DLTQ.org

I have followed with great interest the development of the Norwegian scandal where different counties have been tricked by Terra Securities.

Here is a recent article in English.

First of all, it is interesting that counties are borrowing money to invest.
Then, it is interesting that counties are investing in bonds where they - seemingly - have not full knowledge of what they are investing in. Yes, Terra Securities might have tricked them to some degree, but in the end I think it is up to the counties as well to make sure they have adequate information.

In the end, it is the citizens of these counties that will suffer. The government has stated that they will not step in and aid the counties affected, and Terra Securities has now filed bankruptcy - oh how convenient!!

Stories like this make me SO angry.

I have learned several things from my political videoblogging work in 2005 in Norway and this autumn here in Denmark, and the most important is:

Organizational videoblogging is hard work!

My conclusion is that you cannot do organizational videoblogging on a whim, but it has to be part of a larger communications platform, and that you need to really work on the infrastructure of it.

The last days I have worked on an article for the member’s magazine of my political party here in Copenhagen, and in that article I put forth three separate areas of use of videoblogging within a political party:

The exhibition

Videos that promote the work of the party for mainly an external audience. If your organization is holding a meeting about NATO or the European Union, and that meeting is public, you could shoot some footage during the meeting along with maybe a few quick statements from the organizers before/after the meeting, and then put it online. There is not much revolutionary about this format -there has for years been online visual accounts from meetings (mostly conferences or meetings with very public speakers), but what I think is new about a videoblogger approach to this is that it is more low-key, and does not require as many man-hours or setting up of equipment.

Internally, The Exhibition approach can also be used to showcase local arrangements in rural areas that are maybe not well-attended, but where the discussion was interesting and deserve a broader audience. This kind of internal exposure of activities can also help heighten the visibility of such local chapters of the organization.

The library

It is well-known that any organization can gain a lot of productivity from having a well-stocked media library that is immediately accessible to all levels of the organization. That way, when the local chapter in Aarhus or Odense wants to use some pictures about climate issues, wind energy or the new Party spokesperson for tax policies, they can simply use this library instead of going around searching in different folders/systems.

Likewise, it would be great if we could build a media library of video that can be used in a score of different situations. Need to make a video about an upcoming event on the EU? Include a few quotes from a statement by the EU spokesperson of the party from a few months back! Of course, today the burden of creating a video just to promote an event is too big to make it seem worthwhile, but as tools become more ubiquitous and easier to use, I am sure that we will see a lot more of this.

Establishing such a library of video is a bit tricky, though. First of all, you should have different versions of the files available. If the video was shot in HD, for instance, there should be a link to an HD/DivX version of the file. Then, there should be a lower-resolution version that you can download and use. Also, there should be the flash-converted version, that is used for quick-scrubbing to see if the content can be used at all before you download larger files.

Then, you need to find a good taxonomy, which is the eternal problem. A tagcloud for video files along with some categories could work, but experience shows that not even this works perfectly.

The Workshop

Ahh, the workshop. As more people in the organization start to use video themselves, some of them can also be involved with more experimental work. How could political messages be effectively communicated - for instance if you want to reach youngsters aged 15-24. It certainly will not work very well with talking heads if you want to draw the attention of people who are used to being entertained on Youtube. On the other hand, because you have the publicly available library that all of this experimental video narrative is built on, you could link to the longer versions of the interviews, or point to the context of this quote of a political opponent that you used in said polemical video.

The workshop aspects of organizational videoblogging is somewhat more esoteric and will by nature only involve a smaller amount of people in the organization. However, the work done by these people can function as a kickstarter to new forms of discussions and dialogue, and can also help to draw the attention of people from outside the party.

This weekend Radical Youth created a group that will focus on videoblogging and video communnication in general. I am one of the members of the group (I feel old), and it will be interesting to see what we will come up with. The first meeting is on thursday.

On Thursday night Danish television channel DR had another of those stories that is bound to put a dent on the public image of a few individuals. In the programme Taskforce one rather well-known Danish real estate agent named Preben Scheel is first caught threatening a Filippino au-pair, saying “I will soon talk about you to a few friends. They are bad people. They will pick you up, is that what you want?”, and then when the journalist calls him about it, he claims that she was the one threatening him. Another danish man, more public this time, Claus Bretton-Meyer, is found out on sharing his au-pair with another family and doing a few other illegal things.

Of course, this is a lovely news story: Rich men abuse poor (but often university-educated) young women from the Philippines. And of course the politicans react on friday, but I am not impressed so far. The social-democratic party wants the immigration authorities to do more checks - but what will this help? As I wrote elsewhere today, many of these filippino au-pairs are simply too afraid to talk - they don’t want to be sent home too early.

So, maybe Claus Bretton-Meyer will quickly call Burson-Marsteller or another “brand management” crisis company. Or maybe he will just call a lawyer, they will figure out that “nothing sticks”, and after the usual period of hype over this issue, it will all cool down until Next Time when the TV can offer you an Exclusive Insight into the horrible conditions some of the au-pairs are working under.

I feel sick.

So, this is an idea that has been swimming around in my head for a long time: A global “army” of e-warriors of similar interest that join forces and create their own network, including their own massive data centres filled with animations, logos, videos from near and far, and where we constantly learn from each other.

In 2005, during the Norwegian parliamentary elections, we had a few visitors from abroad who came and helped us, boosting our morale as well as helping with more practical things.

This year, we also (I guess) had a few visitors coming to Denmark from abroad to help us.

But, how could we extend the level of commitment that people could enter from afar?

If a growing part of the election campaign is fought on the internet - what does that mean?

I have not, since my days in MOSAIC, been interested in pan-European issues - besides, of course, VlogEurope - and I suppose it is time to start again.

Overall, to see myself as part of a much, much bigger story. A small piece that can, nevertheless, do my share.

In 2004, Shel Israel wrote:

Conversational Marketing is nothing new. It’s basically the concept that people respond better to lowered voices spoken in credible tones than they do to the aggressive in-your-face marketing speak as is evidences in everything from TV ads to the pap-lingo of so many website. If common sense prevailed, marketers would understand that simply conversing with customers, prospects, partners, investors and employees is more effective. People listen better and longer when you just talk to them and listen back. All too often professional marketers lose their credibility by hyperbole, hubris and amplification. It seems to me self evident that just talking with people is more effective than shouting and repeating yourself as if your audience was comprised of deaf idiots.

Note: my italics | [source] | [via]

With my current work to set up shop with visibility.dk, I am thinking a lot about conversations and how video can be effectively used as conversation-enhancers within organizations as well as conversations with the public, the voters, the customers, the clients.

Conversations are so much more, however, and my hope is that some of the conversations we can have are not only organic (thanks for that phrase, Jeffrey), but also have wider consequences. Can touch people’s thinking, not just their purchase habits.

This week, I am spending some time writing a two-page article about videoblogging for a member’s magazine of my political party. I better get back to that.

Hope you all have a great day!

How often have I been in a playful mood while blogging lately?

Not much.

And that is pretty sad

So, cheers for playful blogging, and shorter, more frequent updates, and more links to friends, and more Conversation.

Our party, Det Radikale Venstre, is the B on this list:

Image Source: Politiken.dk

We lost. We were the loser of the election, losing 8 of our 17 mandates in parliament, and we now have 9 left.

On the other hand, what happened was that we simply went back to the level we had before the election of 2005, where Radikale Venstre had a substantial gain. I covered that election here.

Why did it go so wrong? I think it was a mixture of the creation of Ny Alliance in May, which was founded by membes of Radikale Venstre. Practically, a split of Radikale Venstre. Then, in this election, the socialists (SF - which is F on the overview above) had a tremendous gain. They were successful with communicating their core values, and their new leader is also a politician many people feel they can relate well to.

But the decline of my own party was not the biggest problem. What really made us annoyed was that the current government (V and C - The Liberals and the Conservatives) can continue in majority with just the support of the Danish People’s Party (O). It was our hope that the opposition could receive a majority and we could have a new government. If that didn’t work, it was our hope that VKO alone would not have majority, and that they would need Ny Alliance to continue. Ny Alliance (literally: New Alliance) was created with several goals, one of them being to minimise the influence that Danish People’s Party could have over Danish politics, particularly on the immigrations area (today, Denmark has some of the strictest immigration laws in Europe).

Now the Danish Prime Minister (V) says that he will seek broad dialogue - that is, that he will invite other parties to negotiations, and not just stick with the VKO parties, even though they do have the majority.

The candidate I worked for in this election campaign, Mikkel Sarbo, did not have even a long shot at becoming a member of the parliament. Granted, he was a pretty unknown candidate in the general public, but it was our hope that with among other things an innovative web campaign we could help him get closer to being elected. It did not work very well, and in the coming days and weeks we will do a thorough review of the campaign, and write some guidelines for the next campaign.

Regarding political videoblogging, this election campaign has also been disappointing. Most parties were active on youtube, even Danish People’s Party, but most of them did not open up for proper dialogue. The leader of the Labour Party, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, however had some Q&A sessions where you could ask questions, and she would answer, for instance this:

In Radikale Venstre we also had different videos from different candidates, as well as the official videos from the headquarters of the party. Nicolas Charbonnier has been videoblogging for years, and he registered and administrated radikale.tv, which I think is a great way to aggregate videos from all these different candidates, and he also went out himself and interviewed candidates as well as people on the streets about their point of view on politics and what issues they think are important. Today radikale.tv has over 340 videos of different length and topic which is a good basis - - for what?

Now, that is the question.

These videos from the election campaign - how can they be used in the organization? For years, I have myself been interested in organizational videoblogging, both internally and externally. How can one person who travels somewhere give video updates to the rest of the organization? How can this be streamlined? (I think mobile videoblogging is the way to go there)

How can organizations and companies use videoblogging to communicate with their peers and customers? How can citizens - members of the civil society - use videoblogging to communicate TO the politicians, to the companies, to the organizations?

Yesterday I spent most of the day considering: What now, Raymond?

I had worked in an academic bookstore for a year or so before the election campaign came and “forced me” to quit the job so I could help out full-time during the campaign (it’s not quite the same to campaign after 6 PM and during your lunch break) Before the bookstore, I had worked as a consultant in blogging and videoblogging in Norway and some in Denmark, but I had - basically - grown tired of working pretty much alone. Before that, I had been woking in a hospital while being involved in politics in Bergen. Before that - well.

So, I considered the last days to take on different opportunities for a full time employment, but I realize that this is not what I am really aiming for.

So, I am going independent again. Or, at least, going back into the whole blogging/videoblogging/socialmedia thing full-time. I am actually very excited about this. This time around I will definitely be more motivated!

More information will follow, but now I need to write some emails. I wanted to start using a blog again more actively, and dltq.org it will be.

Could be any November 7th, could be any night at 20:53. 54.

We are approaching the end of the political campaign here in Denmark. National elections is on Tuesday.

I just made this for navlopomo

I have a lot to say about political videoblogging. This will suffice for now:

In Denmark, most parties “are on youtube” this election. But, what does that mean? What does it mean to post talking head videos on youtube, where the politician is just talking to the camera? That has even Less interaction with a critical journalist than main-stream media. Is this what youtube offers politicians? The opportunity to talk to the camera for 5 minutes without critical questions? The faux-openness and “oh, please do send us your comments”?

I will write and say a lot more about this the coming days here on dltq.org