The Liberal Government's New Comms Strategy

I’ve written in the past about how tough it can be for governments to communicate to their citizens. There are so many channels through which communication happens and so many people pushing so many messages, that most voices are doomed to be ignored.

Sure, legacy broadcast media networks are always begging senior politicians and public officials for interviews. But who watches legacy broadcast media networks these days? And it’s not like there are a lot of people who wake up each morning excited to hear what their government will reveal today.

So it’ll hardly surprise you to hear that the federal Liberals recently turbo boosted their social media output. Over the past few weeks, I started noticing accounts belonging to the Prime Minister and some of his cabinet ministers appearing - over and over again - in my X (Twitter) feed. This despite the fact that I don’t subscribe to any of them.

I know that, right now, some of you are involuntarily visualizing Mark Carney tapping away on his smartphone while sitting on the bed in his Doha hotel room with some Netflix movie playing in the background on the TV. Well, remove that awful thought from your filthy mind at once. There is no universe in which Mark Carney composes his own tweets.

Say what you will about Donald Trump, but you just know his social media posts are organic. And they’re endlessly entertaining, too.

I THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTTENTION TO THIS MATTTR

Well no one ever accused the Liberal government of being entertaining:

That one just screams “Hey look! I was written by a very large committee that included multiple Privy Council Office lifers!”

Which is not disqualifying, of course. Governments have a legitimate need to communicate their policies and actions. And it’s not like typos are an objectively good thing. But let me just observe that copy like that feels closer to Soviet-era Pravda articles than Ernest Hemingway.

Ok. Literary criticism aside, how do I rate the effort in terms of effectiveness? Not well. Not well at all.

I’m assuming that the government’s primary objective here is to portray themselves as vigorously engaged in an energetic and forward-looking foreign policy agenda. They may have completely failed in their promises to handle Trump and restore our “special relationship” with the U.S., but just look at how successfully they’re building warm, new international relationships with…state sponsors of terrorism?

Still, I’ll admit that there is value in trying to share developments with as many Canadians as possible. And it’s not a crime to try to portray those developments in the best light possible.

So the next question has to be: is it having in impact? Yes. But perhaps not quite the way the folks in the Prime Minister’s Office had hoped. I’ll admit that I haven’t clicked on all that many official tweets, but every single tweet on which I did click shared something very obvious in common: at least the first few dozen comments were uniformly hostile.

Curiously, I’m not seeing all that many profane and ad hominem attacks. It’s mostly people expressing their disagreement and frustration. But lots of people. So many that, for one thread, I stopped counting well past 100. Here’s a tiny sampling:

And here’s another:

You may well encounter exceptions to this pattern. But I wasn’t able to find any recent post by the Prime Minister or his cabinet ministers with anything like a balance of supporters and opponents. It was nearly all opponents, nearly all the time.

Now it’s true that social media platforms are notoriously negative places. It would be unrealistic for high-profile politicians to think they were going to enjoy an easy time of it. But you’d think an account like Carney’s with a half million followers would attract some support. Anything.

It would have been helpful if I had used the X API to programmatically access those timelines and the associated account follower information to directly assess how much of all this activity is authentic and how much is the work of automated bots. Sadly, a Pro Tier developer account at X is just a bit too expensive for your modestly endowed correspondent.¹

What I can say is that what I’m seeing on those official accounts suggests desperation. Why would an organization that so passionately seeks to control the narrative willingly subject itself to repeated and sustained public attacks? What’s their realistic objective here? This doesn’t feel like the work of people who are particularly confident in their message and popularity.

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Read on…

1. In case you’re curious, the Pro tier goes for $5,000/month. If any subscribers already have access to an account…let’s talk.