Trevor Cook

Labor's 'gordian knot' and the myth of leadership

The ALP is beset by long-term problems that it scarcely knows how to deal with. Instead, the party focuses on 'leadership' in some bizarre form of the 'great man' theory of history. Yet, there is hardly any ideological and policy distinctions between any of the candidates for ALP leadership at federal and state levels. These leadership candidates rely on messaging, narratives, news cycles and all the other branding / PR nonsense that infected both the Rudd and Gillard leaderships, and dates back to the Carr premiership in NSW when the ALP finally abandoned ideological purpose for advertising slogans. 

For starters, what is the relevance of a 'labour' party dominated by blue-collar unions (and the catholic controlled SDA) in a post-industrial world? The 'typical' union member these days is female, university-educated and works in the health, community services and education sectors. Second, the ALP branch structure has been declining (or collapsing) at a faster rate than unionisation. Third, the internal structures of the ALP are archaic and profoundly undemocratic. Efforts to reform the ALP national structure have been on-going since the 1960s or longer (Whitlam was a passionate advocate of a genuinely national, rather than federal, structure). Efforts to ensure that union affiliation to the party reflected changing patterns in the union movement also date back to the 1960s and can be found as late as the 2002 national review (by Wran and Hawke) but have been largely abandoned in the 2010 review. 

Everyone knows about these problems, they are just too hard. They raise the question of whether political parties can really change their character or whether they are doomed to die and be replaced by new parties. In this context, a primary vote around 30 per cent is a a disturbing phenomenon for the ALP. Can the ALP really retain its historic links to unions (as representative organisations of the working class, whatever that might mean these days) and reach out to new social groupings, the 'tradies' (typically self-employed, or employed in micro-businesses) on the right and the inner-city green groupings on the left?

In last year's NSW election, voters deserted the ALP for the Coalition rather than head off to the Green left. Despite this the ALP has tended to see its problem as being one of winning back the green vote. This seems the only plausible reason for Gillard's decision to abandon an election promise and introduce a carbon tax (which I think is good policy but bad politics having specifically ruled it out in an election campaign just a few months previously), handing the political initiative to the Abbott-led Oppposition and ensuring that she is unelectable (what value would her 2013 election promises have?). Perhaps, Gillard will describe the carbon tax in her memoir as a politically costly decision but one worth taking in the national interest. Solace in rationalisation.

If Gillard is unelectable then should the ALP revert to Rudd? In a world where ideology and policy differences matter little, the voters must look to competence. Most of the front bench of the ALP seem to have publicly endorsed the idea that the Rudd Government was chaotic and characterised by administrative incompetence. I don't think Gillard has done much to change this public perception of incompetence (episodes like the Australia Day fiasco only serve to undercut her efforts). If it reverts to Rudd, does that mean more pink batts and exorbitant scholl dunnies? Does it mean another thousand reviews and then reviews of the reviews and lurching between policy paralysis (why did the Henry review take so long to be released?) and policy surprises (a mining tax?)

The damage has been done. They got rid of Beazley and saddled themselves with Crean and then Latham and then Beazley again and finally turned to Rudd in search of the great leader who would deliver them from the political wilderness. Rudd won a great victory and then turned out to be a bit light on when it came to policy (20/20 summits and reviews, reviews), they turned to Gillard (supposedly a great negotiator and hard-working policy wonk) who immediately blathered her way through meaningless messages to a not-quite defeat and then negotiated away everything to the cross-benches in desperation. And then the carbon tax decision and then everything else. And a primary vote that rarely rises above 30 per cent. And now some think that Rudd is the solution. With any luck he might be less bad than he was before, but its unlikely he will have changed much - and his policies will be the same as Gillard's. 

It's not as though the ALP has become an ideologically right-wing party; it's more that it is a mish mash of neo-liberalism and protectionism; anti-middle class welfare on some issues but not others. Best of all - why is an atheist living in a long-term de facto relationship opposed to marriage equality? What's the messaging in that one, dude?

In NSW, we've seen it all before. Changing leaders doesn't change much because the leaders are not the principal problem; the party is the problem. The ALP's policies are not that different to the Coalition's; it just hopes that their leader (whoever it might be) will be considered less worse than Abbott by the swinging voters. 

Comeback: What NSW Labor needs to do now

There will be plenty of analysis of what went wrong. The short answer is a lot. Much will be made of the 'worst result for NSW Labor since the 19th century ' line, but that is a statistic, it's not analysis. We have already heard a lot about fundamental re-alignments and structural change etc. The important point is that any realignment is between the LNP coalition and Labor. The Greens did not emerge as a third party. Disaffected ALP voters went overwhelmingly to the right not the left of the spectrum. The ALP will probably end up losing 28 seats, the Greens will be lucky to win one. In his victory speech, O'Farrell made much of "winning seats we never dreamed of winning". So did Labor under Wran. Wakehurst, for instance, on Sydney's northern beaches. Yesterday, the Libs got 70 per cent of the primary votes in Wakehurst and the ALP came third behind the Greens. Its a cyclical business.

It may take a decade, but the ALP will eventually win back most of the seats it lost yesterday. It won't happen because of some "searingly honest" (as Luke Foley described it) internal navel gazing. It'll happen when the ALP get's on with the business of winning seats. ALP reviews by party elders are a waste of time. Here's what I think the ALP needs to do to win them back sooner rather than later:

1) Pre-select 40 or 50 good candidates as quickly as possible. Labor needs new candidates in the seats it lost, and in others, as soon as possible. It needs people on the ground, with connections to local communities, who are willing to do the hard grind of doorknocking every weekend, running local issue campaigns, representing voters with a grievance against the O'Farrell governmen etc. This won't be easy. Pre-selections should cover two terms so that those who are willing to put in the work starting this year have a realistic chance of getting into Parliament, rather than just warming the audience for some factional trustie down the track. If the ALP can't build an army of enthusuastic candidates anything else it does will be a waste of time.

2) Campaign everywhere. Follow the lead of the Democrats and republicans in recent presidential campaigns with their 50 state campaigns.  The marginal seats strategy, conducted at the expense of safe ALP and LNP seats, has to be moved away from. It's outlived its usefulness, as most political strateges ultimately do. We live in an era of demographic shifts and decreasing party alignment.Labor should consider every seat winnable given the right candidate and the right policies. Focusing on marginal seats creates resentment and disillusionment among your supporters in non-targeted seats, it also lets your opponents target their resources on your marginals. For instance, the Liberals were able to bus supporters from the northern beaches to the western suburbs to staff booths etc because they faced no opposition north of the harbour.

3) It's the substance, stupid. Labor leaders like Carr and Rudd became obssessed with the 24 hour media cycle. There's nothing wrong with polishing the silver, but there were so many promises made (complete with media stunt and glossy brochure) in NSW and broken, and re-announced again that in the end nothing the government said was believed by anybody. Political campaigners often view the long-term as a string of 24-hour news cycles, like points played in a tennis match, the side winning the highest number of points wins. But voters just don't see it this way. If you promise a hospital and don't build it, no amount of clever PR will remove the fact that the voters feels betrayed. Media management works on journalists, for a while, but not so easily on voters.

4) Forget the Greens. Recently, there has been talk about the need for the ALP to reach out to Greens voters to rebuild its primary vote. Nonsense. The Greens would like to become a third force, but they are a small left-wing party reliant on Bob Brown's popularity and mostly confined to Tasmania, and the inner-city areas of Melbourne and Sydney. To rebuild its primary vote the ALP needs to win people off the LNP. Moving towards the Greens makes that harder not easier. Labor should co-operate with the Greens on issues where it is in Labor's interests to do so, and on Labor's terms. In those ALP heartland seats in western sydney and the Hunter, cost of living trumps carbon pricing. I can't see that changing.

5) Don't blame the unions. Another misunderstanding is the idea that Labor would have greater electoral appeal without unions. There is scant evidence for this idea. Unions provide significant resources, especially in campaigning personnel and they provide the ALP with a distinctive identity. The problem lies in relationships between the party organisation and the parliamentary party. Where the organisation tries to dominate the parliamentary leadership (blocking privatisation, engineering leadership coups) the electoral consequences are invariably disastrous. As galling as it might be for the egos of those in the organisation, the best option is always to support the parliamentary leadership team. Disunity never works, and the parliamentary leader is ultimately the person responsible for winning elections and governing. The party organisation has a lot of influence through pre-selections, but once those candidates have been pre-selected its role is, or should be, purely supportive.

Why we hate Gerry Harvey? Analysing a PR disaster

The outpourings of rage following the effort by something called the 'retail coalition' to get the Government to change the GST rules in their favour has its roots in growing public unhappiness about the nation's retail sector, especially the large conglomerates that dominate it. This heavily-financed self-interested pitch, sugar-coated with lame concerns for 'workers' jobs', provided a lighting-rod for all that build-up of consumer rage, and at the epicentre was Gerry Harvey.

So the first mistake was to appeal for support to a public that is not happy with you, and cynical about your motives. Australian big business worried about keeping jobs in Australia? Pleassse.

And then there is the matter of public spokesperson. Harvey has a high profile (famous for being rich and sounding stupid) but he is hardly an appealing character, he seems to hate the poor and his businesses appear to be the among the most reviled (slippery pricing policies, gouging,poor service, poor range). And after the mining tax 'backlash', the public seems to be sick of hearing from billionaires sprouting about fairness.

Stakeholders? Well, the 'retail coalition' was openly ridiculed by consumers' and representatives' in the days following the launch of their ill-fated campaign. And the retailers association itself was also negative about the claims. Not good.

Issues? A campaign like this needs to be built from an analysis of the reactions it might provoke. A pitch to protect big Australian retailers from unfair competition was always going to be a direct invitation for a public debate on the state of competition in the Australian retail sector. 

Thousands of Australians responded to that invitation, many providing examples of huge, and seemingly inexplicable, disparities between prices in Australian shops and those available online from Australian and international sources. 

So far, the now leaderless, 'retail coalition' has chosen not to engage in this public debate about pricing. For a good reason. It is not the so-called GST loophole that threatens these big retailers. It is the challenge from low-cost online retailers that don't have the same overheads (especially all those shopping centres and malls) and profit margins as the retail billionaires.

This silly campaign has just highlighted how out-of-touch, complacent and arrogant many people in big business have become in Australia. Those characteristics are a bad starting point for a public relations campaign.

Paul Sheehan: Blame it on Hawker Britten

With political failure comes the fun of assigning blame, Paul Sheehan, the SMH's fruit bat commentator (you know them by their sources and Sheehan sees Latham as a credible source), got in early today:

Because it was Marcus Junius Brutus Arbib who, with the other members of the Senate, not only knifed Rudd for Gillard but have subsequently encased her in the shell made by the Hawker Britton spin doctors, the party's focus groups, pollsters, lobbyists, factional debt collectors and union kneecappers.

via www.smh.com.au

If only it was all that simple. Just let Julia be all free range and organic and the voters will rush towards her. Not so. It's not the packaging that's the problem - it's the knifing, Gillard's failure to heal the wounds, and the fact that she hasn't yet come up with a single, positive message capable of engaging voters. PR always gets too much credit and too much blame. Good PR is important, but at the end of the day it's about the product. Bruce Hawker has an excellent track record as a political campaigner, if Gillard loses on 21 August it won't his fault.

Business needs to keep perspective on social media

I had a great time talking to a business group in Sydney recently, my theme was that social media is suited in some corporate circumstances and not others. I made the point that there was nothing blue sky or revolutionary about social media and, indeed, it has some real drawbacks for corporates. I made four points:

• Mainstream. The yes or no debate is over, its now about how. Social media is here and its important that we understand it and use it or respond to it in ways that are consistent with our corporate objectives. So social media should be in every comms strategy even if we consider it and decide not to use it or not to use it much

The Obama campaign is the current gold standard of this approach – they controlled message but they allowed people a great deal of lattitude in the way they helped promote that message

• Scalability. MySpace is dead, lost its cool. Facebook is too mainstream to be cool for kids anymore and Twitter is very limited. The more people using something, the more chaotic and junky it becomes.

• Nothing is dying. Media is fragmenting. Big media is still big media but there is more of it, more of it is delivered over the Internet and more of it has a participatory component. A fragmenting media means we as communicators have to get in front of people through a range of media. But radio will be here for a long-time, so will TV and so will newspapers.

• Content will be king, again. Especially content that actually contains new and important facts. Conversation is fine but it’s better if it’s informed. We’ve seen an explosion in opinion outlets. Crikey, the punch, national times, ABC unleashed. I don’t think business is using these outlets effectively. But opinion is great and can be important and entertaining, what is harder to do and costs more is the generation of facts – business and non-government organisations are well-positioned to help feed this need. But we’re not doing much of it yet.

Global PR Blog Week - 5 years on

Oh no. Another how time flies anecdote. Not only do I remember clearly the day Armstrong (Neil not Lance) walked on the moon (we got the afternoon off school - yippee), but I have also been reminded that five years since I conceived and co-organised this modestly titled event, Global PR Blog Week 1.0. At the time, there was just two dozen or so PR bloggers in the world now there are thousands of them, the old enemy (media, including crikey) has become one of the driving forces in the uptake of blogging, and much of the social media action seems to have moved to places like twitter, facebook and youtube.

Social media has become far more important in the past five years. Is it still as exciting - probably not. A road less traveled loses some of its appeal when the 4WD (SUV) crowd start their a/c'd, DVD'ed, leather upholstered pilgrimages.

Anyway, I would have missed this great anniversary had it not been for John Cass who interviewed me on his blog to mark the occasion this week. So thanks John. The interview is reposted below.

Some others have also blogged to mark the occasion, including AgWired, Bastien Beauchamp, Tom Murphy, and Colin McKay.

So here's the interview:

John: What was the significance of the Global PR Blog Week for you?

Trevor: It was fun and it helped demonstrate how people could come together online and create a body of mostly good quality material on line. Most of all I think it helped to counter some of the "PR is dead" stuff that was popular around that time, which originates from a false (IMO) view that PR is only about spin when PR done well is mostly about good communications. People (eg Naked Conversations) sometimes like to think that if only PR got out of the way then communications in our society would automatically improve. That's a bit like Reagan's "government is the problem not the solution" statement. It's simplistic and wrong-headed. The real challenge is to make PR better, and social media will help, is helping, to do that.

John: As one of the organizers of the conference what did it take to organize the conference, what do you recall about the event from your perspective?

Trevor: I basically came up with the initial concept and contacted a bunch of people to participate. This was easy because there was only about two dozen PR bloggers in the world at that stage (now there seem to be countless thousands), and most responded to my email within hours and were keen to participate. Most of the real hard work was done by Constantin Basturea who is now at Converseon in NYC. He did all the website stuff, which I can't do. Constantin deserves most of the credit for making it happen. Today, with twitter and facebook etc PR blogweek would have been far more interactive - the technical challenges were greater back then. Constantin's work meant we were able to do the whole thing without cost to the user - a bit like the Bloggercon idea - and that made it far more accessible.

John: What were the lasting effects of the Global PR Blog Week?

Trevor: The NewPR wiki that Constantin set up after PR blogweek partly as a way of storing the material was a very valuable resource for a lot of people. Anecdotally, I think a lot of people were encouraged to start blogging or to get more committed by the examples they saw in PR blogweek

John: How did the Global PR Blog week influence you and the industry?

Trevor: I think it helped to point to, or confirm, that PR could embrace social media and get real benefits from it. But it was a conference, and there have been many others. It was of its time when PR blogging was embryonic to say the least. I made contact with some great people like Constantin, Steve Rubel, Neville Hobson, and more and that was great fun and taught me a lot about PR in other parts of the world.

John: Reviewing the post(s) you wrote for the Global PR Blog week what has changed? What has not changed, since you wrote the post?

Trevor: Social media has grown rapidly much as we anticipated back then, but the rise of twitter, youtube and facebook have all been a surprise to me. Many of these services are far more accessible to users than blogs. Blogging tends to be a bit high end. Blogs that survive and do well over a period of years need to produce great content consistently and regularly and that's hard work. I find it difficult to blog and do everything else I want to do in life, as do many others - social media provides an easier way to stay in contact.

The media has adopted social media to a large extent and is promoting it heavily. Can that save big media - well some of it, but there is still going to be an almighty rationalisation especially in regard to newspapers. Nevertheless, I find the continuing "blogging versus journalism " debate so tedious. Bloggers are not journalists, and only a few want to be. Just as boring is the "social media can do everything" line that passionate advocates sometimes push. No-one believes it in the real world. Your client is interested in how social media fits in and adds value to the existing comms strategy. Few clients listen to the 'social media can revolutionise everything' hokey. I was more naive back then, a few years of trying to sell the social media idea to clients has toughened me up on this point. I stopped doing media interviews a while ago because the journalists always wanted you to either say something alarmist about social media (identity theft etc) or they wanted a cookie cutter evangelist to say something simplistic and naive.
In my view, we'll be there when we lose the media / PR construct and just communicate. Media would add value principally by selecting and packaging great stuff for a mass audience. PR would be the people in your organisation that facilitate but don't actually do the communicating. The roles of journalist and blogger would be in the background, and the real business of communicating would be in the foreground. We're still a long way off.

John: Give an update on what you've been doing in the last five years, and what you are doing now?

Trevor: In the last couple of years I've changed direction a bit and while I still do some PR work, I'm back at university researching a Phd on Australian politics and teaching, most recently in a course on Australian Foreign and Defence Policy. I still blog a little bit and I've written a lot of articles for Australian online media sites. I'm on twitter and I enjoy Facebook because a lot of my real world family and friends use it.

John: Thanks Trevor for coming up with the original ideas, helping to organize the conference and a great interview.

Rugby League scores another PR disaster

NRL stars named in toilet sex scandal | NEWS.com.au.

THREE high-profile Brisbane Broncos players are at the centre of a police investigation into an alleged sex scandal that has thrown the NRL finals series into chaos.

Broncos and Queensland State of Origin stars Karmichael Hunt, Darius Boyd and Sam Thaiday were allegedly named by a 24-year-old woman in a sexual assault complaint made to police on Saturday night, The Daily Telegraph reports.

The three were allegedly engaged in sexual acts with the woman in the toilet of a Brisbane nightclub and she complained to police after one of the players allegedly began filming with a mobile phone.

The revelations sent shockwaves through the NRL yesterday, with betting on the finals series suspended while police sifted through the allegations.

Three deadbeat players have ruined the finals series as a promotional exercise for a football code facing considerable commercial pressure.

You don't need to be a brain-dead moron to play professional rugby league but it obviously helps. Many of these players are ugly, immoral boofheads and thugs who think that getting their bodies smashed up week in week out makes them special.

The problem is that sponsors don't want their brands associated with behaviour that most people find abhorrent. Parents, particularly mums but also many dads, don't want these low-lifes paraded in front of their kids as role models.

The second-raters that run rugby league have never had the guts to stand up and enforce a zero tolerance ban on bad behaviour. They have messed this up just as they have messed up marketing, scheduling and just about everything else. Including, on-field brutality in the form of shoulder charges which should have been banned long ago. Every one of these sickening king hits turns more mums off in droves. Imagine your kid being assaulted in that cowardly fashion in the name of sport? It's not allowed in rugby union.

The AFL reckon they can cut into rugby league territory in western sydney. Maybe.

But the real challenge is coming from soccer. Australian is on-track for another world cup appearance in 2010 and with the Internet and pay-TV you can follow your favourite soccer teams and competitions all over the world.

Rugby league is on the downward slide unless there are drastic changes it will become just a second-rate sport played by a dwindling band of devotees.

Australia can't sustain four professional football codes. Rugby league is in the weakest position and time is running out.

Echo chamber: Social media strategists are talking to themselves

Echo chamber: Social media strategists are talking to themselves | Feeds | ZDNet.com: "Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about social media as an industry. Or as a field. It’s very new. We’re still finding ourselves. We’re trying to figure out exactly what it is. What the parameters are. Who should lead it within an organization. For that matter, we’re still struggling for a specific definition as to what social media actually is.

As far as social media strategists, we’re a tight lot. We’ll friend one another on Facebook, follow one another on Twitter, read one another’s blogs. We’ve formed a reasonably tight community in which we’ll evangelize to one another concepts such as authenticity and transparency, relevance and subtlety. We’ll say that companies today must listen. They must engage their communities. We’ll all agree with ourselves. But at this point, that’s clearly not enough. And the first thing we must do is recognize this.

About a month ago Forrester came out with a study of 16 social networking efforts put together by brands and their agencies. They found that of the 16, a full 15 were failing to make the grade. According to their metrics, this is a 94 percent failure rate. And the primary reasons for these failures were that those that were implementing the campaigns were using traditional online methodologies, leading Jeremiah Owyang to state ‘many brands are wasting their time, money, and resources.’ That’s not harsh…it’s accurate and fair.

The negative consequences of what we would call poorly run campaigns may not be all that readily apparent either. They could be looked on as learning experiences, experiences that can be improved on the next time around. A tweak here, a tweak there. All done by the same players that were in the first go around. Now many of us will say, in a somewhat frustrated and self-satisfied tone, that ‘they just don’t get it.’ These senior advertising agency and PR firm execs or corporate CMOs and marketing directors don’t know what they’re doing when it comes to social media."

Read the rest...it's well worth it

Fitness First runs into an olympic-size PR disaster

Fitness First (an international chain of gyms) has invested a lot of money in its Olympic sponsorship but its efforts have been undercut by an own-goal PR disaster:

smh.com.au has been inundated with emails from readers complaining about their experiences with Fitness First.

About 70 per cent were from Fitness First customers who had difficulties cancelling their memberships, or those of a loved one.

The readers often cited injuries, health concerns, or death as the reason for cancelling, but often found their accounts continued to be debited by Fitness First.

About 20 per cent complained about the pushiness of staff when they inquired about joining the gym and the harsh terms and conditions of the contracts.

The remaining customers complained about a range of other issues, including the cost of memberships and the facilities.

Oh dear, not good. And what prompted this avalanche of bad PR - they successfully sued a sick woman for 200 bucks. This sort of heavy-handed stuff makes sense to lawyers but in PR terms, it's insane.

The Pope's WYD PR coup

Crikey

Great positioning, great messages, a great show and wildly appealing television images. In PR, it doesn't get any better than that.

Read the rest of my piece ...