Kroes: “Social media means talking with Europeans”
August 10, 2010
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In the past few months we have witnessed a significant increase in the number of European Commissioners present on various social media platforms. Since her blog was recently named the 10th most influential EU blog, we asked the European Commissioner for Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes to tell us about her use of social media.
When and why did you start using social media?
In 2008, when I was the Competition Commissioner, I started a kind of a blog. The idea was to point people to the latest important message we had on the financial crisis. It was quite limited. Only since taking on the Digital Agenda portfolio have I really started to see what is possible with social media. Now we have more of a dialogue with our followers.
Why am I so keen on social media? For a number of reasons. First of them is my motto “Every European Digital”. I can’t ask people to go online and then stay locked up in my office with paper files! I have to be there too. But most importantly, I am online to involve people in our Digital Agenda action plan. We need many partners to create businesses, jobs and ideas that will improve our everyday life. It’s important to have a conversation about how to do that. 
I can’t respond every time, but I do read what people post. I also highly appreciate that social media make my ideas available to a wider audience, including young people, people who can’t come to Brussels for a meeting, those who don’t read newspapers. And it’s great to learn about a new idea, a video or something else from my followers.
Which social media platforms do you use and what for?
Quite a few. I use WordPress for my blog. It is a great open software tool. As for social networks, the main two are my Twitter account and Facebook page. I also use Flickr for my photos and I have YouTube and Dailymotion channels. My video channels are not very popular yet – probably because we don’t make special videos for them. But why should my videos be reserved only for the audience at conferences where I speak? It takes only two minutes for my staff to upload them to these sites, and then everyone can see them.
During the summer my team will try to create my profile on Hyves, which is a Dutch site, and on Netlog which is Belgian.
You need to respect the way people use a site. Twitter is obviously more about policy, while Facebook is more social. You can’t offer everyone something new all the time. I try to keep it reasonable and if it is an important point, I make it on all my accounts on the same day.
Who is involved in your social media activities?
Fewer people than you think. I have Twitter and Facebook applications on my phone, so I can post directly. However, I often barely have time to look after more than one message, so I pass on an idea to one of my Cabinet members and they find the right links and so on to enable the post I have suggested. Also, many updates come out of ongoing work of DG Information Society and Media (DG INFSO). If we have a new video speech or a success, we share it on social media as we would with the traditional press.
After the summer it would be great to get more staff in the DG to send me ideas on what to blog about. In this sense it will become a much broader project.
And of course, the real value is when people re-tweet or forward a link about something I post. Then it goes crazy. Did you know that within a few minutes 100,000 people might have received the message? In this respect, my followers are directly involved.
How do social media relate to your website and DG INFSO websites?
More and more my Commissioner website is becoming a portal for my social media. If you look at it, very few of the pages are static. The homepage mostly sends you to my social media accounts, my favourite projects or the DG’s news feed.
At the moment my website and various DG INFSO websites are not very interrelated except that we often link to specific projects where there is some news. But that’s OK. In my portfolio I have a lot of outreach and horizontal leadership to do, but within the DG I am told that each team has a very specific set of stakeholders who they keep in touch with through their own websites. So, it can be useful to pitch our messages differently to different groups.
What do you see as main advantages and disadvantages of social media?
More Europeans are on social networking sites than they are subscribing to newspapers – so you need to follow people. Using social media means talking with Europeans instead of sitting up in an ivory tower. However, you only have 24 hours a day to live and work. I can’t spend my whole day reading tweets. Therefore, it’s important to keep one’s priorities straight. Get the job done and then tell the world about it, but don’t get distracted from doing the job in the first place!
What have you learned from using social media?
That we have some really clever guys and girls out there! Their innovations are amazing and I hope we can help more European entrepreneurs to be at the front of this field. Also, don’t take it personally if you get criticised. I get mostly positive responses, but there are some people you can never please. I listen but I don’t get upset when people disagree.
What are your social media plans for the future?
I will keep on doing it! Recently I heard that my blog was named one of the most influential EU blogs (in English). It came 10th on the list. In 2011, with the help of my team, I aim for number one!
Note for the readers: The study has been questioned for its methodology. If you are on Twitter, you can read the criticism of the study by the Eurobloggers under the hashtag #bbs10. You can download the PDF of the Brussels Blogger Study 2010, conducted by public affairs company Waggener Edstrom, here.
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August 10th, 2010 at 11:48 pm
To start with the last question and the note:
).
I think Eurogoblin has made quite a clear argument about the actual value of the euroblog ranking you quote: http://eurogoblin.eu/how-did-waggener-edstrom-get-it-so-wrong/
And regarding the third question:
Very few messages/links on Twitter actually ever really reach 100,000 people, especially not in an EU context. You can see that quite easily when you look at bit.ly click statistics. Take one of the last tweets of Ashton Kutcher, the most followed (or 2nd or 3rd) person on Twitter. One of his last tweets was this: http://twitter.com/aplusk/status/20762836203, and the number of clicks on the link in the tweet is here: http://bit.ly/9Fcr1m+ (just above 13,000 as of now, some 18h after it has been tweeted). And re-tweets are rarely that massive (i.e. the message rarely gets viral) so that you get a huge number of clicks, even if you add Facebook to it.
If you ever get several hundreds of clicks on a link shared on Twitter (unless you are one of the few twitter stars), you’ve been lucky, at least that’s what I’ve observed in the past (yet you may still reach out to the “right” people
Which makes me think of this recent study on Twitter influence: http://h30507.www3.hp.com/t5/Data-Central/What-makes-a-tweet-influential-New-HP-Labs-social-media-research/ba-p/81855
August 11th, 2010 at 11:18 am
Thanks for your comment, Ronny.
I have been following the discussion on the blogger study on Twitter and the blog you mention, and I agree that it is somewhat questionable. However, I would still use it to encourage commissioners to blog or use other social media to reach out. It shows that it is being noticed!
Thanks for the reality check on the numbers and the link to the HP study in Twitter influence. It looks very interesting – I will definitely share it with my colleagues!
//Anne
August 11th, 2010 at 10:54 pm
“Now we have more of a dialogue with our followers” – actually, no – because the blog doesn’t accept comments. Its one way traffic. The number of hits are miniscule anyway.
“ 100,000 people might have received the message..” Even if that were true – 100,000 out of some 500 million – that’s hardly saturation coverage. Neelie would be better off learning skywriting.
regards
geoff
August 12th, 2010 at 10:28 am
As someone involved in Kroes’ social media experimentation, I can say that we are very pleased with how it is going.
I think its important to keep the issues discussed here in perspective. Waggener Edstrom have never, I imagine, tried to sell themselves as academics – they are a consultancy trying to attract business and attention. Their study is no better or worse than many of the genre. In other words while Eurogoblin and others have valid points, I don’t think it is that surprising to learn them.
Regarding the number of people who may view a Twitter post – I don’t think click-through rates are the best benchmark. Many tweets don’t have links in the first place, and secondly the tweets are competing with, for example, attempts to place a story in the Financial Times, and not just Ashton Kutcher. So the relative efficiency of someone like Kroes making a popular tweet is high compared to all the effort involved in getting a story into a newspaper which most of the readers of that paper never read in detail anyway. Finally, the idea that 100,000 people is a drop in an ocean of 500 million is just bad thinking. On that basis Kroes and her team would never communicate – and no-one here would like that; 100,000 readers is any case many more readers than ANY of the blogs on the study previously mentioned. So we’d be very very happy to hit even that mark.
August 13th, 2010 at 12:46 am
Well actually Heathry its your logic thats skewed.
100,000 out of 500M IS a drop in the ocean – you can’t argue that – it scarcely even registers as a percentage. On that basis Neelie should do something better. She has access to vast amounts of our cash – so spend some on communicating effectively. Its about as close as the EU gets to democracy.
She could start by allowing responses to her blog.
regards
geoff
August 13th, 2010 at 9:02 pm
@Anne & Heathry
My remark regarding the blogger study was not meant as a critique to the Commissioner’s presence in the social media sphere. I just find it questionable that both Ms Kroes and the introduction to this post take on this ranking unquestioned, mentioning the company’s name and linking the study while it is clear that this is “a consultancy trying to attract business and attention” (quote Heathry) instead of a scientific analysis. Kroes is thus doing marketing for a private actor while everything that was said could have been said equally well without mentioning the study.
@ Heathry
Let me quote the Commissioner:
“the real value is when people re-tweet or forward a link about something I post. Then it goes crazy. Did you know that within a few minutes 100,000 people might have received the message?”
So the Commissioner refers to links herself, which is why I took it up. But in any case, if somebody with 5.5 million followers sends a message with a link (the Kutcher example), it is retweeted by 100+ persons on Twitter (see the statistics), and there are still only less than 15,000 clicks on the link as of now, this gives a pretty good impression about the amount of attention each tweet receives, even when it is heavily forwarded. It is thus unlikely that many messages will have been actually read “within in a few minutes” by 100,000 people. This is in particular relevant given that the Commissioner has less than 1/1000 of the followers of Kutcher by now.
But again, I’m not saying that these are just drops in the ocean. The Commissioner, with her almost 4,000 followers will very probably reach out to an audience that is pretty relevant for her field of activity, and reaching 4,000 (or even just 400) of the right people with a tweet is still better than missing them with a press release nobody will ever read.
In other words: I’m just saying the 100,000 remains pretty unrealistic, which doesn’t mean it’s useless to tweet.
August 16th, 2010 at 9:33 am
Dear Ronny,
Thanks for your remarks – I think you have made it very clear that 100.000 is a completely unrealistic figure, and that Twitter is much more about reaching the right people rather than the masses.
We from our part used the study as a hook for asking Kroes for the interview. We have linked to both the study and the eurobloggers’ discussion on Twitter so readers have access to the discussion/criticism, but we did not criticise the study directly here on the blog.
I have edited the note at the end of the blog post.
//Anne