Waltzing Matilda

This has been a somewhat difficult birth and will probably give us many logistical problems in the future (lots of updating),  so I just felt like sharing a bit how the process has been with revising the section Take part on Europa and creating the latest page we’ve published on Europa: Connect with EU on social networks.

In February this year I started discussing with my colleagues in the Europa web team what to do with the section Take part. Since the relaunch of the portal in September last year we had seen a few changes on the interaction front: We were about to close Debate Europe, so we needed to revise the page Have your say and we had also seen several video channels emerge, so it was time to revise the page dealing with EUTube. That page was already very Commission-centric for a portal that is supposed to be “inter-institutional”, as we call it, but the playlists featured on the page were getting outdated, so something had to be done. 

Furthermore I had noticed A LOT of feedback in our weekly Europa.eu feedback report from people searching for information on how to visit the EU institutions, and I thought that it would fit in nicely with the rest of the “interactive services” we offer.

Visualizing the new content

Some of my Twitter friends might have noticed that I am very fond of post-its and colourful posters, so here is another example of me trying to explain in a simple way what is going on in my crinkly head. The sketch has been hanging in the corridor outside my office since we started the process (I find it an easy way of showing my colleagues what I am working on, and it sometimes leads to very good contributions from them if there is something I haven’t thought of).

Anyway, the first thing we did was to write the page Visit the EU institutions. Apart from having to scout through numerous websites searching for the right pages to link to, it was fairly straightforward (yes, we are aware that finding your way around Europa can be a pain in the b…). We had our first meeting on 1 February, and the page went online in 23 languages on 30 March. This is relatively fast, if you were in doubt!

We then spent some time on researching competitions and moving the previous Prizes and Competitions page we used to host on the Commission homepage to the Europa level. We kept the structure from the old page and squeezed it into the Europa look and feel. We are not super happy with the layout, but at least it is an improvement and now we can publish competitions from all the institutions and agencies and local offices, so we are providing a very good service to those of our colleagues who want to promote their competitions. And the list of open competitions is now an RSS feed that can be exported to other EU websites in 23 languages, which we hope many of our colleagues will make use of.

The third thing we did was a light revision of the page Have your say on EU policies. It was and still is a bit schizophrenic because we a) closed Debate Europe and b) had to categorize the content a bit. I have a second revision for translation at the moment, witgiving an overview of how you can have your say in the legislation process, because, admitted, it is difficult to understand, and the whole change with the Lisbon Treaty has resulted in a lot of changes  that we have to keep track of.

But the biggest thing we’ve done with this section is the page Connect with EU on social networks, which went online on 11 August. Thanks to help from good colleagues and our dear Alenka, we managead to create a first draft.  It has taken a lot of time and effort to collect all the links (my first draft is from March). We sent the first version for translation in June, but 3 weeks later we already had a long list of links to add, so we postponed the launch until we had the updates ready.  AND as I am writing this post, a number of colleagues have already emailed me to get on the list, so I foresee lots and lots of updating of this page.  It just never ends… (might be a good job for our next trainee to take care of it, muhahahaha (evil laughter if you were in doubt))!

I have one thing left to do before the overhaul of this section is concluded and I can start cleaning up bugs, bits and pieces in the pages, and that is the second revision of the Have your say page. We find there is relatively little general information about how to participate in the legislative process, and it seems like the European Citizens’ Initiative is not moving as fast as some might wish, so we thought we could at least provide a small introduction to the different initiatives on the EU portal. So the page will be a bit more prosaic than the others in that section, but I find that what little we can do from here to make the EU a tiny bit more transparent to you guys out there is worth the effort. The page is being translated while this post is being written, so it will hopefully soon go online.

Anyway, that is a short roundup of the last 6 months on my plate. Not that it’s the only thing I’ve been doing, but it has certainly taken a lot of my time besides trying to make some sense of the social media jungle and will also do so in the future. The pages in the Take part section are now very different and we are beginning to worry about how we can keep a logic navigation structure and a common visual line while slowly changing the portal from being a linking service to actually contain more and more content.

But right now I want a cup of coffee.
//Anne

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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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