Waltzing Matilda

Our answer to the question “Better websites or social media: a false dilemma?“, recently raised by Tony Lockett, is: better websites should be our first objective.

Social media are sometimes seen as a new panacea to improve the communication of the EU institutions. But, taking into account our current audience, what is the effective return on investment of using social media for us? Can we effectively reach our target audiences (beyond our current one) through social media? Are there other effective alternatives?

What is our current online audience?

Back to basics. Assessing your current audience is the baseline of your communication planning. In the online world, web analytics make this task really easy.

We (DG Information Society) tried to figure out what was our online audience and what was the degree of “stakeholderness” of our network of websites. We crossed different variables such as:

• from the point of view of the visitor: loyalty, country of origin, language spoken and network locations;
• from the point of view of the content: specific visited sections such as regulations, calls for tenders, etc.

We particularly focused on the criteria of loyalty, meaning the “returning visitors”. Statistically, it translates into regular traffic of returning visitors coming from easily identified traffic sources. We deduced that English-speaking Brussels-based returning visitors correspond more or less to stakeholders monitoring the publications of our institutions. We also discovered that the vast majority of our visitors are stakeholders. This might only apply to our DG and it is therefore not possible to generalize.

In order to increase our online visibility to our current audience, does it really make sense to invest in social media? Aren’t social media better fit for engaging on general subjects?

In any case, it seems that if our web content is not adapted to the general public, the general public is not interested in our policy and activities. And in both cases, the solution seems to focus on improving our web writing and search engine optimization skills. The use of social media would rather come as a “pierre de touche” when we have reached an effective online presence adapted to the general public. A product fit for purpose is certainly easier to sell.

Exploring tools to improve online communication

We tend to distinguish three core tools for improving online communication:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which can be defined as the process of increasing the number of qualified visits to the website via organic traffic over time.
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM), which can be defined as the process of increasing the visibility of the website on search engine result pages immediately through the launch of a search marketing campaign.
• Social Media Optimization (SMO), which can be defined as the process of increasing the visibility of a website through the use of social media, namely Facebook and Twitter in our case.

Based on our experience, we can tell you that SEO and SEM provide cost-effective benefits.

• SEO, because an important number of our websites suffer from certain issues blocking their indexation in search engines. (The origin of this problem seems to lie with the lack of understanding of SEO by those who publish texts).
• SEM, because if timely implemented, a search marketing campaign can drive a qualified number of visitors to our websites.

More important, efforts put in SEO and SEM are measurable thanks to web analytics. In other words, it is really easy to measure their return on investment while the benefit of social media seems less quantifiable. A few examples:

• Regarding Facebook, can you really deduce that you have managed to raise awareness on a certain issue because you have reached 1,000 fans?
• Regarding Twitter, is the number of your followers a real indicator of your influence? In the context of our activities Twitter may be more useful for dissemination of short updates on specific issues (e.g. an event or emerging news in their field of interest) to an interested community of users.

Theorizing online communication priorities

If we had to define online communication priorities, we would suggest better understanding of our current audience to better respond to their needs through enhancing our web copywriting and SEO skills (as illustrated below).

This would mean a comprehensive training of communication officers and content publishers in order to improve the current web content. A valuable source on writing for the web is available online on Europa.

This article was written by Pierre-Antoine Rousseau and reviewed by José Pato.
European Commission, DG Information Society, S3 – Web Team

DG INFSO’s roaming presence on Facebook (Sea, Sun and SMS Fan Page)

DG INFSO’s presence on Twitter to promote the event ICT 2010

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