Aircraft engine - CC / Flickr

A good friend of mine works for GAIA / No Burn, an organisation that makes the case for alternatives to incinerating waste. The problem is that for his work my friend there has to fly all over this place – this year already to California and The Philippines – all for the sake of promotion of something green. Contradiction, no? Not as far as he is concerned – all he would have to do would be to convince a single local authority somewhere to not build an incinerator and bingo, he wins, all the CO2 from his flights for the whole of his life have been more than offset. In short the wrong – CO2 from flying – has been relativised.

So could I apply the same to ethical questions, and particularly how I spend my days and weeks?

Essentially the problem is as follows: I’m so busy doing website projects for causes and campaigns I believe in that I’m too busy all the time. All the things I do pay a pittance, but I have to keep on doing all of them just to get the bills paid at the end of the month. In addition I don’t spend enough time on each project and the quality suffers and, importantly, I don’t have time for any really interesting and ethical stuff that might come along (equivalents of the Atheist Bus Campaign) because I am just trying to complete all the small things that pay a bit.

So could I possibly do some ethical offsetting? Essentially contract to some large firms for a couple of days a week and, as a result, give myself financial security to then do really ethical projects pro bono for the rest of the week? OK, there are limits – I am not going to work for tobacco or arms firms for example – but could it work as a concept? If of course anyone would ever employ me to do web strategy for companies anyway…

Organisations on Facebook - click to enlarge

Perhaps I have a naive and simplistic approach to it, but for me Facebook Friends are actually supposed to be people, not organisations.

Hence I am automatically going to reject anyone called ‘European Federalists Secretariat‘, ‘Young Socialists Georgia‘ or ‘Abf Södra-Östra Dalarna‘.

Why is this important?

Firstly, I have no clue who actually operates these organisational ‘Friends’. Even if you very carefully tailor your privacy settings in Facebook it causes problems. If you have no clue who administers an organisational ‘Friend’ profile on Facebook (probably the office intern you’ve never met) then you need to make sure your privacy settings – even for your proper friends – are turned up rather high. To put it bluntly: do you want an organisation’s intern to have access to your holiday photos? *

Secondly, using a friend profile for an organisation in Facebook is just plain lazy as there is an ideal tool – Facebook Pages – that are intended for organisations, companies, politicians in Facebook, and provide a whole range of tools to allow contact to be maintained. OK, it might take a few minutes how to make it work, but now’s the time to learn, and this guide from Mashable is a good starting point.

So the next time an organisation tries to add you as a friend you should tell them politely but firmly that you will not accept the request, and that they should start a Facebook Page. And if it’s the office intern who replies to your message ask them whether they would allow someone they don’t know to see their holiday photos and then maybe they might see sense.

* – for the record I generally don’t get up to anything remotely scandalous, so any holiday photos of mine on Facebook are completely dull, but you get the idea

BBC - CC / Flickr

There’s something deeply wrong with the ‘debate’ currently going on about the future of the BBC, and I think it boils down to the essential question: what is the value of public service broadcasting?

Two themes dominate the debate at the moment. The first is a kind of cost-benefit analysis, do license fee payers get value for money from the BBC, and should the license fee even be cut? The second is a kind of backward looking analysis, getting the BBC back to some halcyon days that probably never actually existed, all evoked by the oft-cited phrase “Putting quality first” (implying that at the moment this has not been done).

All of this plays right into the hands of the Tory party and those on the right who don’t like the notion of a pre-eminent public service broadcaster, or are themselves implicated in the privately owned media that has a hard job to compete with the BBC behemoth. Let’s not forget that the plans were announced yesterday by Mark Thompson, just a couple of months ahead of a general election. Political positioning? Surely not!

So what has the reaction been? A roundup of quotes is on the BBC News website here. Ben Bradshaw distances himself, Jeremy Hunt sounds rather gleeful, and Don Foster rather confused. A proliferation of Facebook pages and Twitter campaigns has been established to help save BBC Asian Network and 6 Music, and some of the quotes online from listeners are rather interesting – this is just one of many: “Radio stations such as Asian Network and Radio 6, help to unite Britain and make us a stronger nation. Not only do they show how cosmopolitan we are as a nation but they also show our diversity through our interests such as music and how we take interest in other cultures.”

But in all of this there’s very little proper discourse about the role of the BBC, the role of public service broadcasting. What media can you actually trust in the internet age? Surely answering that question gives you one answer in the UK: the BBC. Yes, it’s not perfect, changes could be made, but compare BBC to France Télévisions, ARD, ZDF, RTBF, SVT and it’s miles ahead. The BBC surely is the international standard for public service broadcasting. It’s something about the UK that’s genuinely good. So how about framing the debate in terms of trust, in terms of quality of public service broadcasting (as opposed to partial private interests), in terms of reflecting the UK as a country and not the UK as a market?

Some UK politicians on the left better get hold of Don’t Think of an Elephant by George Lakoff and apply it to the debate about the BBC, because otherwise this debate is going the same way as Obama and healthcare in the USA.

[UPDATE]
Jonathan Freedland has an interesting take on the issue in The Guardian, interpreting the Tory policy on this thanks to the influence of News Corp.

This has happened to me so many times that seeing the comic is just painful. Can I send this to clients before I start to work with them?

Liz initially contacted me having seen sites I’ve developed for Rushanara Ali and Chuka Umunna and it was clear from the first phone call that she is a determined, sharp, committed and organised individual. An initial 40 minute meeting to discuss the site delivered more results than hours of client meetings normally accomplish.

Liz has had a clear idea of what she wants, but has also been ready to accept advice, and above all has taken a great personal interest in the development of her site, meaning the website really reflects her political priorities. All too often that’s not the case for politicians’ websites.

The site runs with Wordpress, makes use of Google Maps, surveys, has a Paypal donation facility, and integrates Liz’s use of Twitter and Facebook.

In short I’m happy to have delivered a site for an excellent and professional candidate who will make an excellent MP for Leicester West and I’m looking forward to seeing the site develop between now and the election!

Mostra 2009 Portfolio Screeshot - from mostra.com

A retweet from @belitabrux drew my attention today to a Mostra e-book called Opinion Corner. Take a look – it’s well researched, looks smartly designed… but why does it exist? It’s not that different from the (paper) Shift>Mag published by Tipik in Brussels, a publication that I’ve written for a couple of times. It’s smartly printed and has its own website but if the 10 people that have voted in their recent poll is indicative of the number of web visitors, it’s not immensely popular or relevant. Again why? What is the cost per visitor, the cost per reader of each of these initiatives?

Both Tipik and Mostra are communications agencies that work almost uniquely for the EU institutions. Indeed Mostra’s portfolio for the last 12 months shows nothing but EU institutional clients, and Tipik counts a dozen Commission DGs in its references, and it has 160 staff in Brussels.

It simply strikes me that the EU institutions paranoia about being disliked by EU citizens means there’s a determination to do something, to talk, to debate, to communicate – but without clear goals or objectives. Mostra, Tipik and others exist to serve this paranoia, developing large Brussels operations that can feed off the institutions’ cash.

It’s especially interesting to read that Mostra was responsible for the Gender Pay Gap campaign of the European Commission. What, I wonder, were the demonstrable, measurable achievements of the campaign? And at what cost? (See pages 38-41 of the Mostra 2009 portfolio) Just the crane to put up the banner on the Berlaymont will have been more costly than the entire Gender Balanced Commission effort I was involved with.

In the meantime I am pottering around the edges of all of this, working professionally with individual MEPs and small NGOs in the Brussels sphere, people who think that €500 is a lot to pay for a content management system based website. For me Mostra and Tipik and their ilk seem to be some sort of parallel EU communications universe, something I cannot begin to relate to.

I think the essence here is that TweetLevel, the tool I used for the main players post, tries to take something rather complex – how good someone is at using Twitter – and to make it incredibly simple, to boil all the complexity down to one number. After all Edelman are in the PR business, selling social media strategies to clients, many of whom probably have little clue about the technology. Making it simple is the essence of their business. It’s not that far from what I do professionally – trying to get politicians and campaigns working online.

So is TweetLevel actually any good? I essentially think it’s intuitively about right, and that’s what makes it useful.

Take @AlexAlvaro for example – he’s a German FDP MEP who basically uses Twitter to broadcast to people, and follows just 19 people. That’s not a good strategy – Twitter is about interaction and conversation, and his score is a measly 31. @JeanineHennis, Alvaro’s Liberal colleague from the Dutch VVD scores 60 on TweetLevel – she actively replies to @replies sent to her, asks for opinions, and genuinely interacts with others via Twitter. Her strategy is better and she scores more in the system.

All of this is intuitively right – I appreciate Jeanine’s strategy more than Alex’s, her approach is the one I would advocate to clients, and now there’s a handy little tool I can use to lend a little more credence to my assertions. As the TweetLevel About Page shows, there is some decent methodology behind their site, and I think that’s reflected in the outcomes, and users are also given some practical tips on how to improve.

So TweetLevel perhaps tells us what we already more or less know or feel, but that doesn’t stop it being useful.

Essentially TweetLevel uses 4 factors to determine its score:

• Influence – what you say is interesting and many people listen to it. This is the primary ranking metric.
• Popularity – how many people follow you
• Engagement – you actively participate within your community
• Trust – people believe what you say

There’s more about the methodology here.

So who does best on EU matters on Twitter? The highest score I managed to find was 58 for @kattebel, who scores very highly (71.1) for engagement. Other individuals of note are @linotherhino (52), @dicknieuwenhuis (51) and @eurosocialiste (50). I (@jonworth) score 48, level with @JulienFrisch, @Nosemonkey is on 45, level with @kosmopolit, @MacarenaRG scores 44, @spiller2 scores 41.

Among the institutional Twitterers @JeanineHennis (60) leads @judithineuropa (52), @Sophieintveld (51), @MarietjeD66 (48), @MatthiasGroote (42) and @AlexAlvaro (31) and @JerzyBuzek (29). The latter two score very low for engagement. Amusingly @ecrgroup scores a lousy 16, and an engagement score of 0.3 – due to their generally dire approach to Twitter.

(please add a comment if you think you should be added to the lists!)

[UPDATE] A few more to add – @neurope – 47, @quarsan – 47, @eurocentrique – 39, @eulondonrep – 43, @rose22joh – 30, @bloggingportal – 41, @mteu – 43, @passie_kracht – 43, @erikwesselius – 40, @euroced – 36, @letzi83 – 43, @quatremer – 52, @LB2S – 49, @belitabrux – 32, @dominikfrelih – 34, @steffenmoller – 25, @afourms – 36, @bmbrussels – 22, @placelux – 30, @eurotwittering – 26, @efpia – 24, @europabio – 37, @ewea – 28, @cropprotection – 25, @europeanpaper – 13, @engineerComms – 25, @bueti – 49, @grahamwatsonmep – 23, @EU_Consumer – 31, @emireland – 42, @GellisCom – 24, @J_Zim – 53, @PStrempel – 23, @TonyRobinson – 32, @europeecologie – 48, @pes_activist – 29, @Berlaymont – 52, @UmarAhmed – 38. (Note: if an account is protected it cannot be analysed)