Don’t ignore the digital
Not one, but two great examples this week of how digital and social media are changing the world of campaigning, and taking a battering ram to the old gatekeepers.
First, the Trafigura injunction story showed the futility of thinking that anything can be kept truly secret when communication is instant, global and in the hands of the users. On the face of it, a victory for free speech and open-ness, although it’s worth reflecting also on the dangers it reveals – well captured in this post by PC Pro’s Barry Collins.
Second, the comment article by the Daily Mail’s Jan Moir , originally headlined “Why there was nothing ‘natural’ about Stephen Gately’s death”. Within minutes of it appearing in first editions and online, the backlash had begun. A record level of complaints to the Press Complaints Commission – a Twitter campaign and a Facebook group headed “The Daily Mail should retract Jan Moir’s hateful, homophobic article”.
Her assertion that “healthy and fit young men do not just climb into their pyjamas and go to sleep on the sofa never to wake up again” had also angered those organisations campaigning to raise awareness of the many conditions which cause exactly that.
Several companies, including Nestle (no stranger to the power of online campaigns), Visit England, Kodak and National Express asked for their online advertising to be removed from pages featuring the offending article.
The Mail didn’t retract anything, but they did change the headline to the apparently less controversial “A strange, lonely and troubling death…” and publish a “clarification” from Jan Moir. Her claim that she was the victim of “an orchestrated campaign” and that many of those complaining had not even read her article will have raised wry smiles from anyone who remembers the Mail’s own campaign against Ross and Brand a year ago.