Here’s the new strategy for communications undertaken by the European Union: a shared agenda and framework, but with an extremely local focus. The innovation? Looks like the EU may pony up the funds to underwrite some of this activity.

For too long we have blamed one another for the EU’s communication failures. It is time to work together on a shared agenda based on agreed priorities.
Cooperation and coherent communication is the way forward. Moreover, we need an agreed framework within which to cooperate. What we proposed in our recent paper is an inter-institutional agreement under which much of the communication work done by the commission, council and parliament would be based on a common annual work plan, reflecting a common set of communication priorities and linked to the annual policy strategy the three institutions have agreed on.
The commission has also proposed to establish management partnerships with individual member states. To put it simply, this means that individual governments – if they so wish – will implement specific communication plans that have been agreed with the commission and are financed by the commission. The action taken under these plans should be as decentralized as possible – with the emphasis on going local.

That’s an excerpt from an article penned by Margot Wallström, the EU Commissioner responsible for communications, in Parliament Magazine.

Wow. Sucks to the press attache to the French Embassy in Washington.

Chris Anderson just outed Amaury Laporte, as well as dozens of other people, for spamming his inbox.

“All of them have sent me something inappropriate at some point in the past 30 days. Many of them sent press releases; others just added me to a distribution list without asking.”

As a result, he’s blocked their addresses.

The comments to the post are valuable for their discussion of how public relations pros (or amateurs) handle their mail lists.

It’s at an international conference that your skills as a high master of government communications are tested.

Your policy and program colleagues have spent months developing a comprehensive agenda. They have convinced experts from around the country and around the world to attend - and to speak.

And they look to you for the entire gamut of communications skills:

Oh, and some communications plan that will tie everything together and wrap it with a pretty bow.

If you’re lucky, your organization has hired some very experienced conference planners to drive the process and make sure every detail of the event proceeds smoothly and as planned.

It’s still up to you and your communications staff to hit the bricks, so to speak. Pick apart the conference agenda, find the topics, the nuggets and the speakers who are at all interesting to the general public. And sell the bejesus out of them.

It’s an exercise in identifying your spheres of influence:

• people who normally cover your organization and your topic
• people who have covered your topic in the past
• people who have written about subjects related to your topic
• people who have interviewed the speakers invited to your conference
• people who have reported on the topics covered by your speakers
• reporters in the town where you’re hosting your conference
• assignment editors in other towns who will make reporters in the town where you’re hosting your conference actually come to your conference.

In our case, we managed to have an issue to lead into our conference. And it was an issue that drew attention.

Luckily, we brought most of our communications team to town in preparation. And I needed help from each and every one of them. Still, I’ve spent the entire day on the phone with reporters. As have four other, expert, spokespersons.

It shakes the bones of a staid government communicator, I’ll tell you. Sometimes we get used to events and schedules unfolding as expected - and as routinely and quietly as possible. It suits a government employee.

But all it takes is one day - just one day - where your skills as manager, strategist and media relations expert are challenged to remind you how most government communicators leave a lot on the table every day.

Really. We all arrive at work vowing to produce our best work and provide our clients with the best counsel possible. But how often do we arrive at work thinking “I want this file to explode - but in a good way.”

And the conference doesn’t really start until tomorrow. Stay tuned.

British researchers, working in conjunction with an Ottawa government lab, discovered a rock with the composition sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide - which is the imaginary chemical formula for kryptonite. That’s right - the rock that could defeat Superman.

It was, as one Ottawa communicator called it, “a science writer’s dream.” The Citizen tells us why the trans-Atlantic partnership failed in its attempts to cross-promote the discovery. It’s all in an article called Even with kryptonite, scientists can’t smite red tape.

In the world of social media, you really do have to pause sometimes. Innovation after innovation, mashable upon widget. They all threaten to re-interpret our world, and question exactly how old-line organizations (and communicators) have been able to get by doling out information by the tablespoon and digesting it by the teaspoon.

Like the twitter channel that updates on the activities on the floor of the House of Representatives. It draws on the information posted to this page by the Office of the Clerk of the House. (Here’s how it’s done.)

Sounds like a great idea. But consider the target market, largely political aides, bureaucrats and lobbyists in and around Washington. That’s an audience of thousands. This twitter is being followed by 18.

More interesting, but also more like drinking water from a firehose, is an application of Yahoo Pipes that attempts to filter legislative tracking feeds and Congressional Record speeches.

There are people, deeply interested in public policy, who are dissecting our work in ways barely imagined by those inside the bureaucracy.

And, despite all the hand wringing about the death of PR in the private sector, the explosion in social media and networking technology offers a real opportunity for a PR or comms person to build experience, value and credibility with their clients - if they’re capable of interpreting the trends online, forecasting their effects on their organization, and applying relevant innovations to their own work.

“… The old diplomacy was defined by a world of limited information. It was a veritable secret garden of negotiations. And secret negotiation still matters. But we live in a world where the views of a Pashtun herdsman, and the conflict he faces between illegal opium production and legal farming, holds the fate of a critical country in the balance. So the new diplomacy is public as well as private, mass as well as elite, real-time as well as deliberative. And that needs to be reflected in the way we do our business.”

- excerpt from David Miliband’s first speech as Foreign Secretary, speaking to The New Diplomacy (text on FCO site, spotty video on YouTube, and webcast on avaaz.org)

Which signals a greater commitment to online communities and a frank conversation with the general public?

• a blog, or
• co-hosting your first major policy speech with an international and online activist organization?

David Miliband, the British Cabinet Minister formerly known online for his personal blog posts as DEFRA Minister, has been promoted to the post of Foreign Secretary. No new blog yet, but the signs are encouraging.

In fact, Miliband’s first major policy speech was co-hosted by avaaz.org - a relatively new international and online activist organization. In addition to the vague but reassuring words in his speech about non-traditional influences on diplomacy and foreign policy priorities. the new Foreign Secretary fielded some questions submitted online by avaaz’ members.

“…At the end we handed David Miliband his own Book of Global Public Opinion, with all our members’ thousands of questions and pieces of advice, warning and encouragement. Clarion calls for an ethical foreign policy, a new global climate treaty, all-party negotiations and ending occupation in the Middle East, the protection of human rights and decisive action on poverty. I hope he’s reading it now.” (Paul Hilder, in HuffPost)

The talk is even being walked on the Foreign and Commonwealth Office website.

The FCO is encouraging Britons to “Have Their Say” about the speech and the FCO’s priorities. Unfortunately, the system seems to consist of an HTML form, a formal review process once submitted, and then a static compilation of comments.

The three themes under this section have links to reddit, del.icio.us and digg - but none of the other pages on the FCO site seem to have them.

It’s a first step, isn’t it?

The larger question remains how Miliband’s past experience with online comment and activism will be reflected in the polices and practices developed by the FCO.

Will public diplomacy really change as a result? Or will the process be more incremental, simply as a result of institutional inertia and the greater challenge of shifting the course of a large foreign policy apparatus.

In the world of bureaucracy, there are two ways to communicate with senior management:

• very short briefs describing novel ideas with clear benefits or costs; or
• great long reports that demonstrate that a lot of very deep thinking and extensive consultation have resulted in findings with fundamental impact.

Unfortunately, David Wyld’s The Blogging Revolution: Government in the Age of Web 2.0 is looong. It’s presented as a research report and, although it has clearly defined sections on blogging by public officials, public sector executives and corporate executives, it buries all the good nuggets of information between graphs, charts and paragraph upon paragraph of descriptive text.

Which is a pity, because he’s included a number of useful case studies and checklists, like this one:

10 Tips for Blogging by
Public Sector Executives

Tip 1: Define yourself and your purpose.
Tip 2: Do it yourself!
Tip 3: Make a time commitment.
Tip 4: Be regular.
Tip 5: Be generous.
Tip 6: Have a “hard hide.”
Tip 7: Spell-check.
Tip 8: Don’t give too much information.
Tip 9: Consider multimedia.
Tip 10: Be a student of blogging.

I guess what strikes me is the information design of the report. It just smells of 1993. It’s a big hunk of text, sitting online, with no energy or interactive elements. The report’s not going to win any converts the way it’s presented.

That said, I’ve long believed that adoption of social media by large hierarchical organizations will rely on heavyweight evangelism.

Much of the traditional executive suite will not buy into the benefits of social media and community building without the approval and reassurance of the same people who put their enterprise architecture into place.

Let’s face it. Senior executives are looking for these qualities:

• suits
• shoes
• combed hair
• an awareness of how the proposed technology will affect the rest of the network
• practical experience working with enterprise applications
• some sort of graduate degree that smells of ivy
• someone who can tie the benefits of social media to key business priorities

That means the big consultancies (IBM, by the way, sponsored Wyld’s report) and enterprise providers. As an advocate for social media, you might have to wrap yourself in big blue or talk about “the guys back in Germany.”

Otherwise, the alternate strategy is to win “big consultancy street cred” by getting articles published in white shoe magazines and newsletters like Harvard Business Review, Strategy+Business, and others.

thanks, Barb, for the pointer.

How do you put into place a comprehensive and radically new communications program across an entire government? An interview over at PR Conversations provides details on how the Government of Tanzania has taken steps to implement a system-wide communications process - nuts and bolts, soup to nuts.

Tanzania’s previous government communications strategy was, how should be put it, prescriptive and parental? For example, take a look at the previous media relations policy (post-1970), detailed on page 105 and beyond of the MISA Media Advocacy Toolkit.

In the late 1990s, a fundamental change in political philosophy, government leaders and institutional approach to communications enabled Tanzania to begin restructuring the government’s communications function.

Gerhard Butschi and Mindi Kasiga made a presentation about the Tanzanian initiative at the recent World Public Relations Festival in Cape Town. Their powerpoint deck is available online.

Reviewing the interview and the deck, we can winnow down an extremely complicated process into some basic steps:

• Radical change in government ideology towards communicating with the public
• Strong direction from the Head of Government
• Empowered and centralized direction for change
• Third Party, NGO and international support for program
• Communications Audit by Burson-Marsteller
• Reinvigorated communications function in every Ministry
• Heads of Communication participation in management decisions
• Institutionalized best practices through common training and professional exchanges
• Common training across communication function, involving entire communications community

Granted, it is much easier to radically remake a communications community when you only have 50-odd communicators across the 26 ministries. Still, how many other governments have documents like the “Communications Strategy for the National Strategy for Growth and Reduction of Poverty” available online?

h/t to Judy Gombita

The Power of Information report is in. I’m slowly reading through it, but I’ll give you some highlights from the fifteen recommendations for action by the British Government:

• coordinate the development of experimental partnerships between major departments and user-generated sites in key policy areas, including parenting advice, services for young people, and healthcare.
• departments should be strongly advised to consult the operators and users of pre-existing user-generated sites before they build their own versions.
• research the scale and role of user-generated websites in their areas, with a view to either terminating government services that are no longer required, or modifying them to complement citizen-led endeavours.
• examine the introduction of non-commercial re-use licences.
• by autumn 2007 the Cabinet Office Propriety and Ethics and Government Communications teams should together clarify how civil servants should respond to citizens seeking government advice and guidance online.

The full document is available at the Cabinet Office site.

Matt Haughey, of MetaFilter, offers Seven tips on how to run a successful community. Many experienced social media professionals, when pitching to the uninitiated, dance around the level of effort and labour needed to successfully launch a new community. The benefits are undeniable! The costs are minimal! Your stakeholders will flock to your community!

Not for Matt:

“If you’ve got an existing site/service that you’re planning to add a community or social component to, don’t expect someone with a full workload to simply take it on and spend a few minutes here and there maintaining it. Your best bet would be devoting someone full-time to the effort.”

Just as important for government types contemplating launching social media apps are suggestions he originally published in 2001. Repeated again: a good community demands attention and nurturing.

Identifying a social media “expert” in your communications, consultations, outreach or community office is a fantastic first step, but a successful effort requires a partnership with the relevant policy analysts. Or the appropriate program specialists. Only together will you be able to plant the seeds of a community or discussion that will attract readers and participants.

“Seed content sets the stage

In the early months of a community site, it’s important that there is good content there, and that the comments or audience interaction are as close to optimal as possible, so that others reading the site can get a feel for how they are expected to act. If you’re building a site that covers politics and you’re dreaming of lively debate with a specific slant, make sure your first few articles, essays, or threads cover a good topic, and that some discussion follows where users (more than one) are debating things in an intelligent way. New members will see what is currently on the site, and react accordingly. If there is considerate and helpful criticism, others will usually follow. If there are “first posts!” and posts making threats on other members, other such garbage will follow that as well.

If it’s a company discussion forum, set up some threads and have some friends start discussions. If it’s a community of airplane enthusiasts, try and find 2 or 3 people to help start the site off the same way, by finding content and discussing it in a proper manner. You’re not shooting for having hundreds of fake discussion posts with no one, you’re just trying to convey a code of conduct by starting with things you can use as examples, and new members can follow.”

Matt echoes this advice in his more recent post:

“Be the best member of your site. Lead by example by participating as much as you can in your own community. This is a good way to attract other well-intentioned members of your site and also reminds everyone a real person is behind it all and building the best community they can for everyone. Speak honestly and be supportive of other members. When I think of all the communities I’m a part of, the ones I love are the ones I see the creators using everyday. “

Unfortunately, many government public relations specialists don’t have the resources to tend to a network of community sites, discussion threads and comment moderation queues.

In any other situation, like a trade show or a large event, they might contract out excess workload to external agencies: that is CLEARLY NOT an option here.

No matter how detailed the brief or longstanding the relationship between government organization and agency, an outsider cannot speak knowledgeably (or legitimately) about the “state of play” in policy development and program implementation.

More importantly, most people would not accept that their government is allowing the most direct form of communications (other than accosting your Member of Parliament while they’re doorstepping) to be stick handled and filtered by an outside supplier.

Obviously,  government types chasing the implementation of an effective social media program face a dual challenge: arguing that social media is the most effective and most responsive method to communicate with citizens and stakeholders WHILE arguing for more financial and human resources.

Damn those fly by the seat of your pants Web 2.0 firms and their exposed brick offices! They swoop in with their flashy shirts, tight slacks and MB-heavy powerpoints and make it all seem so easy!