Jump 3: Coffee strategies & influencer gulags
Scott Davidson's newsletter on PR, public affairs & lobbying
Welcome to Jump 3. Because practitioners often miss great academic studies. Because I do a lot of reading…in this edition:
* The Coffee Strategy
* Rhetoric and Covid vaccine drives
* Influencer deep dives
* The death of official football songs
FEATURED RESEARCH: The Coffee Strategy
This week I’d like to share the fascinatingly illuminating PhD of Camilla Notthaft (Lund).
Camilla extensively shadowed and interviewed lobbyists working in Brussels. Her analysis gives us the “coffee strategy”. Whereby public affairs practitioners both organise, and attend, conferences and seminars to create informal opportunities to talk to policy-makers.
The coffee strategy creates opportunities for inter-personal conversations in the corridors during drinks breaks. A chance to make contact and build seemingly natural opportunities to propose further meetings or events.
(I can attest to this from my personal experience of working in lobbying, where my teams would assiduously get all staff to return notes on everyone they met and spoke to during events, with bullet points to help with horizon scanning and identifying friends and foes on any issue position).
Finally, there was the importance of just being physically seen at events as this builds perceptions of being legitimate stakeholders on an issue.
As Nothhaft explains:
“The coffee-strategy has primarily been linked to…corridor encounters and reception and drinks meetings. Lobbyists sign up for conferences and seminars to stay in the corridors to meet people and attend meetings for the important coffee breaks. These encounters are seen as valuable even if there is no speaking involved. I was told that it is ‘good to be seen around because then others [especially the politicians] realise that you are active and interested in the on-going issues’”.
When it came to the assistants and younger staffers there was also the evening drinks encounters. The deliberate cultivation of backstage interactions was illustrated by one lobbyist who:
“…arranged a lunch seminar with an organisation in which she was the chairman. The topic of the seminar was far from the issues with which she normally worked. I asked her why she put such great effort and time into this organisation, and she told me that the sole reason was another woman on the board. This woman was a high-ranked politician in Brussels, and this was an efficient way to obtain backstage encounters with her.”
This all resonates with last week’s featured paper by Will Dinan, and his identification of breakfast briefings, lunchtime seminars and dinner debates as being a key part of the networks of influence within Brussels.
Full text: https://tinyurl.com/3uf6w94d
OVER THE (PAY) WALL
A content strategy for public health communicators dealing with the problem of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy comes from a new paper from Oyvind Ihlen, Margalit Toledano and Sine Norholm Just (Oslo, Waikato & Roskilde universities).
Content strategies need to be related to the most important drivers for hesitancy in their contexts, be it religious views, scepticism of “big pharma,” first - or second-hand experience with side effects of vaccines, or a general mistrust in authorities.
The paper reminds us that experts and non-experts have different perceptions of risk. This can lead to a failure to seriously understand the vaccine hesitant. As frustrating, and irrational, as some beliefs amongst the hesitant might be, they need to be addressed rather than dismissed.
Additionally as there are many different categories of the vaccine hesitant, one-size fits all-messages are unlikely to succeed. Ethos – that is to say character or reputation – can be a bigger factor than the logic of the arguments to get vaccinated. It’s a truth we have known for centuries, messages will be rejected if the audience does not trust the messenger.
Based on a review of evidence on rhetorical strategies, the authors conclude:
1) vaccine hesitancy is not irrational per se;
2) messages should be tailored to the various hesitancy drivers;
3) what is perceived as trustworthy is situational and constantly negotiated;
4) in areas of uncertainty where no exact knowledge exists, the character of the speaker becomes more important; and
5) the trustworthiness of the speaker can be strengthened through finding some common ground — such as shared feelings or accepted premises — with the audience.
NOTABLE
This week, influencers. Do we have to? Yes we do.
Firstly Barrett Swanson’s long read in Harpers, deep diving into content houses and TikTok mansions – kind of voluntary gulags where young people spend all day creating social media content.
“Among the various House Rules, which are enumerated on a whiteboard in the dining room of this mansion, are boldfaced injunctions to wake up by 10 am, to refrain from drinking Sunday through Thursday, to hold house meetings every morning at 11:30, and to “finish brand deliverables before inviting guests.” Unlike some other houses, the Clubhouse isn’t owned and operated by the influencers themselves but is overseen by outside investors. In exchange for posting three to five videos per week to the Clubhouse social-media accounts, the boys receive free room and board, plus whatever brand deals they can get based upon their “relevance.””
TikTok has a “creator marketplace”. Although I wasn’t surprised to learn this I have never really followed the detailed mechanics of this industry, with its catalogues of eager youngsters for sale:
“Listing influencers’ most pertinent statistics, the marketplace allows brands to search any number of specifications—country, topic, audience age, average views, etc. For example, if I wanted to add an influencer named Meghan McCarthy to my campaign, I’d know that she has 3.7 million followers, that her posts garner an average of 615,000 viewers, and that 58 percent of those people live in the United States and some 80 percent of them are women.”
Swanson also draws on his experience teaching at Wisconsin university. It’s a recommended article for how it explains the mechanics of this market being fed rocket fuel through the budgets of brand promoters.
Complementing this is Diane Banks on Tortoise.
She argues the keen consumers of influencer content are doing so in a way that is in harmony with:
“…natural forms of human interaction, but which has never been available on a mass scale – until now. The rise of peer-to-peer recommendation and direct contact with online gurus is no mystery to those who understand evolutionary psychology. It has restored the most deeply ingrained habits of trust and recommendation: albeit on a planetary scale, rather than within the confines of a village or a tribe”
Which makes a timely link to the Ihlen, Toledano and Norholm’s paper above . The power of influencers on consumer opinion, and likely as this evolves, public opinion on issues, is grounded in trusting a speaker who is believed to be similar to yourself.
CULTURAL HINTERLAND
Its July 2021 and we the final of EURO 2020 is upon us. So, let’s pose a football and culture question. Why have songs by football teams, released to coincide with tournaments been fading away?
Hat tip to one of my fav podcasts - A word in your ear - where Mark Ellen and David Hepworth put forward their theories.
* The modern footballer is now a slick professional earning huge money. Always on the look out for brand building and advertising opportunities. Looking amateur and singing along with other guys who can’t sing, doesn’t fit with the image.
* A fear of doing humorous jokey projects. A fear of getting an unforeseen, or maybe entirely foreseeable, social media backlash for being insensitive or inappropriate.
* You can't make money out of the record, no high street record shops, what it might make on streaming service, peanuts compared to their huge salaries and commercial deals.
Play us out lads: