Waltzing Matilda

This is just a short post to notify all of you that we have started the process of getting the spokespersons of the European Commission on Twitter so they can connect with journalists, media and interest organisations.

The first people to start tweeting are the Planning and Coordination unit. We have done a training for them on Friday 23 October and the last few days I have been back and forth between Madou and Berlaymont to help them get all their accounts up and running with URL shortening, smartphones and desktop connections. But now they are out there!

They will be tweeting official ”Barroso” messages from the account @EU_Commission, but it is the aim that as many as possible get on twitter with their own accounts. We have created a naming convention so they will be using @ECspokesFirstname as their Twitter handles.

The first accounts to go live are:

@ECspokesKoen – Head of the Spokespersons’ Service
@ECspokesPia – Spokeswoman for the Commission
@ECspokesMichael - Michael Karnitschnig, spokesperson, Planning and Coordination unit
@ECspokesMark - Mark Gray, advisor to the head of service
@ECspokesLeonor, Leonor Ribeiro, deputy spokeswoman attached to the President
@ECspokesCezary, Cezary Lewanowicz, spokesperson, Planning and Coordination unit
@ECspokesJens, Jens Mester, spokesperson, Planning and Coordination unit

You can find a full list of the Spokespersons’ service here while we dig out photos for their accounts.

More to follow! And be nice to them ;oD

//Anne

Added 15 November:
@ECspokesMyriam, Myriam Sochacki, spokesperson, Planning and Coordination unit.
@ECspokesRoger, Roger Waite, Spokesperson for Agriculture.

Added 22 November:
@ECspokesAmadeu, Amadeu Alfaj, Spokesperson for Economic and Monetary Affairs.

Added 3 December:
@ECspokesFerran, Ferran Tarradellas, Spokesperson for International Cooperation, Humanitarian Aid & Crisis Response

Update Jan. 2012:
To find Spokespeople on Twitter, please see this Twitter list.

Number of views: 11589

On 6 May the Communication Unit of the Directorate General for Human Resources hosted a workshop for our colleagues working with internal communication; mostly communication officers and intranet editors, but also some HR and training officers. The aim was to promote greater awareness of the potential for using social media in communication work, and to get colleagues to look together at the pros and cons and practical issues together.

The workshop was organised into smaller groups after the world café principle (short discussion with one person taking notes, continue discussion with a new group, write positive and negative aspects on cards, then sort cards into categories in plenary). This might seem a little too social for some, but it is a surprisingly good method that both makes people open up and ensures that the outcome can be harvested in a useful format.

There were two main questions to be discussed during the morning’s activities:

1. Why should staff  get involved in social media as Commission representatives?

2. What do you recommend to staff when engaging with social media in the context of the Commission?

Bert and I were mainly there to listen, so I sat down with a group and tried not to influence the conversation but instead acted as the note-taker. It was very interesting to meet our audience on the inside of the house and hear for ourselves what their concerns are. The photographer got me sitting on the floor:

Anne sitting on the floor taking notes while colleagues discuss. Copyright: EC

Why should staff get involved in social media as Commission representatives?

For the first question there were loads of both pro’s and con’s. On the positive side there were the fact that social media are tools to actually connect, listen and engage with citizens, interest groups, professional communities etc., which would be appreciated by many colleagues. This could improve the human face of the Commission.

It was also noted that we could be much faster at responding to crisis situations or address attacks or misleading information on forums, blogs and news sites. Many people also said that it is much easier to target your audience through social media platforms because of the many communities.

One of the main negative issues coming up was whether or not staff were at all allowed to go on social media on behalf of the Commission, and whether this is something we should prioritise as a public organisation:

• Low awareness of the ‘rules’
• Capacity (do we have the skills/manpower?)
• Legal issues/trust (management needs to trust colleagues)
• Time consuming (not recognised as “real work” in bureaucracy)
• Risk of information overload (lack of control, too many publishing too much)
• Risk of oversimplifying complex issues

Professional vs. private?

Then there is the issue of whether our colleagues want to “give up” their ‘private sphere’. Obviously many colleagues have a private Facebook account for example, but do they want to use it as a set of speakers for their employer? Of course not – which I can totally relate to. I think I’d soon be friendless in that case.

However, many colleagues seem to have the impression that when we say staff should be Commission ambassadors on social media, that’s what they would be doing. That work activity would invade their private circles. I think that is a misconception, which we need to correct. And we should make it clearer for them where and when it is appropriate to use social media as a work tool.

Recommendations to staff when engaging with social media in the context of the Commission

I think the main lesson from this second exercise was “If you are on social media in a professional capacity, then be a professional”. Simple, but beautiful. The outcome of this session was very fruitful, so no need for me to paraphrase my brilliant colleagues any further:

DOs (for staff):

1. Talk about what you master/ Stick to your professional knowledge
2. If in doubt, consult/check; double check facts; be well briefed
3. Be honest; acknowledge different facts/arguments
4. Do it correctly: content, tone frequency; Use appropriate style & language; KISS; Be passionate (no Commission language)
5. Be careful and clarify your role
6. Get to know well the platform before you take part in it and the topics there
7. Be ready to invest time on it
8. Be selective (monitoring)
9. Re-use/re-cycle content: LTT, IPs*, “Share it”
10. Only react to non-anonymous posts
11. Respect confidentiality
12. Tell your Head of Unit what is going on/ keep hierarchy in loop

Voting on the most important Dos and Don'ts with stickers. Copyright: EC

Some colleagues felt the rules were unclear. Copyright: EC

DON’Ts (for staff)

1. Don’t do it before you are ready! 
2. Never depart from the official Commission line!  
3. Don’t give personal opinions – try to stick to facts! 
4. Don’t get involved in personal arguments! 
5. Don’t be afraid! 
6. Don’t reply to issues that are not related to your job! 
7. Don’t use jargon!
8. Be willing to delegate!
9. Give a line to take!
10. Ensure proper communication training for subject experts!
11. Understand! Support!

Guidelines for managers:

1. Trust staff!
2. Treat people like adults! (rules exist)
3. Have guidelines!

* The only thing I have some difficulties with is sharing LTTs (Lines To Take i.e. background notes addressing a certain press issue) and IPs (Press Releases) via social media, especially to the general public. Although we do spend a lot of time and effort on writing long and correct press releases and background notes, they are rarely suited for normal people of the general public.

But if you are a policy officer who has for instance many Twitter contacts in a specific field and a relevant press release is being published, then it would definitely make sense to tweet it to that network and get valuable feedback. And they can very well be used as background papers for online interaction. 

What now?

The first thing we need to do together with HR is to frame the situation more clearly. Most of our colleagues would not be interested in going on social media anyway, but we should make the rules much clearer and start training those who will as soon as possible, so we get the issue de-mystified in the house (both on the ground and in our bosses’ offices).

Personally I think this is best done by telling the good stories, so we are going to launch a series of stories about different EU bodies using social media actively in their communication activities. We will publish them on our Commission intranet but we will also post them here to make sure we get lots of comments and suggestions from the outside.

Looking very much forward to your comments on this post! 

 //Anne

Number of views: 4257

Way back in early 1995, a bunch of mavericks in the European Commission started the Europa server. Mavericks, indeed, if you look back and see how it all started. We had Netscape as browser and I bought myself the first HTML editor for 10$!

It wasn’t until the end of 1999 that anyone above us (plus the lawyers) realised what we were doing. Y2K was a wake up call for many people, but also for those who made webpages of the European Commission. Life became a bit more serious and in 2001 we had our first official EUROPA strategy. It established the WWW as the corner stone of the communication strategy and devoted much more attention to multilingualism (i.e. as many EU languages as possible should be used on our websites).

Searching the web, I found EUROPA pages of 1996 for the Commission  and for the research department where I worked (called DG XII). Making webpages those days was easy, wasn’t it?

Getting information from a bureaucracy into the real web world in a meaningful way has remained an uphill struggle ever since. First of all, we produce documents that rival each other in length and obscurity, and secondly, we prefer to keep these documents to ourselves! Once we believe they can go out, we throw them out. Gerry McGovern talked about “put-it-uppers”. Yes, that’s what we did for many years.

As a result, the EUROPA server has, no doubt, the largest collection of bureaucratese literature but will never win a Nobel Prize (for peace or anything else!).

With the arrival of social media such as Facebook and Twitter, we entered Alice in Wonderland. For the first time in the history of the web it seems that the good old website and its homepage are no longer at the front door but rather in the back office. But “social” media are based on people and faces, aren’t they? And aren’t all bureaucrats by definition “faceless”?

Mia Garlick writes in her blog “The ‘Faceless Bureaucrat’ and Web 2.0”:

There are some inherent tensions between the practice of Web 2.0 and the practice of Government. Web 2.0 tends to be characterised by a sense of the personal, a sense of immediacy and a sense of informality. All these things mean that mistakes in the Web 2.0 world can and are made readily but are equally readily corrected, sometimes by the original contributor, sometimes by the crowd.

The practice of Government, on the other hand, tends to be the opposite of each of these things. Instead of being personal, we have the stereotype of the “faceless bureaucrat”. Instead of being immediate, Government announcements and actions can take a while to be forthcoming while all possible stakeholders are consulted and points of view are considered. Instead of being informal, Government-speak is quite formal with each word chosen very carefully. Government processes are set up to minimise, if not completely avoid, the chance of making a mistake.

If the mavericks that started the EUROPA server had been the ideal bureaucrats, I am sure it would never have seen the daylight! We made many mistakes (and still do), skipped procedures, went ahead, took risks and much more.

Much depended on individuals who were thinking and working “out of the box”. The Eurocontrol case shows again that you need brave individuals to get the ball rolling. So, let’s pull up our sleeves and get on it. Social media, here we come!

Dick Nieuwenhuis
Head of Section Electronic & Audiovisual Information
European Commission – External Relations

You can follow Dick on Twitter @dicknieuwenhuis or his own blog dicknieuwenhuis.wordpress.com.

Number of views: 2156