The Dutch MoD Youtubechannel : WRONG!

The Dutch military shares professionaly made video’s on their own youtube channel. Great! But they still dont get that when it comes to warfootage, its the personal, firstperson accounts that attract most visitors online.

The most viewed video on the channel is a helmetcam video of an oiltanker being boarded by Dutch marines in the Gulf of Aden last year. It has more than half a million views, which is a lot, compared to the second most popular video of a singing soldier. He got only 60.000 views.

April 2nd another ship stacked with gunblazing, deathwishing evil incarnate somali pirates was boarded in the same area by HMS Tromp. This video shows real footage as well. Again, within three weeks it got more than 20.000 views to this date. That is much more than any other video uploaded in the same period.

So its pretty clear that these video’s attract the most visitors. If the Dutch defence department wants to attract more people to share their own stories online, they must accept that more helmetcam video is needed. Give your soldiers videocamera’s, or better, let them use their own. It will help you grow an audience and reach the goal as was stated in the ‘marketing plan’ for the Uruzgan mission. This plan was based on the assumption that better understanding will lead to more support for the mision. In short ‘Support through understanding’ will grow when people see what happens. This is ofcourse what defence allows to be seen, but it helps. 

It does not help to use youtube as an online platform for official statements by boring officers. Thats not what youtube is about, and it surely is not something that helps selling your side of the story. 

Then again, maybe the people at public affairs have a different agenda. 

A paper one, probably.

Attack is the best defence.

In a presentation i did a few weeks ago on a military base, i spoke about the use of  youtube by the Dutch military as a weapon to influence public opinion.

In my view, that social media is being used is great, but it can be used better. One of the remarks i made in this presentation was that the first person perspective of the more controversial subjects, such as missions abroad, is completely missing. The only thing you see is dull officers telling dull stuff about people digging holes to bring democracy. or something.

Sorry for being cynical, but social media is all about the dialogue. Thats two-way, not just sending a message.  Thats why it is called ‘social’ media.
And by using Youtube in a traditional, one way manner you are telling the audience: we dont give a rats ass about your opinion, just watch and shut up. 

This contradicts with what people want when using social media produced by defence. When looking at the views and popularity of video’s, one excells. Its the boarding by marines of HMS Tromp. A traditional video, with some highranking guy telling stuff about the mission, but he uses first person helmetcam video to illustrate his little talk.

And guess what? more than half a million views and voted most populair (next video scores 50000 something views, thats 10%!

And what does defence learn from all this ready to eat information ? uhm, ‘nuttin? Right! nothing! Same old boring propaganda and information about , well, nothing really important. Stuff like graduating soldiers, marching soldiers and soldiers inspecting dikes. -pun intended-.

Twitter is just the same! Sending, no discussion.  Only couple of following. And fairly small amount of followers. Why? people dont get what the expect, they dont read every spammail either. So its okay on the side, but thats that. 

I hate it when defence does this, because i KNOW that the people behind this activity are working hard to make the most of social media as a new way of reaching an audience. But they are doing it wrong. I’m not making this stuff up, it shows in the traffic the military social media sites generate. This can grow if they start making some changes in their social media policies.

Therefore, i advised the military in my presentation to do linger a while over the following things:

• social media is on the rise as a primary news source.
• people go to social media to be informed in another way than on TV
• nowadays, people want to hear personal stories in media
• social media is the perfect tool for telling those individual personal stories. -easy, accesible, little restrictions-
• these personal stories can brigde the gap between boring official abstract stories about the nations reasons to do things, such as going to afghanistan, and the personal accounts of people going there
• So more ‘helmetcam’ video’s will raise traffic to your defence site -proven fact!-and will raise the possibilities of reaching people with your stories -helmetcam can be cellphone video or blogposts as well, whatever suits the need-
• And, i told this before, the military does not have to be scared to loosen up on soldiers using social media. they are the ideal spokespersons and eager to tell their story
• This is a win-win situation, the military gets more traffic to their stories, the soldiers can finally tell their own story instead of some guy back in the office telling abstract stuff in technospeak and the audience gets what they are looking for on social media.

Necessary
In the Netherlands, the relationship between society and the military is strained. People  are always questioning the necessity of a strong military and if politicians want to score, they cut the defence budget. In order to tell their story, the military MUST do the best they can in using every option to reach out to others telling their story about what they do and why they do stuff. Especcialy when it comes to hot items, such as military missions abroad. And guess what? the military is NOT doing that. Dud.

Social media is the perfect channel for reaching an audience. So please dutch public affairs people, get your stuff together. Sometimes attack is the best defence. Get you images out as fast as possible, to as many people as possible. And reaching more people will only happen if you give the people what the want: More personal stories, more simple explanations of controversial subjects and most important: a dialogue! do a bloggers roundtable, hire a content manager who can serve as an online spokesperson. Just do something,

 This will raise traffic, more people will follow Twitter, visit youtube and spread the message.