Waltzing Matilda

How Facebook and YouTube will help the institutions to keep talking in 2020

Maroš Šefčovič, on the left, showing a promotional t-shirt of the DG “Interpretation”

The Commission’s interpreters use social media to raise awareness about the interpreting profession and encouraging young people to join to fill the gaps left after future massive retirements. Combining a Facebook page with YouTube video productions, presence at events and classic press work they are averting a looming recruitment crisis in key languages.

DG Interpretation (SCIC), the Commission’s interpreting service, provides language cover also for the Council, the Committees and a string of agencies and offices in the Member States, altogether in 11,000 meetings a year. Along with sister services in the European Parliament and the European Court of Justice it stands to lose up to half of its interpreters in key languages by 2020 – while universities have trouble keeping up production of freshly minted interpreters to balance the foreseeable retirements.

The best way to help them help us – after we have taken all possible steps in terms of direct funding, bursaries, teaching assistance, contacts with the administrations, curriculum advice, association and regular consultation – is to encourage highly qualified students to apply for MA courses in interpreting and, in some countries, to stimulate the interest in learning languages at all.

After testing video and contacts to the general press to drive up interest in the profession in two Member States, we looked at media patterns and where our audience of chiefly 18-34-year-olds is to be found in quantity. Clearly, social media is where they “live”. Considering that the average Facebook-user spends 186 hours a month connected to the page and that practically all young people with multi-lingual/cultural interests are to be found there, there was never an argument against using this as our main channel.

Each campaign for a particular potential deficit language was launched with a YouTube video produced in-house with colleagues and built on the model “Interpreting for Europe … into (language)”. Scripting was based on stakeholder research to determine which barriers and prejudices we faced in each market. Each video therefore carries slightly different messages beyond the general “working for the EU is really cool” basis.

The videos would then be promoted on Facebook and at events as well as through the press. At the same time our Facebook page operates on three levels: as a promotion tool for the interpreting services and the profession; as a provider of curated light entertainment and language news which serves to build audience figures; and finally as a model for direct communication with the citizens whom we help solve their career – and sometimes existential, problems through dialogue – lending solid support to the Commission’s image and brand.

The audience numbers on YouTube and Facebook and on our feed on Twitter are good, especially given the investment: part of one A-official and one full-time stagiaire plus a small sum for targeted advertising. But more significant is the very substantial increase in applicants and quality of applicants at the targeted universities. Thanks to our social media activities we are no longer worried: the delegates in EU meetings can keep talking, also after 2020.

Ian Andersen

External Communications Advisor

DG Interpretation

@Antusheng

Number of views: 2671

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!

Number of views: 2459