Posts tagged ‘digital’
Public Affairs 2.0 – one year on
Health warning – this is a self-indulgent end of school term post.
It’s about time that some of us left the unseasonal sunshine of Brussels for southern climes. As we put the out of office on, set the voicemail up and send long to-do lists to those colleagues unlucky enough to remain here over the August lull/madness period, we thought it would be a good time to reflect on the first year of this blog.
Some stats first of all. Since our soft launch last July we’ve made 95 posts of varying quality and interest. 115 comments have been made – all welcomed. WordPress has registered approaching 12,000 views in total. July was our busiest month yet with 1,567 views until today (see graph above showing nice trend). Quantcast now tells us that 641 different people reading our blog a month and that 159 of them are from Belgium (or at least based here). The number 1 country is of course the US, but then the Europeans together of course add up to more – ah, is it not always the case! If only we were all one (hang on is that the reason we are all here?).
In any case, as global domination was not our goal, we are kind of happy. We are doing what we said we would do over a year ago – sharing our experience of this digital PA world, learning by doing, commenting on stuff – and you know what, we are enjoying it. And boy has a lot changed since then (not just the British PM).
Increasingly, we are implementing digital communications in Brussels for our clients. The enthusiasm of our Brussels team to “Switch On” has not yet dimmed. Indeed, it’s growing. So thanks to all those who have posted from the team in the last year (yep, it’s not just little old me) – Rob, Carey, Ed, Jez, (both undergrad interns this year) Rebecca, Simone, Nick, Mike, Fred and Liliana (and the folks at FH Paris in recent days). More to come. Others promise to join our merry band over the summer.
On that note, some of my own personal highlights from this year.
- A personal note (copied to no-one) from our CEO in St. Louis to one of our number thanking him for an interesting blog post. Now that’s good internal comms.
- The ECPA post. Helen showed us all what this is all about. Sharing our experiences of digital in what we do. It also continues to hold the record for the most views in one day – 130.
- The fact that all those subscribing to our email updates via Feedburner are from competing firms! (ok, with the exception of my missus) Yep, we can see who you are…Thoughtleadership at work perhaps.
On that thought – I slip away from the desk and leave those colleagues to keep the blog ticking over the summer.
Internet has 8 times the influence of newspapers on Europeans
Our digital practice in Europe has recently launched the results of a piece of research conducted in France, Germany and the UK with consumers on the impact of the use of the internet on their decisions. The Digital Influence Index that results uses both the time spent on different media and the influence consumers say it has on the decisions they take to come to an index that we shall be using to track the growing power of the internet over time. The study was undertaken by FH with Harris Interactive.
Unsurprisingly, the study comes to the conclusion that the internet trumps both print and broadcast media in terms of the influence it has on consumer decisions. Clearly, there is a lot more to the study than that, so click here for the social media release with lots of further info, pics, speeches, exec. summaries and media coverage.
While the study focuses for the most part on decisions consumers take, rather than political decisions, it does address the latter. Interestingly our bods come to the conclusion that political decisions by citizens are less likely to be influenced by the internet than other consumer related decisions.
Having said this, it is clear, at least for me, that the study underlines the potential impact of digital on public affairs and politics.
1. The influence of the internet scores highly (61%) in terms of citizen behaviour of campaigning on an issue. This compares favourably to campaiging for a political party (45%) and voting in an election and way above voting in an election (18%). Speculating wildly, one might argue that this confirms the issue driven nature of the internet rather than the party political. This underlines the fact that on our issues, Brussels public affairs people might find rich pickings in finding and mobilising people around issues online. It should be our natural hunting ground for third party advocates. (see p. 11 executive summary)
2. Political parties/candidates need to be on the net. While the influence of the net on votes in elections may be lower than on other forms of political activity (see point 1. above), in terms of influence different kinds of sites have content from “sponsored sites” (i.e. party/candidates) scores highest of all 61% and non-sponsored sites score second highest 42%. (see p.12 executive summary). This suggests that the politically interested are going online to get their information and that more candidates/parties should invest online to get their message out to their core support – more work for Jon perhaps?
We hope to have some more comments from the people behind the research on here soon, in the meantime your views on the findings are most welcome.
