Why haven't the Lib Dems learnt from Obama’s use of the internet?

The importance of the internet, and especially YouTube, in Barack Obama’s successful campaign in coming from nowhere to the presidency has been widely recognized (e.g. see here, or just type 'Obama's use of the internet' into Google).

Shortly after the foundation of the Liberal Democrats 21 years ago, they too were pretty much nowhere - it doesn't get much worse than 4% in the polls and 4th, after the Green Party in the Euro elections.

Then, as now, it was always difficult for the third party to get anything like parity in media coverage with the other two parties. But then there was no internet, whereas now there is.

Yet here we are, a whole week since the Liberal Democrat Spring Conference in Harrogate came to an end, and not a single speech from the leader, or anyone else at the conference, has appeared on YouTube. All there is to be seen of it is an amateurish looking video, complete with some awful background library music, that was apparently ‘shown … to introduce party leader Nick Clegg’s keynote speech’ (see here).

But you can't actually watch his keynote speech on YouTube, nor the speech by Vince Cable or anyone else who spoke at the conference.

Having worked with Paddy Ashdown in the early days of trying to get the new party off the ground, I know that we’d have given our eye teeth to have had access to something like YouTube back in 1988 (especially as there were hardly enough funds to pay for the first party political broadcast).

In December last year, there were press announcements that the LibDems had appointed a new ‘Director of Policy & Communications’ - which raises the questions of what he and his colleagues have been doing since then, and why they haven’t learnt the most obvious, simplest and cheapest lesson from the Obama campaign - i.e. about how to make the most of the internet.

If Bill Gates doesn't read bullet points from PowerPoint slides ...

I’ve just been watching a talk by Bill Gates on How I'm trying to change the world now - the full version of which can be seen HERE.

Unfortunately, his plans for changing the world don't seem to extend to instructing Microsoft to withdraw, or at least radically overhaul, their market-leading presentation software.

Apart from his subject matter (defeating malaria and improving the quality of teaching), there were three other things about his presentation that struck me as interesting.

1. Bill Gates knows better than to read bullet points from PowerPoint slides
Although he showed a few slides (mainly pictures, maps and graphs), he did not use any that consisted of long lists of bullet points, and therefore didn’t have to keep turning round and reading from them – like the vast majority of PowerPoint users I’ve seen over the years.

If the founder of Microsoft has no use for the opening templates PowerPoint offers to its users (i.e. headings and lists), why doesn't he have any qualms about allowing his company to make millions of dollars from giving millions of people the false impression that listing bullet points is a sure-fire route to making an effective presentation?

2. Bill Gates knows that some technologies can help teachers but not that others can hinder them
Although he singles out video and DVD as technologies that can help to improve the quality of teaching, he seems completely unaware that other technologies, (e.g. PowerPoint, electronic whiteboards, etc.) might be reducing the quality of teaching.

Again, isn’t it time he woke up to the fact that PowerPoint may have led thousands of teachers and lecturers down a blind alley that's leaving millions of students a year in a state of boredom and/or confusion?

3. Bill Gates knows that objects can be used as effective visual aids
Apart from the applause for his announcement that he was going to give everyone in the audience a free copy of a book, the most positive response came when he took the lid off a jar and pretended to release mosquitoes into the auditorium (see below).

This may be about as far away from relying on PowerPoint slides as you can get, but is a simple and effective form of visual aid (for more on which, see HERE where you can watch examples of the Archbishop of York and Barack Obama doing something similar).

If only Microsoft would preach what its founder practises, there might be a chance of saving the world from the ever-spreading epidemic of death by PowerPoint.

An imaginative innovation in a PowerPoint presentation?

In December, I reported on a meeting my wife had been to, at which there were some unscheduled PowerPoint presentations – see There’s nothing wrong with PowerPoint until there’s an audience

Yesterday, I made the mistake of going with her to another meeting of the same people at the same place.

You might think that a meeting of voluntary part-time stewards in a medieval bishop’s palace would be an unlikely venue for PowerPoint presentations, let alone that you’d see anything new in the way this latter-day scourge of audiences can be used. But you’d be wrong on both counts.

Our speaker’s imaginative innovation was not just to stand directly in front of the screen, but in front of the laptop and the projector as well – with her back to all the gadgets on which her presentation depended, as well as to all the people sitting on the front two or three rows.

This had two obvious consequences. One was that it was made it even more difficult than usual for her to find out what to say next (other than the fluent “Ers” and “Ums” that prefaced almost every sentence), as she had to turn round both to see the screens and to press the button on the laptop;

The other was that that her position a few metres in front of the middle of the screen prevented large swathes of the audience from seeing what was on the screen (even if they had wanted to).

Luckily for them and unluckily for everyone else, they weren’t missing much, as there was nothing to look other than lists of items in a multi-million pound plan for developing tourism at the palace.

Whether or not it counts as another innovation, our presenter’s choice of clothing – jeans with a top that exposed her rather unsightly naval – at least raised questions in our minds: was this a deliberate bid to look as different as possible from this smartly turned out late-middle aged, middle-class audience? Or was it just casual weekend attire that was being worn to remind us that she, unlike us, was having to work on a Sunday?

If nothing else, we learnt that it has yet to occur to anyone at the palace that it might be worth spending a small fraction of the millions of pounds in their budget on some presentation skills training for development officers (or an even smaller fraction on a copy of one of my books).

In any case, twenty minutes of this dire performance was more than enough to convince us that we were in for a repeat of the event reported on in December and that our time would be better spent by leaving in search of the cup of tea that had failed to materialise before the meeting started.

‘From Stalin to Mr Bean’: putting two parts of a contrast in the most effective order

In case anyone thinks that the last posting was intended as a criticism of Vince Cable’s rhetorical skill, I haven't forgotten that his most famous line came when, as acting leader of the Liberal Democrats, he produced a devastating contrast at Question Time in the House of Commons (see below).

If he had said that Mr Brown ‘had become more like Mr Bean than Stalin’, the contrast between a bumbling fool and an autocratic dictator would still have been there and would no doubt have raised a laugh or two.

But on that occasion, he got the order of the two parts of the contrast the right way round, and not only had a tremendous impact there and then, but also did his own longer term reputation no harm at all.

The line also inspired a purely visual representation of his point on you YouTube that can be seen HERE.

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How to improve impact by sequence, repetition and a rhetorical technique

In Vince Cable’s speech at the spring conference of the Liberal Democrats in Harrogate a couple of days ago, there was a sequence that would have been more effective had he (or his speechwriter) reversed the order in which he mentioned the two points, used repetition and packaged it as a contrast.

The line went as follows:

"Public companies should publish full pay package of all their highly paid employees [applause starts] as well as the directors."

You can see the sequence by looking here (1 minute, 25 seconds into the video), and will notice that the audience started applauding immediately after he said ‘employees’ and before he got to the key phrase ‘as well as the directors.'

As the current situation is that pay packages of directors already have to be published and Cable’s new/controversial point was that this should also apply to all highly paid employees, this would have worked better if the 'news' had come second rather than first.

It was also crying out to be turned into as a more explicit contrast between directors and other highly paid employees, with key words repeated, along the lines of the following:

"Public companies should not just publish the full pay package of their directors.
"They should publish the full pay package of all their highly paid employees."

Rhythmically and for adding emphasis, it would arguably have been improved further by making the second part of the contrast slightly longer, as in:

"They should publish the full pay package of each and every single one of their highly paid employees."

Either way, the applause would still have come immediately after the word ‘employees’, but it would have sounded more emphatic and there would have been no risk of the key point being drowned out by the applause.