Waltzing Matilda

OK, so I haven’t been super good at writing here lately. Those of you who follow Bert and me on Twitter and Yammer (internal comms experiment) will know that we have been drafting guidelines for use of social media for ages and obviously can’t say much about them before the ink of the signatures has dried.  But we hope to have news for you soon. We’ve also been doing lots of training sessions and are now working on building a facebook page for the Commission. Obviously it is a work in progress, but our idea is to manage it in cooperation with colleagues across DGs to ensure that it becomes more of a meeting place than ‘just’ a relay for redistribution of web content.

In the meantime, I have been wanting to reflect a little bit on the use of social media for events, because I have been going to a lot of events lately, both internally and externally (such as ButterflyEurope, Club of Venice, Toute l’Europe’s social media debate, EuroPCom etc.), and I have made a few observations that I hope you will comment on.

This is not an attempt to criticize, but rather to find out what we can learn from past events. Obviously the events I participate in are mainly about new media, so they are populated by the more sophisticated users who have high demands to technical infrastructure, but I think that it is worth taking the time to think of how we (can) use them for our own events in the EU institutions. The average EU event is usually not about social media, but that is no reason why we could not use them to expand the discussion to remote audiences with an interest in the topics that are being discussed.

EPSO: Webcasting
I noticed recently that our recruitment agency EPSO did a live webcast of a conference for potential candidates to become EU officials – introduction to life as a eurocrat and how the application procedure works. People could log on to watch the streaming here (someone please correct me if I’m wrong), and they were taking questions both from the audience in the conference room AND from Twitter, where you asked it by including a specific hashtag in your tweet to @EU_Careers. The online team continued to reply to questions after the event had finished, which I think was a really good way to handle it! The only problem was in my opinion that the event was published on Facebook and the fans there are not necessarily familiar with Twitter, so were not able to ask questions. You can check the stream of comments here. By the way, still waiting for the recording to be published on the EPSO website ;o)

Club of Venice: Chatham House Rules vs Tweetwall: 0-1
The Club of Venice is an interesting collection of heads of communication from across EU institutions and European countries. They have been doing some dedicated workshops lately on “Web 2.0, Web 3.0 and social media” where Bert and I have been invited as speakers and participants. The meeting is an informal gathering and operates under the so-called Chatham House Rule, where you have the ground rule that nothing you say can be quoted outside the walls of the meeting room. Combining this with WIFI and a tweetwall in the meeting room and asking people to discuss the topics gave a bit of a weird result and quite a few comments from people listening in from the outside. Here you can find the tweets that were sent on the day with the hashtag #socialmediaseminar (you have to browse the tweets via the timeline on the top right corner).

Social Media Week in Paris: Live tweeting but no WIFI?
On the 10th of February, Dana and I went to Paris for three reasons; to meet our counterparts in OECD, to participate in the event organised by Toute l’Europe: “Can social media counter the democratic deficit?” and finally also to show our faces in the Francophone blogosphere, where a lot of stuff is going on but where we sometimes forget to look and listen because the language of internet tends to be English. The event was an interesting setup, there were a couple of MEPs,  a professor from Lyon University, and two bloggers, who had a lively discussion among themselves and with a few members of the audience.

Although I’d personnally be more interested in getting a better understanding of what people were expecting from an institutional level, the discussions on the relation between elected politicians and their “online constituencies” was also interesting. However, there was again a bit of  a technical hickup. The event took place underground in a cinema in the Goethe Institut in Paris, so there was no 3G connection and there was no WIFI to compensate for it. So even though Toute l’Europe were tweeting for the outside, the inside had little or no way of participating in the conversation. That was a bit of a pity, because I often use the discussions at events to find new ‘victims’ to follow ;o)

EuroPCom: Community building without a common platform?
For the EuroPCom conference in October, the technical infrastructure was in place. The WIFI was excellent, and there was even a predefined hashtag - but the interaction from the participants was relatively meager. I guess it is to be expected when you bring together 400 communicators from local or regional authorities that they generally do not use Twitter to communicate with their audiences (we use it mainly for B2B communication),  but also the attempt to create a forum for the participants seems to not really leave ground. Top scoring country is Belgium with 15 members, and I wonder if you can even expect of local communicators that they would invest time and energy in having professional discussions in languages other than their own?

I can’t figure this one out, but I wonder what it takes to make these people talk and how much it is actually needed. For my own country, I saw that all the Danes took the opportunity to network with each other – they probably don’t see each other much anyway, coming from different parts of the country. But anyways, what do you do with an audience that seems to be unwilling to participate?

On that note, I am looking forward to your reactions and thoughts!

//Anne

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