Is the Daily Mail threatened by social media?
Facebook can give you cancer. Social websites are bad for children’s brains and the government is a disgrace for seeking to appoint a director of digital engagement.
It’s hard to believe, but these are all stories that have appeared in the Daily Mail over the past seven days. The Mail is widely held as the media outlet most feared by public and political decision makers in the UK, so should we be worried that it now seems to have social media in its sights?
The first two stories mentioned are simply grist for the Mail mill, but I think the third one is more interesting and perhaps more disappointing, regardless of what political persuasion you are.
If the government – or rather, the civil service – finds the right person to be the director of digital engagement, then they could have a huge and positive impact.
Contrary to the tone of the Mail’s article about getting ministers Twittering or onto Facebook, I think a key symptom of success would be helping the government live up to one of its promises circa 1997 – the practice of joined up government.
When we work with our large corporate clients we often find that social media challenges them in a number of ways:
- Responsibility for social media can fall to marketing or comms teams, or various other convoluted permutations. Huge companies can often, despite their best efforts, suffer from their scale and fail to demonstrate joined up thinking.
- Social media can shine a very harsh light on organisations, and they need to be ready to respond quickly and deftly. See Will’s appearance on the BBC for details of a recent example of this… from Facebook of all people.
- Social media can pose questions of an organisation that are best answered by someone very high up, with the perspective to see across multiple departments, yet often the people tasked with tweeting are very junior.
These are just some of the issues we are helping people with, and I would imagine there is every chance that they will be amplified in government.
So, if the director of engagement is to be effective, I think they will need to be a fairly exceptional individual – able to get things done in an environment full of inertia, comfortable leading change and well versed in the personal perils of pushing against an established organisational culture. And that’s before we get to the requirement for social media thought leadership…
But if they are smart, they won’t need to do it alone. They can tap into the hivemind, get people engaged and use the wisdom of the crowd – and in this case, the crowd should be large and motivated, as government really does have an effect on all of us.
At the risk of being overly utopian/evangelical, there is potential that a well executed digital engagement strategy (which apparently needs to be delivered within six months) could improve our access to government and go a long way towards undoing some of the cynicism we feel about our political masters.
It’s a big ask indeed, and it will quickly show whether the government is serious about getting things done or simply spinning things. That makes me think the Mail has kind of missed the point and is being more than a little disingenuous with its story. Quelle surprise!
Part of me thinks there is a huge opportunity for an MBA wielding upstart to channel Tom Peters and his cohorts and publish a book in the vein of In Search of Excellence – our work with blue chips leads me to think there is a real gap in the market for a book about how to re-engineer the corporation for the social media age.
At an operational and strategic level this is what we are increasingly helping clients with, but unfortunately I don’t imagine we will be called to help out at Daily Mail towers anytime soon to see how we could help them moderate their message for the networked world.
The Mail’s disdain for social media is interesting – I wonder if editor Paul Dacre knows someone who has had an unfortunate experience with it?
When the paper became the unlikely champion of Stephen Lawrence, it did so simply because Stephen’s father gained access to Mr Dacre by painting and decorating his house. Could something similar be at work here?
Oh, and in the interests of full disclosure, when I was a reporter in my early 20s I did a huge amount of freelance work for the Mail in Scotland.
Murray Cox wrote this on 25.02.09 – 8 comments
It's filed in the Business, Democracy, Interesting, Press, Social media, Strategy box
On February 25th, 2009 at 1:06 pm, Neil responded:
I think two things explain it…
1) The Daily Mail has (along with many baby boomers) a fear of strangers. Social media with its inherant trust of people (until proven otherwise) goes against this. It says that not everyone you don’t know is a mad axemen and most people are reasonable
2) The Daily Mail is conservative and therefore untrusting of anything new. The disdain will be followed by acceptance in the long run – like the fact that they finally got a website after running KILLER INTERNET stories for years.
What I find interesting when you look at the Mail site is how reasonable often the comments on stories are. They have a DIgg like system and often the more liberal, less hysterical responses are the most approved – in stark contrast to the nutjobs who’ve overtaken much of the debate on the BBC’s Have Your Say area.
On February 25th, 2009 at 1:12 pm, Leif Kendall responded:
I think the Daily Mail are happy to attack social media because it’s a threat to their business. It’s not news, it’s business strategy.
The Daily Mail’s daft barks are a desperate death-rattle from a media dinosaur. Rather than embracing modern technology, and trying to advance serious journalism in exciting new ways, they attack.
The Daily Mail is a hideous institution and it is depressing that so many people read it. It’s full of fearful nonsense. Broken Britain? MMR? Now social media is the big evil.
Perhaps digital media should bite back, and attempt to show Daily Mail readers how awful their news-source really is…?
On February 25th, 2009 at 1:15 pm, Roger, Online PR Agency C&M responded:
Great post Murray. Bravo. the ‘What a Bunch of Twitterers’ is just idiotic and irresponsible. Get your asses down there and straighten them out.
I think there’s another concern here. The news agenda is moving to Social Media bashing…. having swung from @wossy / Twitter is great. There will be more to come…
On February 26th, 2009 at 2:27 am, Robin Grant (Managing Director, We Are Social) responded:
I think you should get Mr McInnes to apply for the role. Seriously…
On February 26th, 2009 at 10:40 am, Ben Smith responded:
…and this is their reaction to parody: http://probablynotthedailymail.blogspot.com/
The only problem with them smartening up to the whole issue of social networking is that it would give them yet another platform to peddle their nasty political agenda and lazy journalism. IMHO :-)
On February 26th, 2009 at 4:52 pm, Matt Hill responded:
“The Mail is widely held as the media outlet most feared by public and political decision makers in the UK”
Swap “feared” with “derided” and you have a much more accurate statement. Well, on my side of the fence, at least.
On February 26th, 2009 at 6:53 pm, Why I’m Glad the Daily Mail Hates Social Media « Clive Andrews responded:
[...] for communication and understanding. That point has been well argued elsewhere, not only by those working in social media but by that fantastic champion of reason and science, Dr. Ben [...]
On March 5th, 2009 at 5:43 pm, kelvin newman responded:
There’s another way of looking at this,
Daily Mail is one of the most popular sites of social voting sites like digg etc. content about social sites tends to do well on social sites…
Not entirely surprising they are covering topics like this…