Waltzing Matilda

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.

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What was first, the chicken or the egg? Or translated to the world of social media – what should come first, the strategy or their use? While at university they teach us that one should first develop a strategy on the basis of which communication activities should be conducted, this somehow fails to translate to the professional world.  

It is not unusual to have your boss tell you to start using social media because others use them. Many organisations are afraid they might miss on something if they don’t go social. They are right. But there is no point in going social unless it helps you achieve your organisational goals and reach your target audience.

There are few organisations that have a social media strategy with clearly defined target audience, objectives and evaluation methods. When talking about target groups they most often mention the general audience. But does anyone actually know who a general audience is? I don’t. It might be a bit hard to target someone who you don’t really know.

When it comes to objectives situation isn’t any better. People’s most common response to why they want to use social media is because they are hip, price-efficient and everybody uses them. Even if you come across strategies with set objectives, they usually say something like, we want to share our content or reach the young, which says nothing about what they want to achieve by doing that.  

It gets worse when it comes to evaluation. Even though many organisations seem to stress the importance of ROI, it is impossible to measure your success without a previously specified target audience and SMART objectives. It’s like a jigsaw – you can’t expect to see the whole picture if you miss a few pieces.

I have been asking the question of why organisations don’t use social media strategically over and over again, but to date I haven’t found the answer. However, I have come up with a few possible reasons which I would like to share with you:

• They don’t take social media seriously and are convinced that traditional communication rules don’t really apply here.

• Their use of social media is no different from their use of other media – they just don’t know how to develop a strategy.
• Employees responsible for social media often face internal challenges when trying to convince their superiors about the value of social media. Even when they succeed, they are usually very limited in what they can do and have to fight for resources.
• They don’t know yet how to use social media strategically and are trying to figure it out.

Tell me what you think about it. I am looking forward to hearing your opinion and experience with the issue. 

Posted by Alenka

Number of views: 2186