Florent put it very well. We are in a real post-electoral moment. Yes, there is a slight feeling of deflation. We have worked flat out for months now, trying new things almost daily, reaching new audiences, adding yet another platform, pushing ourselves just a bit further, twittering into the small hours… It has been exhausting and I am pretty sure everyone is glad of the chance to slow down for just a bit now, but at the same time, we will miss the adrenaline-fuelled rush too.

Oh well, as hardships go, it’s not as bad as some, let’s be honest.

The emerging consensus is that the elections awareness campaign went well. Speaking parochially, we believe the online part of it particularly so. Several members of the team report approaches from journalists eager to find out about our ventures into the social media. Students of communication visit us to find out more, and I personally find myself invited here and there to present the online campaign to a surprising array of audiences. I was most amused by one inquiry, which reached me via a colleague, asking who was the “web guru” in charge of the campaign. I’ve been called many things, but never that. If only he knew…

What will be on their screens this autumn?

Of course, indulging in a feelgood factor for a while is fine, but the time is coming now for some serious evaluation. What worked, what didn’t, what did but wasn’t worth it… We need some number-crunching and bean-counting. At the end, we’ll have to decide, in the first instance, whether we stick with all the platforms we have opened or not.

However, it’s a bit more complicated than that. First, while we’re busy thinking, the internet is moving on. As I write, Twitter is turning out to be one of the major collateral stories of the unrest in Iran. The US State Department reportedly intervened to reschedule routine Twitter maintenance to avoid critical downtime in Tehran. This is the same Twitter that plenty of normal people, in my experience, hadn’t even heard of two or three weeks ago. So who knows what’ll be hot when the European Parliament gets down to work in earnest after the summer break?

Parliament will be working, going about its business, legislating, doing politics… Whither our  social web tools in this context?

Second, we have to consider the purpose of what we are doing. All of the really new things we have done – interactivity on the website, social networking, viral tools – have been launched in the context of a pre-electoral communications campaign. We were people with a message: “Parliament matters to you, so vote!” From now on, we’re in a new context; Parliament will be working, going about its business, legislating, doing politics… Whither our  social web tools in this context? Is it still about communicating a message, or, by its  very nature, more about participation and interaction in the political process? (“e-democracy”?) What does that imply about how MEPs are associated with what we do? And what does the answer to that question imply about our all-important institutional ethic and status: communicating for the Institution, not its component parts?

Third, entry barriers have tumbled. Suddenly everyone wants to be in on the act. It is safe to predict that, before long, most Members, all political groups and many others in the EU political-institutional world will be venturing forth on the social networks. What will this mean for us? How will this ecosystem develop? What will be our place in it? How will the expectations of users be affected?

So much to think about. Moreover, as politicians often say in a different context: never forget your base! All the flash-harry social stuff is all very well, but we have a day-job too, maintaining an online information and news service worthy of the name. This has to mean a serious upgrade to our flagship website, in the direction of the kind of multimedia, multichannel, interactive service users now expect. All this in the full range of languages and, of course, with top quality content.

“Now what?” is therefore a pretty big question. To answer it, we need some serious thinking. I hope we are granted the time and the space to do it.  I also think we need help. We may like to see ourselves as trailblazers – in our perhaps undemanding peer group we probably are – but others have been in similar enough situations to have a thing or two to teach us. So we need to strike a balance between following our instincts and some good old fashioned professionalism. We need feedback. (Some on our Facebook page here – 18 June). We maybe need to go and find a real web guru to talk to.

Yes, maybe only 10% of projects make it, but that doesn’t mean the other 90% fail.

Talking of which… Guess who was in Parliament yesterday. No lesser figure than Google co-founder and ubergeek Larry Page. He had many fascinating things to say. I was most impressed by his remarks on how you foster innovation and come up with the Next Big Idea. In part, his message was about money: it has to be freely available and available to be lost (as in Silicon Valley), but it was the other half of his answer which caught my ear in the context of what we do. It’s about the attitude to risk taking. Yes, maybe only 10% of projects (or start-ups) make it, but that doesn’t mean the other 90% fail. Most of the 90% don’t get where they intended, but lay the foundations for Another Big Idea, create networks which end up creating unexpected results, or simply teach their protagonists how to get it right next time.

In our modest way, perhaps we need most of all to heed that message. Just try; if it doesn’t work out, there are plenty of other ideas that will. We just need the investors who are prepared to lose their (in our case) metaphorical “million bucks” in the process as an investment for the long term gains.