Its all about how you Post It

I have always thought that being an MEP would be quite a good job once my PR career has come to an end. It comes with a nice salary, great expenses, generous and robust pension and a little European travel. Plus, nobody in the UK really knows what area your constituency covers, or really cares what you get up to. So if you can avoid getting caught fiddling your expenses it all looks rosy.

But as widely reported since Tuesday, Daniel Hannan, Conservative MEP for South East England, found himself at the centre of the news agenda after he posted a three minute speech he gave in the European Parliament in response to Gordon Brown on to You Tube and his Telegraph blog.

Whatever your politics, what is interesting from a PR point of view is that the mainstream media did not take up the speech when it was provided to them by Hannan but that 200,000+ people have watched the video online and it was also picked up by US (right-wing) media. This in turn has generated a huge amount of media interest and comment.

I appreciate that passionate and articulate political speeches are few and far between, but this one has really struck a chord and without the YouTube as a distribution platform would have remained a forgotten three minutes in Brussels.