The FB page of the European Parliament rocks, and we shouldn’t be afraid to say it. As Florent wrote on his post, we’ve the broadest EU community and the biggest Parliament’s presence on Facebook in the world.

I’m honoured to work at this project, and I want to invest myself to make it bigger, nicer, and more powerful. It is a lab of experimentation and creativity, as it tests the potential (and pushes the limits) of institutional communication. Nowhere else, as far as I know, there is a community from so many different countries discussing political issues among them.  I was literally touched by the post on Thailand, when we talked about the riots in Bangkok. Some Thai people commented on it and many, many Europeans expressed them their solidarity and their sorrow, but also discussed the political situation there.

With over 76.000 fans, each post seen at least 100.000 times, and over 1.000 interactions per week, I think we shouldn’t be shy and say that this is one of the most successful experiences of communication on EU affairs ever.

Football time: the genius of Fred "en jouant avec son 'toshop"

Positive feed-back

In fact, we don’t need to auto celebrate ourselves, because we have a lot of positive feed-back, from inside and outside the House.

The other EU Institutions consider us frontrunners, and want to exchange experiences. The last example: a communication officer from EuropeAid at the Commission said he is “a big fan of the Facebook editorial team of the Parliament” and he would like to share with us some best practices.

After the chat with Heidi Hautala on human rights on Facebook, her assistant wrote to me that the results were “very impressive” and that the MEP “was very happy to participate and would do it again for sure :)”, encouraging us to “continue the excellent work!”.

FB fans appreciate our work, and they expressed it many times. Just over the last week, Marcello Toni thanked us for organising the chats, Tremopoulos Michalis encouraged us to “keep up the good work!!”and Mark Valdam said he likes “funny organisations like the EP :-))”.
…and some secrets to reveal
So far so good. Of course we can do much better, and I’ll write another post on what we can and should do in the future. For the time being, just two little confessions.
1) It is a serious thing – When “the pillar” left, I didn’t sleep for one week. I was given more or less informally the responsibility of coordinating the magic Facebook team, and this gave me a good dose of stress. The page took off and grew thanks – among others – to the creativity, restless effort and “geekiness” of Christian. I don’t know if I can keep up, but I will do all my best because I believe that this communication platform has a great potential to get Europe a little bit closer to citizens, but also to get citizens closer to European decision makers, and maybe most important, to get Europeans closer to each other.
2) But you don’t have to take yourself (and the others) too seriously. Do you know how the best posts that we publish see the light? Normally we exchange tonnes of emails, and at some point somebody comes up with a funny, sometimes hilarious email, that the others – crazily enough – take seriously. And then it goes on Facebook and gets a lot of comments and “likes”: the magic of Facebook!

For me, the important thing is to keep this spirit alive and…enjoy your work!