URL: Latest posts
Messaging sucks
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Clearly this is tongue in check, messaging is useful; but it’s not the be-all and end-all: It’s often not used although organisations spend ages developing the messages It needs to change every few months It’s often often base...
Presentation: Reputation and Public Affairs in Brussels
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I mentioned in a post a couple of weeks back that I was slightly unsure of how to approach the presentation on reputation I was due to give at the Public Affairs Action Day. In short, we all know reputation matters in Public Affairs, but there a...
Online grassroots campaigning to support Public Affairs: once overhyped, now largely ignored
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Even just a couple of years ago, a fair few people in the Brussels bubble were getting excited about the prospect of online grassroots campaigning. Their logic was as follows: Regulation increasingly reflects public sentiment Public sentiment lives b...
Reputation and Public Affairs in Brussels: where to start?
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I’m running a session on reputation this week at the Public Affairs Action Day and although it’s a subject I’ve been dealing with for years, I’m always slightly unsure of how to approach it in a Brussels context. Meaning what?
What Public Affairs could learn from Borgen
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To anyone who hasn’t seen (or indeed heard) of Borgen, you’re missing out. Think The West Wing but better: the characters are utterly compelling yet not all exactly the same in all but appearance like on TWW (where everyone is bright and fast-tal...
We’d like a little bit of digital please
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The starting point for digital in Public Affairs, and other disciplines no doubt, will often be very tentative: “we’d like a little bit of digital please.” In practice, it may mean no clear strategy, a single channel, one junior person within a...
Being overly tactical can go unnoticed in Public Affairs
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Interesting thought emanating from a recent conversation: Public Affairs is probably the communications discipline that more than any other is tactic-centric. Meaning that in PA, you can propose all manner of tactics without much research or strategy...
Paid media (advertising) in Public Affairs
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Although it can be extremely effective in driving traffic and raising awareness of one’s activity, we often scoff at advertising in Public Affairs, usually for one of more of these reasons: We know our audiences so why advertise? Advertising is not...
Europeans and Obama (not another post on Obama?!)
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As if enough hadn’t been said or written already (and I don’t profess to be an expert, by any stretch). An interesting thought nonetheless: why are we Europeans still so enamoured of Obama? A mix of some of the following perhaps. To many, h...
In one visual: online support for an issues management programme
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If you’re working on an issue in which you represent one side of the debate, you’ll need to present that view online. Why? We’ve been over this before, but in short, people who matter will be looking you up online and if you’re nowhere, they
Digital principles from the US presidential campaign applied to our far smaller pond
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My colleague from Fleishman-Hillard in Washington DC, Bill Black, was in Brussels a couple of weeks ago to host an event on the use of digital in the US presidential campaign. Good thing that Obama was triumphant, given that the presentation centred...
Digital is always relevant in Public Affairs
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I start off a number of presentations on digital PA with this image, slyly trying to pre-empt the inevitable i.e. PA professionals who have made one (if not both) the following assumptions: Digital is a mass-market, spray and pray medium Knowi...
Social media fatigue in Brussels
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Not long ago, Brussels was wildly excited about the potential of social media, from two perspectives: Social media = EU saviour: proponents of the EU construct believed that social media could help bridge the divide between member states and Brussels...
Dodgy to amazing: where do Brussels communicators lie?
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I have helped to develop a framework for a client over the last few weeks that defines multiple phases of development in digital comms, broadly and in specific disciplines (e.g. content marketing, social media or search, for instance). The thinking i...
PA professionals: picking the right “influential” people
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A Public Affairs staple, as with all fields of communications, is to seek out “influential” people who support your side of the story and are willing to say so. This gives you and your side of the story credibility, so the logic goes. So who is u...
Online habits vary: social technographics applied to Brussels
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Forrester’s Social Technographics Profile Tool is superb; take a look if you haven’t previously. In short, it breaks down social users into different categories, ranging from inactives (don’t use social) to creators (produce and publish stuff).
Stop running communications programmes – run campaigns instead
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Too often, communications efforts conducted in support of Public Affairs ends are treated as programmes and not campaigns, making them mundane and less likely to work. Meaning what? Let’s imagine, in theory, that we’re trying to ban the Internet.
Digital public affairs latest presentation
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I gave a presentation to a number of smart and lively communications professionals last week as part of the “EU Federation Knowledge Programme”, organised by EurActiv for their trade association / federation partners. The theme was my u...
My new blog on Italy
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Some readers may remember a number of angry, annoyingly righteous and humourless posts I wrote about Italy a few years back. After a couple of people I know and trust told me that the posts were annoyingly righteous and humourless – and made me app...
Success in digital communications on issues: the three Cs
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A lot of digital issues comms may appear good at first glance, but does not tick enough Cs to succeed, the three being: content, community and campaign. Here’s a hypothesis representing pretty much any organisation that conducts online communicatio...
