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

Last week I had the honour of sitting in while the EP webteam did a Facebook chat with Hungarian MEP, Zita Gurmai. I had been curious to see how they actually do it, and since we had also had a request from one of the cabinets, I think it is about time to share with you what I learned last Tuesday. As a bonus, the topic of the chat was the European Citizens’ Initiative, which is an interesting topic seen from a communication perspective, but which we (as far as I know) are not really involved in here in DG Communication.

OK, so here goes: Actually an EP Facebook chat is a really swift operation which in this case went very smoothly. The chat was to start at 12.00, and I met with Raffaella (who manages the EP page on Facebook) outside the Parliament at around 11.45. We went in and up one of the towers and shortly after found ourselves in the office of Mrs. Gurmai, where we were greeted by no less than three people besides the MEP herself (assistant, trainee and advisor I think).

If anyone has been to these offices, you will know that it is pretty crowded by then. So I tried not to be in the way while the event unfolded. On the picture below you can see my notes on two post-its that I shamelessly took from one of the assistants:

The group gathered around Mrs. Gurmai’s desk. Raffaella had brought a laptop and while she tried to connect it, the assistant logged on to Mr’s Gurmai’s Facebook profile and went to the Parliament’s page to wait for the chat session to be launched.

IT infrastructure and interaction
Meanwhile, Raffaella’s laptop didn’t connect to the internet, so the trainee found another one and in the meantime Raffaella explained how they do it: obviously it is difficult to reply to all questions, so basically the MEP can choose which ones to reply to. Raffaella also mentioned what people might ask about, so there wouldn’t be too many surprises underway.  The EP photographer Pietro also showed up and started taking pictures, so during the session there were a total of seven people in the room, of which three were moving around.

Finally, when both computers were ready (MEPs desktop for answering questions and laptop for refreshing the stream of comments and questions), Raffaella phoned her colleague in another building to post a picture of Mrs Gurmai together with the first question in the discussion, which would basically be the stream of comments on the picture. And then it was on!

Mrs. Gurmai was commenting and responding to questions, the assistant was tapping away on the keyboard and Raffaella suggested interesting questions to respond to while also explaining Facebook lingo to the MEP. On Mrs Gurmai’s computer screen all you could see was her own updates, so they would consult  the laptop and refresh the stream of comments to get everything. 

I was trying to follow the discussion on my iPhone as well, so actually three devices were on in the same room.  I tried not to interfere, but it is hard to stay silent when there is so much discussion in a room on a topic you find very interesting.

Mrs Gurmai managed to reply 24 times in 30 minutes. There were a total of 88 comments on the chat that day – that’s not half bad! It was also fun to see how some of the people who joined the chat were already known by Mrs Gurmai: one guy apparently sends her many, many emails and another one was a PES activist in Dublin.

The whole thing was over in almost no time. Then we had a short chat with Mrs Gurmai on equality issues – as she is very passionate about women’s role in democracy.

Perspective for possible EC chats on Facebook
As I said, we have been asked by one of the cabinets how they could use chats on Facebook. Obviously it’s perfectly possible to do it, and I think the very low tech approach is appealing. Also, time is an improtant factor: with the current online chat system (provided by our Colleagues in DG Interpretation) a chat needs to be organised 4 weeks in advance.

But there are some issues to deal with if we want to adopt the model that the EP is using:

1. What should the outcome be? If commissioners do a chat, it should be related to an event, a campaign or communication, or maybe in relation to a public consultation to ensure that people can have a say on the topic without necessarily filling out a survey. So commissioners and their staff should think carefully about how this could feed into the work of the Commission.
2. Very few commissioners are on Facebook with a personal profile. It makes it very difficult for them to participate in the discussion, and I do not see it as a viable solution to create temporary profiles for the duration of the chat. If the profile is deleted afterwards you can’t go back and see who was answering the questions.
3. The Commissioners who do have a Facebook “page” (Kroes, Potocnik, Barnier, Lewandowski, Damanaki, Georgieva and Ciolos) could relatively easy organise chats on their own page with our assistance, but this is not necessarily the best solution if you want to reach special target audiences. However, this might be the most viable solution.
4. We do not only have one central platform, but many distributed pages with very diverse audiences. We have created a Commission facebook page as an experiment, but we are nowhere near the followers that the Parliament has, so we first need to ensure that there is enough people to monitor and follow up on the discussions, and then we would also need to advertise chats like this heavily through all the different EC Facebook pages in advance, so the contact and infrastructure between the EC Facebook pages need to be reinforced. At least until we reach a critical mass on the central Facebook page.
5. Advertising the chats on facebook brings up another problem, because individual Facebook pages shouldn’t spam their followers too much. 2-3 updates per day is acceptable, but more than that can lead to irritation and people leaving the page again. So we will probably have to land on a compromise where the page owners decide if their audience is interested in the chat and then publishes the advertisement. It could be done as a calendar event which is spread via the network.

These are at least some of the thoughts that I have had after the session. I would very much welcome views from followers of commissioners and EC pages on Facebook, especially to get an idea of the ambition level. it would also be great to hear from colleagues and contractors who run EC related pages on Facebook!

//Anne

Pictures from the chat session by Pietro Naj-Oleari/European Parliament: (more chats on the EP Flickr account)

Number of views: 11860

In the past few months we have witnessed a significant increase in the number of European Commissioners present on various social media platforms. Since her blog was recently named the 10^th most influential EU blog, we asked the European Commissioner for Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes to tell us about her use of social media.

When and why did you start using social media?
In 2008, when I was the Competition Commissioner, I started a kind of a blog. The idea was to point people to the latest important message we had on the financial crisis. It was quite limited. Only since taking on the Digital Agenda portfolio have I really started to see what is possible with social media. Now we have more of a dialogue with our followers.

Why am I so keen on social media? For a number of reasons. First of them is my motto “Every European Digital”. I can’t ask people to go online and then stay locked up in my office with paper files! I have to be there too. But most importantly, I am online to involve people in our Digital Agenda action plan. We need many partners to create businesses, jobs and ideas that will improve our everyday life. It’s important to have a conversation about how to do that.   

I can’t respond every time, but I do read what people post. I also highly appreciate that social media make my ideas available to a wider audience, including young people, people who can’t come to Brussels for a meeting, those who don’t read newspapers. And it’s great to learn about a new idea, a video or something else from my followers.

Which social media platforms do you use and what for?
Quite a few. I use WordPress for my blog. It is a great open software tool. As for social networks, the main two are my Twitter account and Facebook page. I also use Flickr for my photos and I have YouTube and Dailymotion channels. My video channels are not very popular yet – probably because we don’t make special videos for them. But why should my videos be reserved only for the audience at conferences where I speak? It takes only two minutes for my staff to upload them to these sites, and then everyone can see them.

During the summer my team will try to create my profile on Hyves, which is a Dutch site, and on Netlog which is Belgian.

You need to respect the way people use a site. Twitter is obviously more about policy, while Facebook is more social. You can’t offer everyone something new all the time. I try to keep it reasonable and if it is an important point, I make it on all my accounts on the same day.

Who is involved in your social media activities? 
Fewer people than you think. I have Twitter and Facebook applications on my phone, so I can post directly. However, I often barely have time to look after more than one message, so I pass on an idea to one of my Cabinet members and they find the right links and so on to enable the post I have suggested. Also, many updates come out of ongoing work of DG Information Society and Media (DG INFSO). If we have a new video speech or a success, we share it on social media as we would with the traditional press.

After the summer it would be great to get more staff in the DG to send me ideas on what to blog about. In this sense it will become a much broader project.  

And of course, the real value is when people re-tweet or forward a link about something I post. Then it goes crazy. Did you know that within a few minutes 100,000 people might have received the message? In this respect, my followers are directly involved.  

How do social media relate to your website and DG INFSO websites?
More and more my Commissioner website is becoming a portal for my social media. If you look at it, very few of the pages are static. The homepage mostly sends you to my social media accounts, my favourite projects or the DG’s news feed.

At the moment my website and various DG INFSO websites are not very interrelated except that we often link to specific projects where there is some news. But that’s OK. In my portfolio I have a lot of outreach and horizontal leadership to do, but within the DG I am told that each team has a very specific set of stakeholders who they keep in touch with through their own websites. So, it can be useful to pitch our messages differently to different groups.

What do you see as main advantages and disadvantages of social media?
More Europeans are on social networking sites than they are subscribing to newspapers – so you need to follow people. Using social media means talking with Europeans instead of sitting up in an ivory tower. However, you only have 24 hours a day to live and work. I can’t spend my whole day reading tweets. Therefore, it’s important to keep one’s priorities straight. Get the job done and then tell the world about it, but don’t get distracted from doing the job in the first place!

What have you learned from using social media?
That we have some really clever guys and girls out there! Their innovations are amazing and I hope we can help more European entrepreneurs to be at the front of this field. Also, don’t take it personally if you get criticised. I get mostly positive responses, but there are some people you can never please. I listen but I don’t get upset when people disagree.

What are your social media plans for the future?
I will keep on doing it! Recently I heard that my blog was named one of the most influential EU blogs (in English). It came 10^th on the list. In 2011, with the help of my team, I aim for number one!

Note for the readers: The study has been questioned for its methodology.  If you are on Twitter, you can read the criticism of the study by the Eurobloggers under the hashtag #bbs10. You can download the PDF of the Brussels Blogger Study 2010, conducted by public affairs company Waggener Edstrom, here.

Number of views: 13698

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