Politics, Communications and Digital-Only Voters

As a communicator today, I know that the world is going digital.

Long gone are the days when large groups of people of all ages read a newspaper, listened to the radio or watched TV news.

The result? More time and energy devoted to social media.

(A sign of the changing times is that more non-profits today are hiring social media specialists—a job description that hardly existed even five years ago.)

Now politicians are adapting to this new reality.

An new study by Abacus Data for Google Canada found that 30 percent of all eligible voters in the 2015 election will get their information about politics only online.

As reported by the Globe and Mail, these “digital-only” voters—people who don’t watch TV news, listen to radio or read a newspaper—are typically young. But a fifth of eligible voters 50 years or older also say they are digital-only, too.

“Traditional broadcast communications are just not going to reach them,” says Abacus CEO David Coletto.

Overall, TV is still the main source of information about politics for most Canadians, with 33 per cent of respondents identified television as their primary information source. 

The Internet is close behind, with 30 percent, while for 19 percent its newspapers, 13 percent said radio and 4 percent identified word of mouth.

Respondents were also asked about what kind of information they search online. Seventy per cent said they either frequently, fairly often or occasionally looked for political news stories online, while 63 per cent said they searched for information about politicians and 60 per cent said they turned to the Internet to find out what parties stand for.

Despite the digital shift in recent years, Canada’s political parties still spend most of their advertising budgets on broadcast, probably because more older people mostly watch TV, and this is the demographic that is (currently) most likely to vote.

There’s more bang for the buck, in other words.

Of course, that's not the whole story; ads or stories on TV or a newspaper often end up online, anyway. So it's not like there's no digital reach. It just isn't the first way that political parties reach out to voters.

This is not unlike most non-profits, and for similar reasons. Going viral on Facebook is great, but it doesn’t bring in much money compared to a print appeal.

But the world is changing, and political parties and non-profits need to change with it. Who will be brave enough to go first and go all-digital?  

More Lessons from the World of Sports, or "News-Like News"

Earlier, I wrote about what non-profit communicators could learn from the world of professional wrestling. Here’s another lesson from the world of sports (if that’s what wrestling could be called), this time from ESPN.

In an article in by Derek Thompson in Atlantic, he notes that ESPN has built its brand on sports news. But on social media, straight sports news isn’t a hot or appealing commodity.

"What is least shareable is the final score, or how many points each team has,” says Nate Ravitz of ESPN.

What people want to read and share, he says, are the stories that make athletes relatable or exceptional.

"It’s stuff that is outside of the day-to-day construct of sports,” he says “It’s Rob Gronkowski’s cat. It’s a coach dancing in the locker room. It’s the moments we have conversations about, and we want to tell it the way you would tell your friend at the bar."

What does this mean for non-profit communicators? While it is tempting to share the “score”—how many people are made hungry in a drought, the size of the hurricane, or the number of people who will be afflicted by a disease—that’s not what garners attention on social media.

What people want to hear, and what they will share, are the stories of people who are hungry, who lost their homes, or who are dealing with the disease.

Thompson also goes on in the articles to note that ESPN is also seeing mobile as its future.

Although sports on the big screen is a staple of networks like ESPN, most people are not near a TV when a sports story breaks. They do have their phones with them, though.

But even there they are trying to avoid just giving the score.

Things that grab people’s attention on social media are what Thompson calls “news-like” news. Again, this would be the stories behind the news, stories about the athletes in the news.

Read the article in Atlantic here. 

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, and the Future of News (Or, "Hurry Up! I Haven't Got All Ten Seconds.")

Years ago, when microwave ovens were new, I remember seeing a cartoon of a man standing in front of one with the caption: “Hurry up! I haven’t got all minute.”

Today, when trying to load a page on the Internet, that caption might read: “Hurry up! I haven’t got all ten seconds.”

That’s what Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook suggested in a recent online Q & A when asked about that platform’s role in news.

“People discover and read a lot of news content on Facebook, so we spend a lot of time making this experience as good as possible,” he replied.

“One of the biggest issues today is just that reading news is slow. If you’re using our mobile app and you tap on a photo, it typically loads immediately. But if you tap on a news link, since that content isn’t stored on Facebook and you have to download it from elsewhere, it can take 10+ seconds to load.

“People don’t want to wait that long, so a lot of people abandon news before it has loaded or just don’t even bother tapping on things in the first place, even if they wanted to read them.”

The way Facebook is solving the lengthy wait to get news is Instant Articles.

Says Zuckerberg: “When news is as fast as everything else on Facebook, people will naturally read a lot more news. That will be good for helping people be more informed about the world, and it will be good for the news ecosystem because it will deliver more traffic.”

Still with Facebook (and Twitter), a new Pew Study shows that users across all demographics are increasingly using them as sources of news.

According to the report, 63 percent of both Facebook and Twitter users say they get news on those social networks, up from 52 percent of Twitter users and 47 percent of Facebook in 2013.

Although the same percentage of users look to each platform for news, nearly twice as many use Twitter to follow breaking news: 59 percent of Twitter users versus 31 percent of Facebook users.

About half of people between the ages of 18 and 34 say Facebook and Twitter are “the most important” or “an important” way they get news, compared to 34 percent of Facebook users over 35 and 31 percent of Twitter users over 35.

The study also found that Facebook users are more likely to engage with political content than Twitter users: 32 percent of Facebookers post about politics and government, compared to 25 percent of tweeters.

That finding corresponds to an earlier Pew report  that showed that 61 percent of Americans born between 1981 and 1996 get their political news from Facebook in a given week.

Only 37 percent of Americans in the same age group get political news from local TV, compared to 60 percent of Americans born between 1946 and 1964.

Bottom line? Facebook and Twitter are becoming the channel of choice for news for growing numbers of people today. What this means for non-profit communicators is a big question; we normally don't have the heft to break into the news cycle, the urgency to command attention, or the ability to get our information into Facebook's Instant Articles.

Looks like we need to hope our supporters have at least ten seconds worth of patience for our web pages to load. 

When it Comes to Social Media, NASA has The Right Stuff

Remember the movie (or the book) The Right Stuff? It was about the men who flew in the first space flight program in the U.S.

Back then, only men who were strong, tough, macho and brave were seen by NASA to have “the right stuff.” 

Today, it’s a different story—people who have “the right stuff” know how to use social media.

That's the conclusion of a recent article in Quartz about how NASA conquered not just space, but the social media universe.

“In an era when the media whips itself into a frenzy over how to make things go viral, and marketers take their cues from big brands, a government entity has quickly and quietly become the darling of the internet,” writes author Adam Epstein.

Those searching for proof need look no further than this month’s mission to Pluto.

When NASA’s New Horizon’s spacecraft began to beam back photos of the former planet, after a 4.8 billion kilometre journey of over nine years, it took social media (and most other media) by storm.

“If you were connected to the internet around 9 AM U.S. eastern time on Tuesday, July 14, your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social platforms were all Pluto, all the time,” Epstein says.

How did NASA end up the darling of the Internet? And what can non-profit communicators learn from them?

First off, it helps to have access to some of the coolest photos in the universe, and the drama of exploration in space.

But even that is not enough. After all, there are no people on those spacecraft—they’re just machines, and machines have no personality.

Or do they?

That’s one of the first lessons. When the Mars lander touched down on that planet in 2008, Veronica McGregor, head of social media at NASA, decided to give it personality by Tweeting in the first person.

“Atmospheric entry has started,” she posted. “Time to get REALLY nervous. Now I'm in the ‘seven minutes of terror.’"

“Parachute must open next. my signal still getting to Earth which is AWESOME!”

“I've landed!!!!!!!!!!!!! Cheers! Tears!! I'm here!”

Today, @NASA is the 104th most popular Twitter account in the world, with over 11 million followers—more than the White House, with 6.5 million.

"I was a little worried that the space community would think that was silly,” says McGregor.

“But the minute I did a tweet in the first person, suddenly all these people started writing back. We have a voice now that we didn't before."

And the lesson? When communicating about programs, try to infuse them with personality. Don’t just re-hash press releases or share dry statistics.

As Epstein put it: “On social media, people share things that make them feel really big, crazy feelings. ‘Look at this awesome or amazing photo.’ ‘Watch this incredible video.’ ‘Read this astonishing essay.’”

This personal voice gets at the heart of how social media functions, says Epstein: “It makes people care. NASA's probes have (or rather, appear to have) wants and desires and goals, and that makes us invested in their successes.”

It’s not only machines that engage people through social media; NASA’s astronauts do, too.

One of the most successful was Canada's Chris Hadfield, with his singing and goofy antics aboard the International Space Station (ISS) in 2013. His rendition of David Bowie's "Space Oddity," has 26 million views on YouTube.

NASA also actively courts people who promote it on social media, providing them with special access through what are called NASA Socials. 

These people are invaluable allies to NASA's communications team.  "Some people aren't going to believe us as much as they're going to believe members of the general public," says McGregor said. 

"In some ways, I think they're able to convince the skeptics better than we ever could."

NASA is also careful to avoid jargon. 

"You'll never really see us use the term 'EVA', or extravehicular activity," says Jason Townsend, NASA’s Deputy Social Media Manager  said. "We're going to use the term 'spacewalk,' because that's what everybody knows."

You can read the full article here. 

More on What Non-Profit Communicators Can Learn from the Gay Marriage Movement

Earlier this year I wrote about how gay marriage activists had successfully used stories to influence public opinion in the U.S. in favour of gay marriage. 

In a recent article in the Atlantic, Molly Ball wrote the idea behind that strategy.

A major factor in winning over voters was to those four state wins “was an overhaul in the message used to win over voters—from an argument about the rights and benefits of marriage to one about the fundamental human desire for love and commitment.”

This, she writes, is another lesson Marc Solomon, the national campaign director for Freedom to Marry, believes other movements could learn: Make an emotional argument based on positive values. 

“For years, pollsters told gay-marriage advocates that attacking discrimination and invoking the Constitution were their most resonant arguments—but over and over, these cerebral ideas proved no match for the visceral appeal of the opposition’s messages about family and faith. And the emphasis on rights convinced many voters that what gay people wanted out of marriage was fundamentally different than what they thought marriage was about.

“It was by framing the issue in personal terms that campaigners started to win hearts and minds. This is something immigration reformers have recently tried to do by making young strivers—the “dreamers”—the human face of their movement.”

The other thing gay marriage campaigners did to spread their message was to use a sophisticated persuasion campaign—a tactical innovation that many others are now trying to emulate.

“Armies of canvassers—both paid workers and volunteers—set out to have in-depth conversations with thousands of voters using ideas developed with help from the liberal Analyst Institute, a quasi-academic campaign-tactic lab.

“Rather than parroting a script, the canvassers used a few open-ended prompts (“What does marriage mean to you?”) and drew on their own experiences to have long conversations about family and faith that often turned personal—and changed people’s minds.”

Promoting a positive, emotional, personal message wasn’t the only thing that helped them win the day—gay marriage campaigners also used some sophisticated and targeted political and legal strategies. 

But changing their message to emphasize personal stories of real people created the conditions where they could show public support for the political and legal arguments—a key element in the overall, and winning, strategy.

What Non-Profit Communicators can Learn from the World of Professonial Wrestling

 

OK, I didn’t see that coming—who would think that non-profit communicators could learn something from the world of professional wrestling?

No, really; I’m serious. (And I don't mean learning how to take a fall.)

Earlier this month secret notes prepared by Vince McMahon, owner of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), were leaked online.

The notes, for his on-air announcers, give ideas for how they can provide the best experience for the 39 million viewers in 150 countries who watch WWE’s over 300 events each year.

In the main, the ideas are pretty sensible; they are the kinds of things that will help anyone whose job it is to communicate with the public.

Here are some of the ideas Vince provides: 

Prepare!

Dress professionally.

Be aware of what’s happening in the world (e.g. an earthquake in China, floods, etc.).

“Fully understand the history and heritage” of the WWE.

Have fun—you’re a fan. If you don’t like it,  why should anyone else?

Be descriptive of the people you are talking about. “It gives them life and character.”

Quote the people involved—“it makes it mean more.”

Make sure your comments are believable and plausible. (Don’t exaggerate by saying someone is “the greatest of all time.”)

Don’t use passive words.

Less is more.

Don’t read notes prepared by others. “The audience can always tell when an announcer is reading and it is a total disconnect. Never read copy. Tell the story in your own words.”

Don’t yell. “Tone and inflection are more important than volume.”

Be conversational. “You are talking to a buddy in a bar!”

Slow down—there’s no rush!

Tell your stories succinctly and to the point.

It is not necessary to fill every moment with verbiage.

Avoid words like “obviously.”

Engage the audience. Ask provocative questions rather than telling them what to think.

Avoid clichés.

Talk in soundbites.

Be yourself.

+++++++++++++

All-in-all, it sounds like pretty good advice to me . . . .

See the entire leaked list here.  

The End of Online Advertising and the Future of News

Earlier this year I wrote about banner blindness, or why people don’t click on online ads. It was a cautionary tale for marketers and publishers thinking that online advertising might be a new savior.

Now comes more proof that online ads aren’t working.

In a column in the July 3 Globe and Mail, Carl Mortished writes about the alarming—for publishers—growth in the use of ad-blocking software.

According to a 2015 Reuters Digital News Survey, 47 per cent of American readers of news websites and 39 per cent of British readers are using software to block ads.

For publishers of news, this is a worrisome development. Most have moved away from paywalls, since readers have demonstrated over and over again that they won’t pay for news.

This was confirmed by the Reuters survey, which also found that three-quarters of Britons and two-thirds of Americans would never pay to watch or read news.

So if readers won’t pay for news, what are newspapers and other content providers to do? Try to sell more ads.

That’s the strategy being employed by a number of publications, including the Toronto Star, which recently dropped its 18-month experiment with a paywall. 

Instead, newspapers like the Star are going to a tablet version or using their websites to sell eyeballs to advertisers. 

The more eyeballs they can get, the more advertisers they can attract, and the more they can charge for advertising to stay alive.

But that strategy won't work if people are blocking ads. 

Says Mortished: “Web advertising revenues are falling and no one seems to have a solution that would keep readers happy while allowing advertisers and publishers to make a profit . . . readers have declared war on the publishers, a conflict in which neither side can gain long-term advantage.”

In exasperation, the Guardian (which is free online) has installed a message on its website that pops up when it detects ad blocking software, asking the reader to make a voluntary contribution. 

In Germany, media companies are taking a maker of ad-blocking software to court.

I have no answer to this problem. I don’t know how newspapers and other creators of news are going to stay in business if neither paywalls or advertising will generate revenue.

All I know is that buying ads on websites is not a magic bullet for catching reader attention—especially if readers are actively blocking them.