As a PR consultant who is also a politician I'm interested in Change This, the latest venture by permission marketing guru Seth Godin. The idea is to create a forum or network to distribute ideas that challenge or change the way people do things. It appears to deal with everything from business to politics to science and culture. It's early days but there is an interesting list of people already signed up to contribute - Donna Brazille (Al Gore's campaign manager), Tom Peters and Seth Godin himself.

At the moment I'm doing a lot of work and thinking about permission campaigning. It's an extension of permission marketing  and I see it as way of combatting the trend of low turnout and increasing disengagement from politics and civic involvement. There is a connection between people retreating into their homes and getting their entertainment from DVD and PlayStations and people not voting in elections.

Peter Mandelson, the British Labour Party's campaign supremo and now a European Commissioner, says that The British Labour Party won the 1997 election by fighting and winning an 'aerial war'. It dominated the broadcast media and newspapers and fought to get its message across. The strategy was highly successful and crippled the ruling Conservative government.

I believe that now we need to fight and win a different war. The ground war. This is where permission campaigning comes in. Seth Godin argues that traditional advertising is intrusive and interrupts the potential customer, which perhaps is the best way to win friends and influence people. Better says Seth to ask people's permission and ask them to participate in surveys, visit a web site or share a viral email with their friends.

I believe that we can use permission campaigning to re-engage with the electorate. That's what Labour's Big Conversation was about. Listening and understanding the concerns of different individuals and groups in society. The traditional campaigning cycle of periods of relevant inactivy punctuated by frenzied campaigning at election times is no longer good enough. Neither can political parties use a top down approach and fight an aerial war with the same campaign cascaded down to be used in the ground war.

Permission campaigning needs to use a local approach based on the needs of different communities. It develops local word of mouth networks and creates advocates amongst key opinion formers and stakeholders. It uses opt-in email and text messaging so people can choose to find out and become involved in what's happening in their community.

The work we're doing at NetworxPR at the moment isn't just about developing new permission campaigning strategies for use by political parties. The principles and techniques are equally applicable to the whole plethora of different public sector organisations that are involved in engaging with the communities and customers that they serve such as elections for the boards of foundation hospitals, New Deal for Communities and arms length management organisations for social housing.