To ape Sally Field - you love me! you really, really love me!

Okay. Not me. A skinnier, more British, more Labour version of me. Oh, who was a journalist.

Okay. You love Jimmy Leach. Or at least the New Media Age awards did.

Tony Blair’s head of digital communications, has taken home the award for “The Greatest Individual Contribution to New Media.” Why? Epetitions. Podcasts. A YouTube channel for a Prime Minister. All put in place in less than a year.

Simon Dickson underlines the importance of Leach’s work: it has helped establish a precedent for British government communicators.

“…So Jimmy is free to do all sorts of radical things which most Ministries … would typically strangle at birth.

Standard Whitehall mentality is that it’s only acceptable to do something innovative if someone else has already done it. (Which, of course, is a contradiction in terms, but anyway…) And if the ’someone else’ happens to be the almighty Downing Street, all reticence disappears.

Suddenly there’s no need to fear a call from the most powerful office in the land, asking what the hell you thought you were doing. If you post your Minister’s stuff on YouTube, in the same way that No10 posted theirs, what can go wrong? (And if it does go wrong, at least No10 will probably be stuffed too.)”

And, as WhitehallWebby points out, he’s beat out a worthy slate of opponents.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007 at 5:38 pm and is filed under Implementation, Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.