I think the most important is to do a steady work, so not to focus on campaigns, but on the EP generally. If I get a steady stream of interesting information, I also get the campaign ideas. Twitter accounts only focusing on one election like EU_Elections_en are less interesting. It takes to long to build a follower base and you can’t transform your followers to followers of EP policies.

Clearly social media will be important, given this 5-year timeframe. So, some interrelated questions:

What do you mean when you refer to your institutional ethic – do you mean that you communicate for the Parliament, or the EU as a whole?

I ask because I’m wondering whether there’s any scope for MEPs and Commission officials to work together via social media?

And I ask *that* because some of the DGs are using online communities of practice to better implement their programmes (disclosure: I built some of them).

Now these Commission-driven activities are generally aimed at more specialised people – e.g., researchers funded by the Framework Programme.

If these separate worlds (dedicated communities of practice, wider social networks) were connected together, however, then non-specialists would see the work being done by the EU, and see ‘EU added value’ in concrete terms.

And because they’d see these activities in the context of their social networks, this concrete added value would be – by definition – in areas of interest to them.

The killer phrase, above, is probably “if these separate worlds were connected together”. Technically, of course, this is not a problem! But organisationally?