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Have we lost our sense of community?

By Lindsey Challis

I’ve just finished reading a book called ‘My East End,’ which is an oral history of the London East End from shortly before the first World War through to after the second, filled with various stories from those who lived there.  I highly recommend the book, but there was one element that didn’t sit so well.  Despite the real highs and lows of the East End being remembered, there was a consensus that a sense of ‘community’ had been lost.

As someone whose family – in part – came from the East End and has since returned, I’m not sure that’s true.  There’s no doubt that the community has changed and I completely agree that, while once you may have had a close bond with your neighbours, that isn’t always the case now.  I can’t agree, however, that our generation hasn’t the community spirit of an older generation.  Perhaps, it’s just a different sort of community.

Thanks to the commoditisation of technology and, in particular, the prevalence of social media, we are actually all a lot closer together.  In fact, in 2011 it was reported that Facebook had shrunk the infamous six degrees of separation to 3.74, and I’d hazard a guess that this has shrunk even further in the last four years as more people have extended their profiles online. 

I’m not trying to pretend that everyone you know on social media is as close as a neighbour may have been in the East End, but they are part of our modern-day community.  We can find a whole range of ideas and opinions at the touch of a button, we can even resource experts – from bakers to bikers – that we may have lost touch with if it hadn’t been for social media.  In fact, I’d argue that we have a more engaged and connected society than there ever was.

Living in the East End, in particular, I may not know my neighbour – aside from collecting parcels and sharing the lift on occasion – but I do have a brilliant group of friends in and around the East End that I can rely on, as people may have once relied on their neighbours.  We all have different jobs and are at times tied up in our own worlds but, when people from different parts of society join together, that surely give us a greater appreciation for other peoples’ lives?  We can understand a wider range of careers, backgrounds and opinions.  Whether you’re a lawyer or a PR, from the North or from the South, living in Tooting or in Dalston, in my book, you’re all part of ‘my’ community.

Yes, the community of old has gone, but we have a new community in its place.  As those of the old saw the virtues and vices of the community that once was, there are virtues and vices of the new community too.  And if one thing’s for sure, it’s that we’re all tempted into a bit of nostalgia.

As Socrates allegedly said more than 2000 years ago:

“The children now love luxury.  They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.” 

 

Start as you mean to go on: Hillary’s female tech team

By Kasia Murphy

The recently announced – and at absolutely no surprise to absolutely anyone, at all – 2016 presidential election candidate Hillary Clinton has hired Stephanie Hannon, an ex-Google executive formerly responsible for civic innovation and social impact, as CTO.  Hannon is the first woman to hold the title of CTO on a presidential campaign – not just a historical moment, but especially apt should Clinton win the title of the first female president of the United States. Responsible for managing the campaign’s digital operations, it seems Hannon has already passed the first test – Sunday’s campaign launch, characterised by a tweet and campaign video going live thereafter, went off without hitch. (Are the days of political fanfare rallies over?)

Interestingly, Clinton’s newly-formed team already contains a host of women in tech-related posts, including the likes of Katie Dowd as digital director and Jenna Lowenstein taking up the role of deputy digital director. At a time when cases about sex bias are dividing ranks in Silicon Valley, and reverberating worldwide, it’s exciting and heartening to see technology diversifying like this at the ‘very top.’ That said, we shouldn’t really be surprised by the move, as the keynote speaker at a women’s tech conference in the Valley earlier this year, Clinton called on women to “bump your heads on the glass ceilings that persist in the tech industry.”

Another thing we can take from this is that digital communication is now fundamental to election strategy. Indeed, it was Obama’s two campaign teams that were lauded repeatedly for their pioneering use of new technologies in their respective races for the White House. In particular, it was the fact that the second term campaign team employed some 100 analytics staffers to purposely mine through terabytes of data to gain the competitive edge. Of course, Obama’s campaign teams further redefined how individuals could use social media, smartphones and mobile apps (designed specifically for volunteer campaigners) to engage directly in the political process. Today, we can see the continuation of this legacy in the following statistics:

• Within an hour of her campaign's digital launch, the tweet Clinton posted to announce her second bid for the presidency had been viewed 3 million times
• Within three hours of the announcement, the launch video had hit nearly 250,000 views
• Half an hour after the announcement, there were 7,000 tweets about Clinton per minute
• Just 12 hours after setting up her first Facebook page, she had 600,000 likes

Social media enables candidates to engage in an instantaneous dialogue with voters, transforming campaigning into something much more dynamic and individualistic. (The same lessons can be learnt by consumer or B2B brands.) When looking to attract a new, digitally native generation of voters, using the myriad of technologies available is a must… Maybe Texts From Hillary will even get a new burst life? We can but hope.

 

‘When I was your age…’

By Oliver Fischer

You, dear reader, may not know it, but today is actually my birthday. Though I look much younger than my days (it’s the good country air and a strictly beer-based diet…), I’m 31 years old now, which is awesome! Most people don’t really like the whole ‘getting older’ thing, but I really enjoy it. Now I’m not just 30 anymore, I have officially entered the ‘being in my early 30s’ territory. So, as soon as I do something childish, it’s not ‘awkward’ anymore, but ‘adorable’, since I’m ‘still in touch with my inner child’. Yay!

More importantly, I can now tell younger people stories about how the world used to be ‘back in the day’ and that we didn’t have any of the technology we do today. Internet? Nope! Smartphones? Ha, I only got my first mobile when I was 16 and it had a monochrome display! DVDs and Netflix? VHS, baby! People freaking out about boybands breaking up? Well, okay, we had those too. Quite a lot of them, actually. Well, I didn’t say it was all good, okay?!

Regarding boybands, back in my day they were the top guys when it came to screaming and fainting fans. Almost exclusively, in fact. But, as a man in his early 30s who keeps in touch with young people’s culture, I have learned that they have got tough competition – by people posting videos on Youtube, of all things. Where in my time only Take That and the Backstreet Boys got thousands of hysterical teenagers together, it is now Vloggers like Dagi Bee, LeFloid, Y-Titty and Sami Slimani or Let’s-Players Gronkh and Sarazar, that gather the crowds.

The main reason why I find this so fascinating is that nobody here really saw that coming, mostly because they weren’t taken seriously by the ‘traditional’ media. Now they manage to fill halls with their fans and get a whole city to stand-still when they go shopping. Normally, a person becomes a celebrity because reporters and journalists publish stories about them – be it movie stars, sportsmen, musicians or It Girls. But here, for years, you didn’t see anything, and they still gathered millions of fans. And I think the main reason for this was not only ignorance, but a great deal of fear of the competition.

Because the thing is, most of these Youtube stars dabble at least a bit in areas that were traditionally the playing fields of journalists. LeFloid covers recent news and explains them in a colloquial language, Dagi Bee shares a field with classical lifestyle magazines and Gronkh has the same audience as gaming publications. That is also why, when they couldn’t be ignored anymore, some journalists got outright hostile – Hank Green perfectly sums this up in his story about how he and two other Youtuber’s met Barack Obama.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some problems with those new media stars – factual errors, conspiracy theories, covered advertisement and more. But the worst we – the ‘classical’ media people – could do now is trying to ignore or belittle them, because they are here to stay and they have a huge audience and influence. Trust me on this – it’s the wisdom of age speaking.

April Fools' Day: Have you been tricked?!

By Anne-Hélène Lagadeuc 

Today is April Fools' Day; a long-standing tradition.  But have you ever wondered where it comes from?

The origin of this special day is pretty controversial, since there are several theories being proffered to explain how it came about. One of them says that, in France in 1564, King Charles IX stated that the year would start beginning on January 1st (it had until then started on April 1st). As part of this, the tradition of exchanging gifts at the time would also move. But some people kept offering presents in April because they refused to accept the new date, some because they didn't know about it and others just wanted to make fun and spread confusion regarding the real date. And, over the time, gifts turned into jokes and tricks, and the tradition spread all over Europe.

After more than 500 years, the tradition is still alive and brands ride the wave to their benefit. It can be a great opportunity for them to reinvigorate a connection with their customers in a light-hearted way. Thanks to social media, these April Fools' jokes can be seen and shared by a large audience when they are well managed. For example, in 2014 the company Le Slip Français, which sells 100% made in France underwear, unveiled the first pants with a truffle perfume to fight against bad smells. This operation definitely created a buzz and received many pieces of media coverage. SNCF, the French rail company, also played the game and displayed destinations such as Los Angeles or Sidney, which are pretty difficult to imagine!

This year, among others, Google has announced the Google Panda, a teddy bear that can act as a physical version of Google Now, able to provide immediate answers to your questions. And Samsung has unveiled its upcoming “cleaver phone”, the Samsung Galaxy Blade Edge.

April Fools' Day gives brands the possibility to show how creative they can be compared to their competitors, to gain visibility and boost emotional bonds with consumers. Most announcements made are too funny to be true but, eventually, the goal is to create buzz rather than make people really believe. Today #Aprilfools has been one of the top trending topics on Twitter, meaning brands not taking part have perhaps missed an opportunity for publicity by not playing the game in a forum where stories spread like wildfire.

 

Anyone for DOT EVERYONE? I’m in.

By Kasia Murphy

During this year’s annual BBC Dimbleby Lecture, Baroness Martha Lane-Fox, founder of Lastminute.com in the 1990s, used the platform to call for the formation of ‘DOT EVERYONE’: a centralised, public institution – like the BBC or NHS – designed with the intention of pulling the nation into the bright, technological future. Crucially, the institution would tackle three of the biggest challenges facing the technology industry and the internet today: education, inequality, and regulation.

Digital is an essential part of any PR campaign today and educating our clients on how social media and the like can be used to make (or break) brand reputation is part-and-parcel of what we do on a day-to-day basis. How could it not be?  However, it is the second point that got my attention. Though the focus to try to get more women into the digital field is nothing new – look at the likes of WISE set up 30 years ago – given the country’s tech skills shortage and the inevitable detrimental impact this neglect will have on the country economically, designating this issue as a foundation stone in the formation of DOT EVERYONE confirms that there is finally some momentum gathering.

Having stomped across many tradeshow floors in my three years as a technology PR, grimacing at both the persistent use of ‘booth babes’ and the poor ratio of women to men at these events dedicated to innovation, there can be no denying that there is problem. On an aside, isn’t continuing to use women’s bodies as a promotional tool just poor, unimaginative marketing?

In her speech, Lane-Fox said: “If you take a look at the tech sector as a whole, 14 percent are women. That’s a noticeably lower percentage than the 24 percent I find in the House of Lords. So much for the old fashioned world of Parliament versus the shiny modernity of the internet.”  Of course, these sorts of numbers shouldn’t surprise you, the structural and cultural disparities speak for themselves:

• In technology, women occupy 11 percent of executive positions in Silicon Valley – they make up 30 percent of Twitter’s workforce, but fill only 10 per cent of tech-related roles, while, at the global leadership level, 23 percent of Facebook’s workforce is female
• In the media, women represent just 5 percent of the editors of national newspapers
• In politics, the UK is ranked 57^th in the world with regards to the number of women in national parliaments – men currently outnumber women 4 to 1 in Westminster
• In monetary terms, the annual gender pay gap between men and women in full-time employment across Europe is stuck at around 26 percent. The pensions gap is about 50 percent

For more depressing numbers, click here.  Things need to change. I attended the 5^th annual Women of the World festival at the Southbank Centre this year to mark International Women’s Day and, among the many things I took away from it, the overarching message is that change can only be brought about through action in your own environment.  Lane-Fox’s efforts will undoubtedly be criticised, but to me there’s something to be said for trying and working to influence and shape the system we’re in. We should expect more from the digital sector – it “should not be languishing in a comfortably monocultural world” as she says.

If there’s power in the internet to force /drive /inspire change, then so be it. We need women advocating for each other, and men advocating for women. At the end of the day, inequality – whatever the sum of its causes, and the many guises it can take – is all of our problem.