This conversation is reminding me of others, so I was going to write more here, but it got very long. I’ll post something later. Hopefully my trackback won’t get caught up with the Russian viagra mafia …

Bit of a “next shiny object” mentality setting in round here perhaps… :-)

Of course MEPs will themselves get into social media, and that will help move things along. That said, at least in the immediate future, we don’t see that as depriving us of a role. What we can do that no member, party or group can do is provide an institutional (i.e. neutral/credible) space where social media users can come to have their debates and discussions in a kind of political no-man’s land.

So we see ourselves potentially as facilitators, moderators, guarantors even. But like everything else in this area, it’s provisional – who knows where things will go?

Meanwhile, a detail still pleads in favour of us having a role to play, the base of nearly 60,000 FB fans we have established – a critical mass it remains difficult to find anywhere else for the time being.

Thanks for your comments (this one was in the spam too… You must have a doppelganger somewhere).

When you write “Hence our curent efforts to make our social media a channel for communication between our fans and MEPs”, does this mean that you see your goal as getting the MEPs engaged in social media, rather than ‘doing’ social media yourselves?

In other words, once all MEPs are engaged in social media, will the officials step back, ‘mission accomplished’, and get back to focusing on the facts, leaving opinions to the elected representatives?

[Or, more likely, move on to pilot the next shiny object, and bring it back down the mountain for the MEPs to play with...]

Cheerio,

Mathew

PS No viagra, Russian or otherwise, around here …

First, sorry for the delay in moderating your comment. Somehow it ended up in our spam filter and we only just spotted it. (You haven’t been selling viagra through any Russian websites lately, have you?)

On what you say, we were extremely interested to see what our friends in the Commission are doing. We are not associated with this directly. The easiest reason to give would be to say that we weren’t asked! But that would be unfair and would misrepresent the situation.

The open letter is addressed by Commission staff to their political masters. It aims, I suppose, to exploit a particular moment – the creation of the new Commission – to push for a new online communications policy.

In the EP, our position is a little different. First, we are a much smaller oganisation, meaning that our web communications policy is in the hands of a single DG and our online presence coordinated by that DG. We don’t produce everything here, of course, but we do the stuff going under the name “communications” and exercise general editorial oversight. That’s why we can maintain a unified graphical look and consistent “branding”. In the Commission open letter you can see clearly that these conditions do not pertain there.

Second, more importantly, we don’t NEED to write such a letter. The political authorities of the EP have given us a clear mandate to develop Web 2.0 tools and social media in our ongoing communications activities online. We are still bound by our institutional role, of course, but we are already pushing ahead with all the stuff we launched ahead of the elections: Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter et al, within that role.

Third, as for engaging in the “conversation”, we already do that – again in a manner necessarily constrained by our position as officials – but nevetheless in a meaningful way, notably through Facebook and indeed this blog. On this, another distinction between us and the Commission should be borne in mind. The Commission has a “line”, a collective view and/or policy which staff can communicate. The Parliament is composed of opinions often greatly at variance which each other. When it comes to opinion or policy, we have to hold back as officials. Hence our curent efforts to make our social media a channel for communication between our fans and MEPs.

Lastly, and a little tangentially, it must be borne in mind that, in the institutional setup, Parliament and Commission are at least to some degree antagonists. We have different messages and must not be too cosy, for fear of perpetuating the misleading notion that EU institutions are all the same thing. We have recently had great cooperation with our colleagues in the EC on a whole range of things, but we have and must have separate messages.

All that said, good look to them with this letter!