As you know, and thanks to our online communication campaign, we became a kind of team of new gurus on new and social media. We are the first to be surprised by this constant demand for conference keynotes, institutional or inter-institutional workshops, informal meetings with more or less close colleagues who’ve heard that we *know* about all “those things” (eg Facebook, Twitter, MySpace…) and who’d like to understand how it really works. We tend to find this a bit funny, first because we hope we don’t take ourselves too seriously, second because we consider ourselves – like almost everyone else in the online communication field – less experts than constant learners.
And third, because social media are easy to engage with, there is no real need for “instructions”. What you do need, especially in our line of work, is to keep exchanging on experiences, on editorial policy, on feedback you get. This is one of this blog’s aims.
Not a guru, just your regular mailman.
Of course, we diligently indulge in showing our achieved and current progress on the subject, in proposing our own few certitudes (stick to your core values, do not rely only on online medias for your communication, break some of your cultural taboos, don’t do it if you don’t feel ready to do it etc.), sharing our doubts, expecting answers to some unresolved questions we have (they change often).
We are usually greeted by enthusiasm, gentle neutrality and, even if in small proportions, by some skepticism.
Amongst the tribe of non-believers, I noted a recurring worry about the fact we, as civil servants, engage in the online conversation. This is actually one of the few rules we propose, after having tested it during the election campaign. We believe you must appear and behave as humans and not as an administration, an institution, when it comes to Facebook, Twitter or MySpace. This is another aim of this blog as well, which serves as a platform where our readers can comment, interact, discover who (i.e. the Web Team of the European Parliament) we are and how human we are.
“Who the hell do you think you are by taking the social media floor and putting yourselves under the digital spotlights? What kind of brainless egopath are you?”
In our Keynote presentation, we call this “The end of the heard but not seen civil servant” tradition. To be honest, there is a question mark at the end of the slide’s bullet point – a very socratic scholastic way used by Steve to assert a point without hurting anyone’s deep beliefs. Or maybe it’s just a typo.
There is a 99% chance that a member of the audience we’re talking in front of will come back on this, usually in the form of a very polite and carefully phrased question which almost always means: “who the hell do you think you are by taking the social media floor and putting yourselves under the digital spotlights? What kind of brainless egopath are you?”
The question covers different aspects and may imply, in its Lacanian subtext, different fears. I will only confront the two more obvious I perceive.
1°- Do we want to substitute ourselves to the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs)? As democratic elected representatives of We, the people, shouldn’t they be the only ones allowed to express anything regarding the institution?
This is an old debate which started well before Internet was invented. In a nutshell, some consider that the MEPs (and, by extension, their political groups or parties or associations) and the MEPs only should communicate on what they do within the European Parliament, since they’ve been elected to do so, that’s their job and they are (supposedly) good at it – otherwise they wouldn’t have been elected in the first place, would they?
Others estimate that the legitimate MEPs’ full right of expression does not prohibit the Institution itself to communicate about what’s going one in its lap. Amongst its duties, maybe the European Parliament has the one to provide anyone foolish enough to care with as neutral, balanced, impartial information as possible. It belongs also to the Parliament to do whatever it seems appropriate to raise the citizens’ awareness about its role, powers, activities, debates and decisions.
Now, if the question is: “where do you stand on this?”, please meet the official border of my civil servant’s devoir de réserve here:
X
The answer to this under-expressed fear is: as long as we know, we are instructed to use online communication to spread knowledge and awareness about our institution.
And we’re extremely happy to see more and more MEPs opening Facebook’s profiles and Twitter’s accounts.
2°- Aren’t we infringing our devoir de réserve by expressing ourselves online, by moderating comments, answering questions, promoting our accounts and so on?
To this one, I have two answers. The first one refers to one of our core values: “Strict impartiality and no political views expressed”. This is crystal clear, regularly expressed to the team and strictly enforced.
I hope you’re all drying the tear which popped out of your eye from this heart breaking story.
My second answer belongs to the metaphorical sphere. My Grandmother lived in a small house in the countryside, quite far from the closest village. Every morning, the mailman came to visit her. She always prepared coffee for him, which he always drank too quickly for her taste. He brought her snail mails, sometimes a few items she had ordered the day before (bread, milk) because there was too much snow on the road for her to walk to the village. He was providing her with the latest communal news, no gossip, just facts she might be interested in. Even if he had no mail for her, he would stop to make sure she was fine and because “no mail today” was a piece of information in itself. He took the letters she had prepared to be posted. This mailman never judged nor commented what he was delivering. He would never say “this letter comes from an idiot, I know it by the hand writing” nor “this package is too heavy”. He was a State civil servant and my grandmother never called him by his first name. But she was always pissed when he left in holidays because the interim mailman (who behaved like the other one in all aspects of his job) was not *her* mailman.
I hope you’re all drying the tear which popped out of your eye from this heart breaking story.
My point is: maybe, the online tools are a chance for the “grey” civil servants from the “sinister” Brussels “bubble” to become some new kind of digital mailmen. Who would build a trust bond with the citizens, help in connecting them with their MEPs, keeping them up-to-date with the most relevant news, explaining them how the institution work and so on.
There would be no hot coffee to drink in a rush, I am afraid, but there must be a digital equivalent.
Dear Eurocitizen1,
Thanks again for your comments. I’d like to try to answer some of them, although I feel we are not providing you exactly here with what you are actually looking for.
1°- Stats of this blog
We started this blog under an hidden URL protected with a password and we updated it for six months with no readers. None. We did so because we wanted to prove to ourselves and to our managers (which we refer to as being our “authorities”) that we were able to write on EU and communication subjects without infringing our statutory devoir de réserve. We cannot express political opinions nor spreading false or unverified information. Little by little, by word of mouth only, we reached a frequentation between 100 and 200 readers a day. When we don’t update for a while, it goes drastically down – which is why we now use the “Asides” mini-post to publish short items more often. We have no reasons to cheat on the figures. we’d like them to be higher, of course, because it is motivating, but we have no resources allowed to the promotion of this blog – except writing for it. We received twice as many comments as published posts. I have no explanation why our readers don’t comment more. Me being a blog addict, I almost never comment on other blogs.
2°- What you’d like to read here.
“Well, I originally came here in search of information. The kind that you only get on quality corporate or institutional blogs: less filtered, less politically correct than the official channel, with more personal opinions, food for thought not about the blog itself but about the subject of the blog (namely EU parliament), keys to decipher political manoeuvres.”
I think we provide less filtered information, if only because we write about ourselves, our daily work, how we deal with it and, yes, sometimes, about what we did last weekend. Typically things we can’t write on the European Parliament’s website. Now, for the politically incorrect aspect, this is the wrong place. We won’t take this road, we just cannot. Regarding the keys to decipher political manoeuvres… How I’d love to write about that. But again, we cannot. Plus, we are not the best placed to do so: in our job, we don’t know what’s going on in the political backstages. We don’t cover the political groups: they have their own press service. Of course, we hear noises, gossips but less than you might expect. We’re just too far from the battlefield. Blogs from MEPs or parliamentary assistants would be juicer on this subject and there is obviously a gap in the market. Why don’t they jump into this niche? Some journalists (the French Quatremer for example) excel at it. Julian Frisch too.
3°- The tricky game
In the original post, I referred to “online tools”. I should have written “online social medias” because they allow easier and quicker engagement in the conversation. But OK, a blog is an online tool, so, let’s see what we have.
“Send me your reply with a link to a post that clearly:
- builds a trust bond with the citizens”
Arguably, our stories on our YaBs’ project during the Elections. The project connected us with the citizen and we trusted them by sending out 27 YaBs (20 are missing in actions).
- and/or helps connect them with their MEPs
Our first live chat on Facebook with Miss Turunen
- and/or keeps them up-to-date with the most relevant news
Our “Asides” section does that often. And more details where given about the support of Mr. Baroso by MEPs (wow, it’s actually about gossips) and on gas crisis and financial crisis.
- and/or explains how the institution works
Well, there is the post by our Director on how he deals with our team, but you’d say it’s not about the institution but about the administration and you’d be right. Hanna explained us the Lisbon Treaty as well. But on this subject, I am with you. Maybe we should write more about the mechanisms of the Parliament, trying to explain it our way with lame jokes included. To be honest, the editors do it all the time in their stories published on the main website – except with no jokes. And we all feel the main website could be better on this. It’s on our TO-DO list for next year. But for this blog, I’ll have to suggest this angle to the editors.
This comment is long – and we know blog’s readers don’t like when it’s too long. I feel sorry my posts (this one and the one about meetings) irritate you, that our stories tend to bore you. There is too much time to waste on Internet to lose yours on our stories, especially if you don’t like them. That’s why I am grateful you did take the time to write us your true feelings. They’ll help us to improve what we can and, maybe, to please better other readers with different expectations.
I hope to read you again here and I wish you all the best. Now, I have to feed an angry cat and to cook for my better half. I’ll try pasta with curry.
Cheers,
T.
Dear Steve,
Thank you for your reply.
Now, I’ll just have to trust you on the readership you claim to enjoy. Although the fact that at least half of the posts show zero comments does leave me puzzled.
But let’s forget about return on investment for a while. It’s a tricky notion and the EU institutions have always had a hard time wrapping their mind around it.
You kindly ask the kind of things I would like to see more of.
Well, I originally came here in search of information. The kind that you only get on quality corporate or institutional blogs: less filtered, less politically correct than the official channel, with more personal opinions, food for thought not about the blog itself but about the subject of the blog (namely EU parliament), keys to decipher political manoeuvres. Less “How was your weekend”, more “How was last plenary session”. Simply put I would like to snatch nuggets of information that only you can give. If you can’t give me that, because you’re a part of the system or simply because you don’t have it, then your blog has little interest (to me).
The author of the post wrote :My point is: maybe, the online tools are a chance for the “grey” civil servants from the “sinister” Brussels “bubble” to become some new kind of digital mailmen. Who would build a trust bond with the citizens, help in connecting them with their MEPs, keeping them up-to-date with the most relevant news, explaining them how the institution work and so on.
Good definition of what the blog should be! Unfortunately, I see almost none of that in here.
Here’s a game. Below is the list of the items of your definition of the blog’s purpose. Send me your reply with a link to a post that clearly:
- builds a trust bond with the citizens
- and/or helps connect them with their MEPs
- and/or keeps them up-to-date with the most relevant news
- and/or explains how the institution works
If you want to get close to the public, give us real transparency, not intentions. Serving us empty chit chat about your travels just irritates me. I don’t know you guys, I will never meet you and I don’t care about your personal stories; I have the same at work and frankly, they tend to bore me.
One last question though: correct me if I am wrong but I think this is the first online debate this blog has ever stirred. If it really were producing the desired effect, don’t you think that there would be several of those for each post?
Cheers,
Eurocitizen1
PS: I might come across as somewhat harsh. I guess the fact that EU institutions attempt to use new media should be praised and I do praise it. It is just that I work in a big company and I know that sometimes initiatives are taken not because of their efficiency but because they will serve the image of their authors. I fear there is a bit of that in your blog.
Dear Eurocitizen1,
First, our thanks to you for your feedback and for obviously being a regular reader.
I’m sorry however you feel our posts too self-referential, though, of course, we are quite up front about talking about ourselves and our job. What we do is try to serve up a fairly mixed diet: some more focused on professional questions and issues, other, lighter, posts about day-to-day life.
I feel you are a little harsh in saying the blog is “much more about yourselves than your mission”. Over the life of the blog, including recently, we have for example written a lot about the social media and how a public institution such as ours can and should engage with them. This is a critical concern for us at the moment, of course, so we keep coming back to this.
But we try not to be one-track, hence a generous smattering of the other, close-to-home, subjects you seem not to appreciate so much. One of the golden rules of social media is to “be human”, surely? Part of what we hope to reveal in this blog is the fact that there are real sentient beings behind the often faceless walls of European institutions, not just the euro-automata of popular imagination!
Of course, we do like to read each other’s posts and occasionally comment, but I assure you we have a worthwhile readership of people in the real world (whatever any of us perceives that to be). Please bear in mind this is a sideline for us, coming very much after all the other things we do. So it’s not a huge blog and we do not promote it at all. It’s just there for people who find it.
So I guess you can’t please all the people all of the time, but if we occasionally please some of the people some of the time, that’s something.
All that said, we ARE grateful for your comments, as we do periodically ask ourselves, as we must, whether we have got the blog right. Maybe you could tell us what kind of thing would you like to see more of?
And one last thing: to call ourselves “gurus” is not a pretense of a joke, it IS a joke! We’re just people trying to do our job.
2 comments on this :
1. My feeling is that this blog is much more about yourselves than about your mission as, like you say, civil servants. Here’s why. The number of commentators you are attracting (outsiders, like me, not members of your team) looks pretty low for a blog ran by 20 people. In fact, it looks like there are almost more people writing it than outside people reading or contributing to it. So, if it’s not about the readers, it has to be about the authors.
2. But that’s normal. All one finds here is either:
- office little anecdotes (seriously, NO ONE, except Steve Carell, should be paid for that) We all have them at work and it makes me think that you are either totally self-centered, or more probably, that you don’t have much to say. Now, it very well may be that you don’t have the RIGHT to say what you would like to say, but the result is the same.
- essays about the legitimacy of the blog (see supra). And that’s not a good sign either, esp. since you guys have been online for a while now.
And calling yourself a guru (even under the pretense of a joke) doesn’t do much to convince me.
Hi Derek,
Amongst many possible options for the European Parliament as a communicating institution, you’re right when suggesting that it can be the neutral and impartial locutor that allows everyone to get the facts rights on European subject. This is so far the line we follow and so do our colleagues from the Press team.
The sketicism toward social medias exists as well outside our dear institution – this weekend, some of my alumnis from Business school claimed again that they would never step a foot on Facebook… Ah, those Parisians…
Yes, denying the importance of social medias reminds us a lot of the beginning of Internet itself: who needs a website ? they said ;-)
T.
You are clearly too modest, Tibo, to admit that EMPs and member-state ministers will always take a ‘partial’ line. So, it is important that the story be told impartially and “straight” by someone.
If you choose to do this via social networks – why not? Those who want to know will engage; others will pass by: c’est la vie.
But to suggest that social media are inappropriate (as you infer some colleagues hold) is like pretending the internet still isn’t going to take off.
NB I don’t use Facebook or Myspace (security risks), nor Twitter (can’t restrain my verbosity!).