Waltzing Matilda

A week ago my Norwegian friend Jonas posted a fantastic picture on my Facebook profile which completely cracked me up:

Iceland’s revenge: Translation for non-Scandinavians: “Leave €30 billion in the rubbish bin of the Icelandic Embassy tonight, and we’ll turn off the volcano! Don’t call the police!”

This prank ransom note was just a tiny drop in the ocean of social media responses to the ash cloud from the volcano eruption which kept all airplanes grounded for days. Although the above example is more to the funny side, there were certainly much more serious problems to be solved with millions of passengers stranded far away from home. Everybody was affected or knew someone who was stuck. So, what did the European Commission do about it?

What the Commission did

The European Commission indeed had an important role to play in this business:

• Although the EU does not control the European air space, we do have pretty restrictive rules protecting air passengers’ rights which were very relevant to all the passengers affected by the ash cloud.
• Since closure of air space is a national issue, the coordination effort between the EU countries to re-open the air space as soon as possible was to a high extent driven forward by the Commission.

So, we had two good EU actions, which both had a massive public interest. But on the other hand, we are not used to communicating directly with citizens. In the past, this was largely because we simply did not have the channels to communicate directly and bypass the traditional media outlets, but now we do. We just haven’t learned how to use them.

The way travellers dealt with the ash

In the havoc of the crisis, passengers immediately turned to social networks for help. Mainly Twitter streams and hashtags (#ashtag, #getmehome, etc.), but also facebook pages and a number of information sites emerged, and people in the same situation found a way to help each other get a ride home or get housing. It was amazing to see how people got organised in a relatively short time.

Luckily, Eurocontrol was twittering updates on the airspace situation, but unfortunately our press people didn’t participate in the exchange of information.

How EU communicators dealt with the ash

In a time of crisis we do what we usually do in this house; we mainly send out press releases and statements for the media and hold an extra meeting with the transport ministers, counting on the press – set in a national context – to bring our message to the public.

Our websites and crisis communication could probably be a lot more helpful to passengers who found themselves in a somewhat problematic situation. The air passenger rights page is currently the most informative web page we have on EUROPA (the EU’s website), but unfortunately it is not very helpful if you want to know whether you can claim a hotel room or not from your airline at 2AM in the morning.

Europe Direct (the Commission’s free call centre) received hundreds of calls from citizens who needed help and advice about passenger rights in the EU. But again, statements and press releases didn’t contain enough information on where to get help if your airline didn’t do what it should. Without the tools to enforce one’s rights, the rights themselves seem nonexistent.

On Tuesday 20 April, the Commission published an Ash Cloud FAQ press release, which surprised even me with the following sentence: “If it were NOT for European Commission intervention since the end of last week, large parts of Europe’s skies would still be unnecessarily closed.”

Great achievement! But why hide it in the middle of a press release?

Adding a citizen-centric communication angle

My theory is that due to the distribution channels we are focusing on our actions remain largely invisible to the public. In our communications we are addressing mainly the specialists and the press corps based in Brussels.

But the people who need us the most can still feel like the EU is doing nothing. So, how do you make your message stand out in the sea of information? Social platforms cannot replace a good website, but while improving the content on EUROPA, they might help us get the right content to the right audiences if we learn to use them well.

The question remains how to do it right. 

Posted by Anne

UPDATE 5 May: Council has published some information on Ashcloud lessons for the future!

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