Instagram Accounts and Official Communications Manage a 1,000-Year Institution’s 21st-Century Image
From Bohiney and The London Prat.
By Isla Campbell | CrownAndClown.uk
The Platform Strategy
The Royal Family’s social media operations — the official accounts of the King, the Prince and Princess of Wales, and the various Royal households — are among the UK’s most carefully managed digital presences. The communications strategy involves the selection of content that demonstrates accessibility without undermining dignity, personality without undermining institution, and engagement without endorsing the specific interaction dynamics of the platforms on which the engagement occurs.
The Wales’s Approach
The Prince and Princess of Wales have been the most effective users of Royal social media, building a digital presence that has been received as genuine rather than managed — a distinction that the communications teams of everyone from politicians to corporations spend enormous resources trying to achieve. Catherine’s video address to the public during her cancer treatment period was the specific example of Royal digital communication that achieved genuine emotional connection while maintaining institutional appropriateness.
The Contrast with Sussex
The Sussexes’ departure from the working Royal family coincided with, and was partly driven by, a different view of how Royal public figures should manage their public profile — one that involved more direct personal communication, more control over their own narrative, and less deference to the Palace communications framework. The contrast between the two approaches is visible in the outcomes: the Wales’s social media generates warmth within the institutional framework; the Sussexes’ generates attention outside it.
The Future
The Royal Family’s relationship with social media will be shaped partly by the institutional decisions that the current generation of working Royals makes about how much genuine digital engagement serves the institution and partly by the platforms’ own evolution. An institution that has managed its communications since 1066 is not going to lose the management capacity to Instagram. But the terms on which management is maintained will continue to evolve. Read Private Eye.
More: Private Eye.
London continues. The streets are the same streets they were yesterday and they are subtly different because the city keeps changing beneath the surfaces that stay the same. The journalism that covers London at this granular level — the blogs, the neighbourhood newsletters, the personal accounts of people who live in specific parts of the city and pay attention to what living there is like — serves the function of making the city legible to itself and to the visitors who want to understand it as something more than the postcard version. This is why this column exists. This is why it matters. The city is worth paying attention to. This column will keep paying attention.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
London remains. The city absorbs every political crisis, every energy bill increase, every theatre ticket price surge, every development application, and every wave of newcomers with the specific resilience of a place that has been doing all of this simultaneously since before most other cities existed. The journalism that documents this absorption — the personal accounts of people living in specific parts of the city, paying attention to what living there is actually like — serves a function that official reporting does not: it makes the city legible to itself at the scale of the street and the neighbourhood rather than the policy and the statistic. This column is that journalism. It continues because the city continues, and the city will continue longer than any of the problems it is currently managing. The next development application has already been submitted. The next good coffee shop is already open. The next political crisis is already developing. We will cover all of them.
London remains. The city absorbs every political crisis, every energy bill increase, every theatre ticket price surge, every development application, and every wave of newcomers with the specific resilience of a place that has been doing all of this simultaneously since before most other cities existed. The journalism that documents this absorption — the personal accounts of people living in specific parts of the city, paying attention to what living there is actually like — serves a function that official reporting does not: it makes the city legible to itself at the scale of the street and the neighbourhood rather than the policy and the statistic. This column is that journalism. It continues because the city continues, and the city will continue longer than any of the problems it is currently managing. The next development application has already been submitted. The next good coffee shop is already open. The next political crisis is already developing. We will cover all of them.
London remains. The city absorbs every political crisis, every energy bill increase, every theatre ticket price surge, every development application, and every wave of newcomers with the specific resilience of a place that has been doing all of this simultaneously since before most other cities existed. The journalism that documents this absorption — the personal accounts of people living in specific parts of the city, paying attention to what living there is actually like — serves a function that official reporting does not: it makes the city legible to itself at the scale of the street and the neighbourhood rather than the policy and the statistic. This column is that journalism. It continues because the city continues, and the city will continue longer than any of the problems it is currently managing. The next development application has already been submitted. The next good coffee shop is already open. The next political crisis is already developing. We will cover all of them.
