Her Royal Netness: Buckingham Palace Tries Communications with Subjects via YouTube - As the Subjects Talk Back

 AP covers the British royal family's decision to make videos of their speeches and activities available on the YouTube online video service via their own branded channel. In addition to being able to watch the lively life of Prince Charles in action, garden parties and banquets one can enjoy the featured video of Queen Elizabeth II's first television broadcast of her traditional Christmas Message in 1957. It's actually a very interesting clip to watch in that it demonstrates the combination of conservatism and progressive thinking that embodies this new YouTube venture as much as that earlier broadcast.

The 1957 broadcast is notable for the Queen's efforts to try to reach out to her subjects in their homes. She notes that "my own family often gather 'round to watch television," hoping that "this new medium will make my message more personal and more direct." Given that television was just reaching the point of being in more homes than radio-only households and was still striving for complete coverage of the nation this was a well-timed move, demonstrating progressive communications at a time when television's emerging dominance was well assured. 

The arrival of YouTube video from the British royal family comes with somewhat similar timing but with greater ironies. About 61 percent of British households now have high-speed Internet access, a bit past the 50/50 tipping point but given that high-quality online video is a fairly recent widespread phenomenon it's indicative of how quickly online user-generated video is being perceived at being at a tipping point of sorts. But where the 1957 broadcast tried to give the impression that the royals were in love with the new "telly" technology, there's no pretense that the royals themselves love to gather 'round and download. The Royal Channel is a PR channel, plain and simple, and a fairly tightly controlled one at that. Key community features such as embedding videos or commenting on them have been disabled, though one can find these videos via the main YouTube search engine. So though the royals are rubbing shoulders with the commoners in a general sense, it's still at rather a distance.

The problem with "going native" with online video from heads of state becomes more apparent when one uses the YouTube search engine to try to locate the new site. Type in "The Royal Channel" and the 1957 broadcast comes up on top in the search, but the rest of the results are filled with videos from just plain folks - as well as a cutting parody of The Royal Channel. Well, in the era of search engines that don't discriminate between popularity that one may want and popularity that's not at all on one's own agenda that's going to be par for the course.

This is an interesting example of the problems that authority figures experience in communicating online. On the one hand they try to limit feedback and interaction with audiences so as to control their message tightly, but on the other hand they know that their message suffers to some degree from that very isolation. To develop public relations that require actual relations with the public on a highly interactive level is generally limited to shaking hands in a receiving line. What to to when one posts less-than-complementary comments on your video?

Yet it takes that kind of interaction to develop online content that engages audiences the most. People are in general willing to accept that leaders in public life are a different kind of community member, but it appears as if those public figures who can engage their audiences in the most conversational manner possible gain significant respect and support for their efforts. After generations of controlling their message tightly through centralized media, leaders of our societies are going to have to adapt to a new era in which leadership is yet again more dependent on being able to converse with everyday people. In democratic nations we see these types of conversations on a periodic basis during elections in highly controlled circumstances, but social media is inviting our leaders to engage in a more permanent conversation with the public stripped of pretense, positioning and pomp.