Since hiring Mark Flanagan in a strategic move to boost Downing Street’s lagging digital comms, Parliament has been running a range of digital initiatives including a pilot YouTube channeland a twitter feed as part of an effort to embrace web 2.0. These initiatives have been met with hostility by bloggers and PROs according to PR Week, which reports the feeling in the online community to be “too little too late”. Digital channels such as twitter and YouTube have proven to be useful tools – Barack Obama famously used twitter to great effect in his recent campaign.
Indeed, following the recent launch of five short videos explaining the role of the House of Lords and encouraging young people to get involved in politics, blogger and Tech PR Nick Morriscommented that he was “just not convinced that the selection in this video are truly representative of the whole of the upper house”… a comment I’m inclined to agree with, but in terms of communicating what the House of Lords does in simple terms, it’s not half bad! Maddy Bower
