When the election started David Cameron’s Tories looked like they were cruising to some sort of nuanced victory. The first televised leaders’ debate put paid even to that. The Liberal Democrats jumped from a distant third to being front runner or in close second place, depending on which poll you trust. So-called Cleggmania was born. Now some sort of humiliation looks much more likely than it did, even if Cameron becomes PM.

Of course, the leaders’ debate is game-show politics, which makes it even more prone to febrile moodiness than EU or local elections. I agree with my friend Richard D North’s view (expressed on his blog and in his book on Mr Cameron’s Makeover Politics) that we may well be watching the end of 20th Century class politics. Why wouldn’t it get weird? But interestingly, the running is still being made by ordinary newspapers and broadcasters. Who said TV was dying or that dead tree press is dead? One wonders how Clay Shirky and Jeff Jarvis explain such events.

Once upon a time, political parties had a mass base, with mass membership, rooted in trade unions, social classes and local constituencies. Not any more. Today the political elite is remote and connects to the masses via the media. The contest for votes is fought on TV and in the tabloids and broadsheets, sometimes in the style of the X-Factor, Britain’s Got Talent and American Idol. Modern elections are always more about style than content, but I don’t think the real intentions of the major parties were ever more obscure to us than they are today.

Supposedly we live in an age of engagement, in an age in which we form interactive online social networks based on common values. But that doesn’t fit well with the British election experience. Social media – Twitter, Facebook and blogs – are just a backdrop to this story. Charlie Beckett summed up the TV-impact well:

…the curious voter can watch the debates and form their own judgements on the basis of what the candidates say and how they perform.This kind of ‘disintermediated’ communication is usually thought of as an Internet phenomenon. But as Michael Cockerill’s excellent documentary on the history of TV debates reminded us – mainstream broadcast media can do it, too, albeit without interactivity.

Moreover, the political party with by far the largest web-based social presence, with the most interactive website, has the least influence of all on public opinion. The British National Party is a joke (though it might win a seat; we’ll see). But according to the web-rankings agency Alexa the BNP is the world’s 28,545 most popular site compared to the Conservatives at 52,423, Lib Dems at 68,446, Labour at 69,527 and political blogging sensation Guido Fawkes at 40,688.

There’s lessons here for firms. Old media still counts for much more than new media. However new media and old media interconnect so both need to be engaged. But it’s largely a myth that the online networked society changes the rules of PR and communication in general. By the way, I shall deal with the advocates of the Stockholm Accords’ misreading of contemporary developments (they think we live in a new value-network society) at a later date. For now I merely remark that in many ways they miss the obvious: the emergence of new media, and the fragmentation it encourages, makes old media more important than ever, even as their audience shrinks, precisely because the mass public is increasingly disengaged from public life.

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I was raised in Elm Park, having been born in nearby Romford. Elm Park was and remains almost exclusively white, lower working class. It is perhaps the most chav chav-town in chavdom.

The Times gets a warm welcome at the Elm Park Pub from the BNP

Built in the late 1930s, Elm Park was designed to attract young working class families seeking to escape the worst of London’s smog. Its housing consists of well-built three-bedroomed semi-detached properties with back and front gardens. Its streets are tree-lined. There’s a healthy mixture of council houses and privately owned homes in an urban setting on the edge of London’s greenbelt, wedged between Dagenham and Hornchurch. There are parks nearby and a very good swimming pool. It has much going for it.

My parents arrived and met in Elm Park just before the Second World War. They lived next door to each other. My dad’s a Hackney boy and my mum’s from East Ham. They went to school across the road from Hornchurch airdrome, which played a major part in the Battle of Britain.

My father pays homage every year to an American airman who crash-landed his plane into the playground wall rather than risk smashing into their classroom by attempting to fly over it. The class saw the plane dip away from them and explode. They were covered in glass. The boy next to my father was injured for life. And ever since, the old boys meet annually at the pilot’s grave to say thanks to the Yank. Yes, there’s a good heart in Elm Park.

There was plenty of work in the early days. There was a massive Ford factory in Dagenham, as well as the pharmaceutical company May & Baker. There was Roneo Vickers, then Britain’s largest manufacturer of office machinery. And, not least, there were London’s East End docks working at full capacity.

My dad worked on the buses as a conductor. My mother worked at May & Baker. My grandmothers worked at Roneo Vickers. One grandfather was a leading communist shop steward at Ford’s (he left the party in 1956 in protest against the crushing of the Hungarian uprising by the Soviet Union) the other was a self-employed Tory-voting builder.

But something went wrong in Elm Park. Part of the problem was the run-down, then closure, of both Ford’s plant and London’s docks. But seeing as we were connected to the rest of London by the tube, I don’t buy that explanation for my town’s decline.

Elm Park began its big slide from working class respectability to chavdom in the early 1970s. Elm Park somehow came to embody all that was worst about Britain’s loss of direction at that time. The kids got out of control. We glorified in football hooliganism and ignorance. Our low-grade local schools told us we were there to be trained as manual workers. We said “stuff that”, we don’ want to be like our parents.

For many the rebellion meant giving up on education and ambition. For a few, like me, it meant going up the ladder.

Since the 1970s, the Elm Park pub has been the haunt of gangsters, druggies and football hooligans. I learned to drink and to fight there. The room in which the BNP met was where I practiced karate. Its adjacent bar was where I had many a-run-in with local toughs. As 16-year-olds we got drunk and watched the strippers there on Sunday lunch-times (imagine a mob of 150 baying adrenaline-driven yobs screaming at the girls to get their kit off). The police tried many times to have the pub shut.

Today, the town has a run-down early 1960s feel that’s more “up north” than “down south”. There’s boarded up shops, cheap clothes and food, a very bad cafe and an Indian restaurant which serves abusive racists once the pub shuts. Gangs of young kids roam the streets – it’s an intimidating place to be.

Yet, still, I remember that my gang of West Ham United thugs was a mixture of black and white. Some of us used to leave the footie on Saturdays to help the Socialist Workers’ Party beat up National Fronters, some of whom were our school mates.

I can’t put my finger on Elm Park’s decline. I also don’t want to go blind to the good that remains (hey, that’s my home and I’ve friends still there) or to sell its decent residents short. Any quick tour of my town’s back streets will reveal the pride many still take in their homes and gardens. Most people avoid the Elm Park pub. They take the train or bus to Upminster or Hornchurch instead. There’s many hard-working people living there.

As I sit in my villa by Zurich’s lakeside, I’m still inspired by the best things in the Elm Park I knew. I’ll be forever grateful to many of its old folk (including my parents and a couple of cops who once roughed me up and then lectured me) who set me straight and told me to get a life, get organised, clean up my act, get educated, and get out of town, when I was kid. But part of me regrets ever leaving its streets. Yesterday I wish I’d been there to tell the BNP to f-off.

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Forrester Research, the independent technology and market research company, is banning its researchers from blogging. It seems that the “personal” nature of blogging and Twitting is a challenge to Forrester’s business model

Forrester is wary of allowing its staff an opportunity to develop an exit strategy around a social media presence focused on themselves. For a useful report, see Forrester crimps bloggers: epic E2.0 fail.

The Forrester stance reflects that made by the likes of the WSJ, Apple and some British football clubs. This emerging trend challenges head-on the advice provided by many so called social media gurus. One such example is Neville Hobson in the UK. He advocates making corporate communication personal, which was advice I dismissed in a recent debate with him: Corporate blogging: now it’s personal?

Meanwhile, David Cameron has ordered Conservative candidates to clear their remarks made on Twitter with head office. It would seem that keeping control of the message is top priority for the Conservatives, just as it is for most corporates.

Anyway, social media is not going to play a major role in the forthcoming UK election. An exception to that will be the sites of outsiders such as Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale, both of whom have a direct link to mainstream media and neither of which is constrained by party discipline. Curiously, whilst they’re great at dishing the dirt, neither is especially interesting on – as it were – political philosophy.

Another exception will be the BNP, which will hide out on the web because its members fear canvassing in public, and because it will not get a “fair” hearing in the mainstream media.

Meanwhile, Obama’s link to the social media world has been exposed as being just a one election campaign stand, rather than the ongoing relationship it was reported to have been. In short, Obama surfed a wave of enthusiasm that does not exist in the UK today, and which no longer exists in the US either.

Last, the Edelman’s 2010 trust survey provided some startling insights into a new and rapid trend reversal:

“Trust in information from friends and peers, “people like me,” dropped by 20 points, from 47 to 27 percent. Trust in information from digital media – blogs, social networks, and free content sources like Wikipedia or Google news – remains low: only between 11 percent and 22 percent of respondents express trust in information about companies from these sources.

To be fair, Edelman reports that trust in all media has fallen, but mainstream media, it would seem, is holding up much better than social media in the credibility stakes. In particular, business magazines are doing very well indeed when it comes to being trusted (here’s a useful summary from Silicon Valley Watcher).

Counter-intuitively, I think that all these trends reveal that social media is coming of age. I believe that we have learned a lot from a period of experimentation and false hopes over the last few years. Now all that remains is for some social media “gurus” to catch up with reality and to start giving sound advice to the corporate world.

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The report explored WikiLeaks’ claim to speak truth to power by pulling down the controlling, secretive barriers the establishment erects to protect itself. WikiLeaks uses zillions of ISPs to bounce leaks from whistle-blowers around the world leaving no way of tracing the originators.

This insurgent, trendy phenomenon has some impressive backers in the media world who endorse the idea that it’s good to leak. These include AP, the Los Angeles Times and The National Newspaper Association, according to WikiLeaks.

Perhaps they’re seeking novel ways to do investigative journalism in the face of cutbacks in budgets; a case of old media seeking new lifelines through new media. According to The National, “Wikileaks has probably produced more scoops in its short life than the Washington Post has in the past 30 years.”

WikiLeaks (ominously, in my view) is currently behind attempts to introduce legislation in Iceland to turn the island into an offshore “Switzerland of bits“, a safe haven for digital leaks. They’ve positioned it tantalizingly as a potential new business model for the bankrupt country.

Let’s unpick this and begin with the question: whatever happened to trust?

Is every leak a blow on a whistle that can justify itself in the public interest? Aren’t we supposed to want more trust in society? Does that exclude firms and official bodies hoping to trust their employees? How should we balance the tension between trust and the right to whistle-blow?

Well, as somebody who thinks that trust is vital to the functioning of a healthy society, I think the balance has to weigh – even positively favour - the right of institutions and individuals to keep things private, secret and confidential over the right of others to leak.

We have to trust that one another’s rights are going to be protected or we will destroy the bonds that make society function pleasantly and decently, not to say ethically and legally. Transparency has its place, but so does opacity. Reputations have a right to protection against defamation and they have the right to the benefit of the doubt when attacked, just as private property does.

We all have public, private and sometimes very separate other lives which would collapse like a house of cards if they were made transparent. Hence, the restraining arm of the law has a valuable role to play when it comes to protecting our collective freedoms.

That’s why as PR I have recently been on the side of gagging orders on behalf of John Terry, Tiger Woods, Trafigura and the British National Party membership list.

Very often, I have been glad that these issues are under the control of the courts, and very often I’ve found that the careful balancing of peoples’ competing human rights (to privacy, to free speech) are more sound than some giddy free-for-all masquerading as a crusade against censorship or for open-ness.

However, I accept it is a moot point whether the US justice system handles such matters better than does, say, the UK. But, whatever, I’m against a truly free press, just as I’m for democracy precisely because as well as protecting our freedoms, it limits them.

The UK Cabinet and any other organisation have a right to keep some things under wraps. They also have a right to expect that people they hire in any capacity will feel obliged not to betray them.

As a PR I know that the most embarrassing part of most crises is the behind-the-scenes highly-strung incompetence, panic and failure of leadership under pressure. My colleagues and I have always mediated that nonsense: that’s our job.

In a crisis the role of PRs is to keep the focus on the real issues the outside world cares about. Mostly, PRs put out fires which have little fuel but which generate lots of heat. But if ever we leak the detail of the inside insecurities we witness, the outcome becomes far worse than the original crisis warrants.

For instance, the problem at Three Mile Island was the stream of conscious transparency that the operators presented to the world as they grappled to grasp what had gone on inside their malfunctioning reactor. That was the very opposite of a cover up.

So it is no wonder, then, that governments want and should have the right to keep much of their inner workings secret. The same should go for companies and individuals. Moreover, at the heart of any profession is a lack of transparency – call it client confidentiality – which makes them honourable and trustworthy. Lots of people can do good, but not if what they say is leaked. As a list of such types, let’s begin with PRs, lawyers, priests, doctors, consultants and therapists. I don’t mean that every confidence accepted by every one of those is of equal importance and equally inviolate. I mean that very often what these people know is useful because it’s private.

That’s why WikiLeaks is bad news. It is why I am pleased that it is currently so short of funds that it cannot function properly. And it is why I think that it would be in society’s interest to curb the power and effectiveness of this new threat.

At the end of the day, society has more right to keep its secrets secret, than does WikiLeaks have a right to wreak havoc, and to keep its sources hidden while doing so.

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PR Week reports that up to 100 Lib Dems are set to convene at the end of this month to figure out ways in which the party can improve its internet communications. It seems the Lib Dems want to obtain a louder voice on the web than their Labour rival Derek Draper and Tory Iain Dale. But it is the racist BNP which is eclipsing them all online.

BNP is currently the number one political hit on the web in the UK. They’re followed by Guido Fawkes’ blog which ranks as 84,182 most hit website worldwide, and by Iain Dale who has a traffic ranking of 100,289. Neither blog matches the BNP’s “UK political-chart-topping” position of 48,382, according to traffic ratings agency Alexa.

Britain’s mainstream political parties lag further still behind the BNP in terms of popularity online (see graphics below). The supposition is that the internet has been neglected by the official party machines. They might have created websites, but they never attracted an audience with which to interact.

The dirty little truth here may be that the web is not crucial to mainstream retail politics. After all, the successful “Conservative” sites are unofficial to a degree. They appeal to a Private Eye sort of market (the “Wannabe Insider”) and the obsessive pol rather than to the routine undecided marginal voter. They are not a model for the mainstream, “official” parties.

Moreover, as Rachel Sylvester has hilariously pointed out in The Times, some of the recent interventions on the web by the mainstream political establishment have been embarrassing. For instance, Derek Draper has just been suspended from Twitter for inappropriate usage. (There’s an amusing report on this from Iain Dale here.) And was John Prescott really the right person to lead Labour’s charge on the mainly teenage Facebook; or was it that he was the only senior figure willing to give it a go? Politicians do need a measure of gravitas, and that peculiar beast may leak away online.

Confronting the BNP online’s presence may be very difficult. But this is because the BNP can resort to dog-whistles and nudges-and-winks and general dissembling in a way which can’t be matched by mainstream parties.

It’s certainly a real problem. One fallout from the recession is that more and more unemployed people have time on their hands and access to the internet. Sections of this constituency, including Chav-town Dagenham-man (employed as well as unemployed), feels that the “traditional” white working class has been bypassed. It should be no surprise that the BNP has tried to pander to such sentiments.

One of the major concerns of this audience is immigration.

Thank goodness, the mainstream debate is now free of racism. Policy itself is daring to be slightly less permissive. Where that “tightening up” will end up, and whether it will leave a big rump of angry refuseniks is important, of course. Will the mainstream leave a large pond for the BNP to fish in?

The good news is that though the party is as unpleasant as ever, most casual BNP supporters are not hardline racist bigots any more than are the rest of Britain’s population. Most of them are not racist at all: rather, they are angry about their recent experience.They could probably be brought back into the mainstream.

But the mainstream policy shifts which might achieve this probably won’t need a specially online approach. Remember, the online world has an element of the Samizdat about it: it is somehow slightly forbidden. That mood inherently appeals to the BNP because for good reasons and bad, its messages aren’t much heard on the mainstream media but are always faintly and deliberately paranoid.

So in this most important case, the mainstream parties can win this and other battles out in the open – and the BNP can’t easily win the battle, however well it uses the web for which it is so well suited.

I am of course very keen that the mainstream use the internet as best they can. But they ought to use the web in a good, richly informative way. Success online, just as it is offline, is about communicating the right messages in the right format in the right place to the audiences which inhabit the online space. For more on this I recommend Stuart Bruce’s PR blog here, on which he usefully challenges the blogging glitterati’s obsession with social media netiquette.

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Let’s just listen to the counsel PR 2.0 blogger James Warren provides firms in his PR Week Digital PR Essay: contrariwise.

The second idea I want to talk about is again straightforward. But if followed to the letter, it will ensure that the design and tactical execution of any digital activity is optimized for success. And it is, very simply: Be Nice.

While it sounds trite, those businesses that adopt the attributes of niceness when communicating online can only succeed. A few months ago I wrote on my blog: : “…if you’re generous with your time, are courteous, listen, don’t interrupt, help people achieve what they want to achieve and make people smile – in short, if you’re nice – then people will want to hang out with you and they’ll want to introduce you to their mates.”

Any organization that demonstrates the attributes of niceness online – those that run online campaigns that are inclusive, non-judgmental, even-handed, polite, respectful, courteous, humorous, empowering, supportive, interesting and engaging – will be infinitely better placed to succeed than an organization that doesn’t. After all, it’s not not called antisocial media for nothing.

James Warren confuses two things: attracting mates online, and running campaigns. First let’s examine the social side of networking.

Relationships and communities are built on bonds of self-interest, reciprocation, identification and shared experiences. Communities by their nature are rarely inclusive, they have boundaries, just like brands, fashions and all worthwhile relationships do. Niceness, while not to be sniffed at, is rarely at the heart of them, on- or off-line. Allow me to bring this point to life by introducing into the mix a campaign element involving a company or affiliation.

Viewers don’t share NBC’s Saturday Night Live content online because it’s nice. The online Apple community was orginially organised in opposition to PC owners. For both networks of fans it was the judgmental tension that got them motivated. My father is a Millwall FC shareholder, I support West Ham. The conflict over that difference is sharp, and great fun.

The most read interactive political website in the UK is the British National Party’s. The party and its supporters are the very opposite of inclusive.

Moreover, The Sun, The Times and WSJ do not attract readers by being friendly to all, neither does The Huffingdon Post.

James Warren and many others are also wrong to infer that mainstream media are “anti-social”. All media by definition are social. That’s why the fourth estate has real power, real influence in the real world whether online or off. At some point the term “social” will be dropped, just like the “e” in “e-commerce” already has been (digital convergence will ensure this, I’m sure).

By the way, I do of course think that in some sense all communications and even arguments ought to be “nice”. This is especially true of communications which involve strangers. One can afford to be very impolite – downright rude – only to those who one knows well or who one has decided deserve it. But it is always a risk.

I don’t want an anodyne niceness. I know nice can sell. Sometimes. Of course it can. We’ve all viewed attractive holiday advertisements, contacted self-help groups or been touched by viral video clips of a dog mothering kittens, or a baby horse raised by a goat: everything has its place.

Indeed, too much online communication is childish, not least in its intemperance. The web badly needs a bit more courtesy, especially granted its phony intimacy.

Rudeness has a role in many communications, but not all. My larger point is that proper communication is often about quite sharp differences, and it’s best done with civility.

Actually, I rather liked the rest of what James Warren said in his essay about inline communication. But this blog is not designed to be a fanzine. I hope, then, that I can still share a civilized pint with him at some point. That would be nice.

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When my blood’s up, I have to remind myself to be pro-British and not anti-German. Germany’s at least as nice a place as Switzerland or my own beloved England. Indeed, after reading English news of late, Continental virtues (Swiss, German or any other) can seem quite worthwhile.

Anyway, I’m richly varied. I once fell into the folly of being far left. My reasoning of thirty years ago flooded back to me after seeing news of England’s shame in the form of the BNP – neatly put in perspective by David Aaronovitch. I’m from Dagenham and Romford, white heartland of NF and BNP lumpens. I opposed them in my youth when I used to push fruit & veg barrows on Wentworth Street and Romford markets. My mates were a mixed crowd, and a target of hate. I still despise neo-fascists today. And I do mean “despise”: a sort of visceral loathing that isn’t polite.

And there’s the point: I want to stop the BNP, but my hating them doesn’t help me or hurt them. Time to move on.

But I couldn’t resist sharing this Ian Dury classic. It’s a white and indigenous ditty, by chance. It’s somehow the best of patriotism without the worst. The words and humour of Ian Dury’s Blockheads helped define the spirit of my East End gang. While we were all in Victoria Park on 30th April 1978 to hear Tom Robinson, The Clash, Steel Pulse and others say no to racism, Ian Dury was our local hero, not them. So, for all my Dagenham-mates against the BNP, here goes Ian Dury:

There are jewels in the crown of England’s glory (England’s glory)
And every jewel shines a thousand ways

Frankie Howerd, Noël Coward and garden gnomes
Frankie Vaughan, Kenneth Horne, Sherlock Holmes
Monty, Biggles and Old King Cole
In the pink or on the dole
Oliver Twist and Long John Silver
Captain Cook and Nelly Dean
Enid Blyton, Gilbert Harding
Malcolm Sargeant, Graham Greene (Graham Greene)

All the jewels in the crown of England’s glory (England’s glory)
Too numerous to mention, but a few (but a few)
And every one could tell a different story (different story)
And show old England’s glory something new

Nice bit of kipper and Jack the Ripper and Upton Park
Gracie, Cilla, Maxie Miller, Petula Clark
Winkles, Woodbines, Walnut Whips
Vera Lynn and Stafford Cripps
Lady Chatterley, Muffin the Mule
Winston Churchill, Robin Hood
Beatrix Potter, Baden-Powell
Beecham’s powders, Yorkshire pud (Yorkshire pud)

Billy Bunter, Jane Austen
Ray Ellington, George Formby
Billy Fury, Little Titch
Uncle Mac, Mr. Pastry and all
Uncle Mac, Mr. Pastry and all

All the jewels in the crown of England’s glory (England’s glory)
Too numerous to mention, but a few (but a few)
And every one could tell a different story (different story)
And show old England’s glory something new

Somerset Maugham, top of the form and the Boys’ Brigade (England’s glory)
Mortimer Wheeler, Christine Keeler and the Board of Trade (England’s glory)
Henry Cooper, Mighty Strangler, England’s labour (England’s glory)
Standard Vanguard, spotted dick, England’s workers (England’s glory)

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