing politics and policy, and the current failings of the political parties to embrace the brave new world.
And while I largely accept his argument (that the internet offers the potential to create a faster more chaotic, but more open, world in which politicians will have to find new language or risk becoming even more bland - and so less likeable) it is the caveats that he puts around that that I find just as compelling.
These essentially are that the on-line conversation leaves out swathes of the population and as such skews the debate. So while he says “67% of Britons use the internet in one way or another” he also says:
In the UK, in 2006, 51% of those earning up to £10,400 had never used the internet, compared to 6% of those on £36,400 or more.
71% of those aged 65 and over in this country have never used the internet.
As we go down the age range, internet use grows rapidly - only 35% of those aged between 55 and 64 have never gone on-line, falling to just 4% of the digital near-natives in the 16 to 24 bracket.
So our on-line politics is likely to be dominated by younger, wealthier people; and I can’t help noticing that Colvile doesn’t talk about whether there biases around ethnicity or gender.
Which makes me think that, while he may be right in saying that the net savy MP (and for our purposes we can substitute councillor) will find that:
by inhabiting the same on-line spaces as their constituents on a day-to-day basis, MPs will interact with them in much more normal conditions - when the MP is not the privileged voice of authority, but merely one member of a conversation among many.
But the elected representative needs to consider how they’ll represent all of the views of all their constituents, not just those of us who are webheads, so the new politics will need strategies that reach beyond the net, even while they take the best of the net’s creative drive with them.
His blog works because you feel you are getting the full picture rather than some sanitised spun version of events. Sometimes these public sector blogs written under pseudonyms try to hide the authors and initially Random Acts seems that way because it doesn’t pull its punches and is free with its criticism of the Government.
According to Tom though, his employers are comfortable with it. In fact, so comfortable, he is speaking today at the Guardian Public Service Summit (at the opulent Sopwell House House Hotel in St Albans much favoured by footballers¹). His audience includes his big boss, the Director-General Workforce at the Department of Health, Gus O’Donnell and Ed Miliband MP amongst many, many others.
(¹At least Paul Gascoigne was there when I was a few years back)
Steve Webb, MP for Northavon, is perhaps the most Web2.0 friendly politician in the UK. He’s “not an obsessive blogger” and his blog is perhaps not the most cutting edge, but Steve manages a complex and far-reaching online presence through his blog, his website, his email list, his text lists in addition to his MySpace and Facebook profiles. I expect he has YouTube and Flickr accounts and will shortly be tweeting using Twitter before long.
Steve uses Blogger which comes free from Google. Blogger has many supporters but seems to be more limited than Wordpress and has less flexibility for additional pages and comment handling.
At the review meeting last week our Cllrs asked for examples of civic leaders who were blogging so here is the first one.
Cllr Mary Reid
Mary has been blogging for a few years. She has a popular but low key blog that concentrates on events in her constituency and council area, with the occasional comment on national and international matters such as her role in developing e-democracy in the UK and abroad.
Mary also managed to keep her blog going through her year as Mayor of Kingston upon Thames. The role meant that she was unable to be political on the blog, but a succession of photo-opportunities meant there was plenty to blog about.
Mary uses the ReadMyDay platform that was developed for civic leaders but which lacks the widespread support and integration of Wordpress.
Jeff Jarvis met a reluctant blogger the other day:
the woman next to me was troubled, bearing weight on her shoulders from having to fill her blog and manage her blog. To her, the blog was a thing, a beast that needed to be fed, a never-ending sheet of blank paper. I turned to her and said she should see past the blog. It’s not a show with a rundown that, without feeding, turns into dead air. Indeed, if you look at it that way, you’ll probably write crappy blog posts. I’ve said before that if I think I need to write a post just because I haven’t written one, I inevitably come out with something forced and bad. Instead, I blog when I find something interesting that I’ve seen and I think, ‘I have to tell my friends about that.’ You’re the friends. So yes, I said, it’s just a conversation. And reading — hearing what others are saying — is every bit as important as writing.
I don’t watch Countdown and I have a sneaking suspicion that neither does Gordon Brown, so it was a little surprising to see this clip on YouTube he recorded last year.
I don’t want to get into the rights and wrongs of whether the PM should be recording such congratulations but I do believe that politicians should use their own “voice”. In this clip Gordon Brown grins, grimaces, lifts his voice, gets serious within seconds of each other making him look as though he is in the panto. The point is that if you’re going to talk directly to your constituency do so in a voice that they will recognise as you and that you can use consistently.
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