About a month ago we launched the danish primeministers blog. I had no idea the danish press would think of it as such a big story as they did. It got frontpage media coverage for serveral days and danish newspaper Nyhedsavisen wrote about five articles about it. The process with the primeminister was pretty interesting in a lot of ways, I’ll try to sum up my thoughts about that some other time.
But one thing that really struck some danish bloggers was the fact that we had made a rather harsh blog policy, basically just telling people to act nice and not offend anyone or any law. This was done with a specific swedish case in mind. On top of the policy the blog gartners (or moderators, if you like) approve all comments before they are sent online.
The latter part was probably the hardest for the danish blogosphere to accept, but it seems now that especially Nyhedsavisen can understand why we choose to do so. Having an open garden where everyone can come in and say their opinion about the primeminister and this country would just make it an endless stream of caps-lock comments. Not a place where you’d want to go when you actually wanted to have a conversation (and not necessarily an argument to start with).
About two weeks before the primeminister started blogging, another celebrity started blogging. Marc Andreessen of Netscape and Mozilla fame, currently working with Ning. I think he’s an icon to many web youngsters around the globe, so it was a good move (albeit five years too late, if you ask me) for him to show some good examples and give some good advice. But then the comments started flowing in, and Marc just didn’t know what to do about them. And now they are gone - and not coming back. What a shame, I really think a thought through strategy would have helped him a lot. Don’t you?
I think so too. It’s important to have a policy when the need to filter out offensive stuff or just plain idiocy arises. Otherwise the action of filtering out can appear arbitrary.
11.07.07 (d.m.y) at 1:45 pm (CET) | Andreas JohannsenThe harsh blog-policy is definitely a way around some of the problems you face when you are Anders Fogh blogging. And so are moderators. It’s what I call contract-blogging where you set up at contract with the readers/users of the blog – what I will agree to do, what you should agree do. But from a communications point-of-view, it still doesn’t serve the purpose. The contract and moderation might insure some stability, the conversational situation becomes very awkward – especially when Fogh says he want’s to talk with “the people”. Blogs are very good at talking to other blogs, but not specifically well suited, as a media, for mass messaging, no matter is much of the dialog is between the commentators.
I’m definitely for thought-through processes but I think Marc Andressens case, shows that there is a reasonable upper-limit for what blogs can and can’t do, there is matters of scale and issues of time that really doesn’t fit well with this medium – and I think we should consider these issues well when advising our clients to go into these kind of media.
Though I don’t count myself as part of the danish blogosphere, I am rather skeptical about the whole corporate celebrity blogging phenomenon, especially when the blogger is a very high profiled figure like the prime minister. There is just too many constrains, both time wise and in respect to what topics he can address. I think the blog in an communicational context is an interesting project in of itself (credit for that, Jacob), but overall I think it fails to deliver on its own premises and promises, even with harsh politics and moderators. And that is probably mostly due to it being a blog.
I don’t particular think that blogs and blogging should stay in a particular way – I even envision that we’ll see very different attribution of blogs or variations of blogs to come. Obviously Fogh, like any other blogger, can have all the motivation to blog he wants, all I’m reading it doesn’t feel like he has. And that’s really what it comes down to is what you do believable and credible?
Blogs and digital communication in generally interesting because contrary to other media you can set it up yourself and in pretty much the way you want to – But you are also equally obligated to deliver. You’ll be judged on wheter you are delivering on the contract that you set up. I don’t think Fogh have done that yet, and I have a hard time believing he ever will – even after a well deserved holiday :)
11.07.07 (d.m.y) at 4:22 pm (CET) | Martin Sønderlev ChristensenMartin, I think I agree with you on the big picture. Blogs doesn’t serve as a silver bullet, and it never has. But I think the blog can support a lot of processes a lot better than the tools you’d instead be using. But you should also interpret Fogh blogging in many aspects; this is for example only the beginning. If the blog seems to make any sort of value for him, it will be much more likely that he would be willing experiment a lot more. That’s a large part of the problem; a primeminister doesn’t experiment today. Hopefully that will change over time, but this project will definitely not change it – maybe it will start the proces of getting there, I don’t really know.
Going back to the value of having a blogging primeminister, I think it’s pretty obvious that we can’t judge him from his first three postings, but I am already positively surprised. First of all he is actually writing his posts, it’s not just something I am making up to make our job look more successful, I know it as a fact. Whether or not he’ll stay on that path, I can’t tell, but I am surprised to see himself putting the blog so high on his priority list next to G8, global warming, etc. The way I read your comment, it seems you’re not quite confident Fogh will put energy and focus into the blog, but I have quite a contrary experience with him so far.
As for contract-blogging, I don’t really think it’s a new phenomenon. We have always done that, now it’s just a lot more explicit since we’re putting it on the blog as a static text. If you look at some of the early blogs they had a more implicit contract to them, as you would expect a blogger to blog once a week if that’s what he had been doing for the past two years. That also counts for how you handle comments, if you stay on topic, etc.
I am really happy for your constructive critism, I must admit that even though I am still overwhelmed by the press coverage, I am god damn disappointed that all the articles written in the dead-tree media is of such bad quality. Just look at the “analysis” Nyhedsavisen made. I would just hope a lot more bloggers would do what you’ve done.
So keep it up mate, we’re going to get there some day, just not tomorrow. The establishment doesn’t make reforms, the general public does.
11.07.07 (d.m.y) at 6:38 pm (CET) | Jacob BøtterI wanted to quickly chime in with Martin: Blogging has great potential as a means of engaging in discussion between blogs but it’s certainly not a perfect medium for conducting two-way conversations. AFR’s blog is a perfect example of this; it’s a mouthpiece and megaphone. There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with that — as Jacob said it may well be an improvement from previous mouthpieces in it’s personal tone. It just doesn’t move away from one-way communication, and that’s a shame.
In this respect there’s a hypocritical aspect to the AFR blog. It’s signaling openness while maintaining the tight control on communication that we’ve come to know from Fogh. This notion of tight control isn’t based on moderation (which is an absolutely necessary evil) but on the fact that discussion on Fogh’s blog is never going to make a dent in the political stance of the prime minister. (In some ways, this is what Henrik Bang terms culture governance: addressing a public sphere centered around lay-people in the language of those lay-people; but requiring these ordinary citizen to act upon the premises of the expert citizens in order to be heard. Whereas blogging has the potential for everyday people to be heard, I have little confidence this will happen in this case.)
In some ways it’s comparable to the criticism leveled at Ny Alliance’s openness in formulating policy (for example, http://politiken.dk/indland/article335891.ece). It’s an invitation to be heard, which is unlikely to be met with real-life action and consequence. As I said, that’s a shame and it might well be a hard constraint of blogging and net-root politics. Or it might just be a call for the previous commenters to do their jobs even better.
11.07.07 (d.m.y) at 9:57 pm (CET) | Steffen Tiedemann ChristensenNice analytic comment from Steffen. I think we are all driving the same argument here in different tongues though – Interesting project, to early to judge etc.
Foghs (and Connectas) take on blogging it is serving as a pending proof of concept, from which we will all learn from – I do hope that I will work, that could be awesome. But I think we owe our self to remain critical based on the premises. The critic should however not aim at stopping everyone that doesn’t meet the standard requirements from blogging. Not at all. But we should at least analyze the boundaries of the communication we are initiating white these kind of media. I think it is crucial that we challenge the blog as a media product exactly now when everybody is going for it – It’s almost to easy to make/sell blogs to clients – even if Fogh is a bit of an achievement.
I think the real challenge, when engaging into the form of communication that a blog can initiate, is challenging the organization behind, and I think you agree. If the organization doesn’t adapt, start experimenting (as you say) and open up equally, the blog will be, as Steffen says, hypocritical. Thus corporate blogging should equal a whole new mindset in the organization, if this should matter. I think social software and web 2.0 has been focus to much on bending traditional communication into these new media and too little on make the essential organizational changes.
If we continue adapting the blog to the needs of the organization we will end up creating the same old problems in different formats! Less talk, mo tools.
I must say really appreciate and admire you being so open about the process Jakob, that goes to show that you know what you are doing, but also that you are interested in knowing more – I’d like to join that club!
And wow Jacob, now you have such a superfly-funky-15-minuttes-edit thing going, could have a little bigger commentfield to work in :)
12.07.07 (d.m.y) at 11:25 am (CET) | Martin Sønderlev Christensen+1 on the 15 minute edit thing. Nice.
Anyway, just wanted to chime in with an oldie but goodie on how the asymmetry of power prevents blogs from the powers-that-be from success.
It is already super evident in the AFR case, since after all, this is the same AFR recently criticized for selectively giving interviews.
Which is to say: When the asymmetry is there there’s a pretty good chance that a blog is just another kind of CMS, and not really – culturally – a blog.
13.07.07 (d.m.y) at 1:12 pm (CET) | Claus