French Cancan: picture from http://www.ukstudentlife.com

Florent has already written about the most interesting things we've learnt in Paris. I will complement his points, while adding a general consideration: the French web scenario is well ahead in terms of trends, vision and professionalism. This summed to their elegant, sophisticated way of presenting things makes me say "Vive la France!"

It must also be a personal thing: I'm 100% fascinated by the 20-lines long paragraphs of French literature and unreadable philosophers like Foucault and Bordieu are my favourites. Basically, French have the ability to make simple things complicated. For example talking of "re-intermediation" and "decryptage" when describing the web, and even the most commercial advertisement agency speaks of "philosophie". Here some concepts I grabbed – transformed (machées, if you want) in trivial concrete proposals of what the Parliament could do of them.

From the Elysée

1. Exploit start-ups – Any of us has met at least once a young, brilliant geek who developed an interesting app. If a public institution makes use of them, it gives them free publicity. On the other hand, the institution gives a positive, modern image of itself. This synergy could be exploited by us, too. For example:  we tested Storify and we met its "inventor". Even if Storify isn't a start-up any more, I'm sure he would be more than happy to help us adjusting his product to our needs and giving our materials the max visibility.

2. Google + vs Facebook – The Elysée is going to test Google + to reach some specific audiences, such as the education sector. If Google + won't became the new FB, several people expect it to become the virtual place where you meet people that share your same interests. Not a generalist platform but a topic-related one. The guys at TBWA (see later) even suggested that we organise an Hang Out, as they are sure Google would be interested in helping us with that. Conclusion: we should keep an eye on Google +.

3) Cross-promotion with other institutions.  Tens of VIPs and high-level institutions' representatives visit the Parliament every year. Most of them are on Social Media and probably, like anybody else, mad to get a bit of visibility. We should get in touch with their web team in advance to organise a cross-promotion of our respective web presences. We will certainly do it with the Elysée next time Le President de la Republique is around.

From TBWA

4) "Brought to you by…" or how to hide advertisement everywhere. The case was Whiskas. Yes, those who sell cat's food. They were very low on the internet as well as in the real world. The agency suggested that, instead of talking of "itself", the brand should talk of cute cats. Now they have 137.00 fans on FB and the last post concerning a blind cat got over 5.000 reactions! The idea is: talk of things people are interested in, not of yourself! It's what we try to do on FB, but we can do even more. Another way to "hide" advertisement is to co-produce content for the newspapers.  The motto here is "advertisement is always unwanted. So if you're going to crash the party, at least bring some champagne". Good advice for our future campaigns?

"Advertisement is always unwanted. So if you're going to crash the party, at least bring some champagne"

Whiskas: how to talk of cat's food in an engaging way

5) Think "data base". The idea is: you recruit people on Facebook and then you engage them for your purposes. This requires, among other, getting their email address and knowing who they are: what do they like, what are they interested in… And "loyalise" them by feeding them with the content they appreciate, then engaging them in the action you want them to do (buying or, in our case, voting). It is CRM and, yes, ours is poor. If 2009 Elections were the occasion to think "Facebook", maybe 2014 will be the occasion to think "email"?

6) Interaction between online and offline. This is an old one but not yet fully implemented by the EP. TBWA presented the case of the UGC cinemas, who invited people to join their FB page via an integrated set of tools displayed in the cinemas. For us, this could work with the Parlamentarium, but also with the EP visitors and other hundreds of people passing by the EP every day.

La Netscouade

7) Target the online media. This is maybe the most important lesson of the day.  Florent has already explained the concept of "re-intermediation". I found it quite similar to the one of "digital authority". What was interesting for me is, the mediation is done by the "new" journalists: those who understand that what matters is not "being the first" in giving a piece of news, but rather analysing, explaining, curating the content, making it meaningful. "Raw information doesn't have any value anymore. Journalists who don't understand this, are destined to fail", said our guru. For us, this means that we have to try and communicate not only to "the citizen" but also to the new "online intermediators". This is a segment of the market that nobody is covering in the Parliament, or us or the press service. Producing good content is not enough: you have to sell it. Another "intermediator" could be MEPs: how to make them use our content? The starting point should be informing them… How? More food for thought.

"Raw information doesn't have any value anymore"

Slate.fr

9) Open the data! Johan is a journalist combining the good old virtues of traditional journalism and a deep understanding of the web landscape. When we asked how we could help him publishing more info about the EU, he said "give the money to recruit a journalist like Jean Quatremer!". This means he doesn't want our articles or pre-written material, but data, presented in an understandable and findable way.

Radio France

10) Live-tweeting is not a waste of time – Jöel encouraged us to live-tweet the important events. I think being more intensively present on Twitter is a way to reach that target, the "new" journalists of point 8, that are for the moment not too interested in the EU. Twitter is their favourite platform.

France TV Info

10)  THE new model of website? Nora works for the new website "France Tvinfo", that is making the buzz in France at the moment. Their home page is like a stream of news but the novelty is that it is composed by many voices: the official one, the users, social media, other media. It's a kind of Storify but interactive and live, with an editor "curating" the page and also intervening in the conversation. We have just changed our website, but as there is more to come, maybe "France tv info" could be a source of inspiration…

11) A general conclusion: break down the walls! Since the internet came, many barriers have collapsed. Those between different media, between on and offline, between journalists and citizens (bloggers), "websites" and "social media" etc.  Institutions, though, tend to be conservative and maintain in their organisation the old fronteers: the "web", the "press", the "events", the "policies" and the "communications" … For most of the things mentioned before, though, we cannot do alone. Shouldn't we – the Web Comm Unit – be those who are able to break down some walls that may make sense for organisational purposes but not for communications? The web is everywhere, and we can no longer think "Web Comm" and "the others", as the others cannot think of thier activities without a web dimension.

Some weeks ago, a little group of us went for a school trip at the European Commission, where our favourite geek-buddies showed us the wonderful tool they got to manage online reputation. No wonder that, big kids as we are, we got out of there saying "we want it as well!!".

Actually it has been a while that we talk of "online reputation management", sentiment tracking", "social media monitoring", etc.  It's one of the existential questions that doesn't make the Boss sleep, and apparently he received so many offers and proposals that he got confused. And that's why now he sends us to explore…
 

Engagor, the truth-teller?

There is no magic wand, this is clear. But all of us were positively surprised by the richness of content of the tool used by the Commission.

It is based on keywords: you select them, and it finds all the online content related to your query in a certain timeline. It presents different kinds of results, mainly quantitative – how many mentions, demographics, the most influential sources on a certain topic… – and some qualitative – like the trending topics, that show you which words are associated to your keywords (for European Parliament, it was Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Jean Marie Le Pen… but it was an unusual coincidence). The Commission colleagues said they are sceptical on sentiment analyisis because only humans can understand the real meaning of the words: for example, if an UK online magazine writes "the EU is great", you can be 80% sure it's a form of humour, but your "sentiment tracking" tool will consider it as a positive mention.

Let's tell the truth: in our boundless vanity, what we liked most of the tool were the results. To our great surprise, we discovered that, for example, the "European Parliament" had more mentions (almost double if my eyes don't lie) than "Barroso" and "European Union" in relation to the the State of the Union address.

This is how Twitter Counter sees @Europarl_EN

We also discovered that among the most influential twitterers on EU affairs, there where our friends @Europarl_EN and @Europarl_FR. But the most unexpected news was that the "famous" video on economic governance (which received rather mixed reactions) was still among the most seen and shared Parliament's videos.

Three reasons to monitor your online reputation

One: not to look like an idiot when the Commission's colleagues show you data that you should be supposed to know.

Two: not to manually count all the tweets, retweets and mentions of 22 Twitter accounts when your director asks you a report on the online coverage of the State of the Union (it happened).

Three: to have (nicely presented) results to sell when we ask for more money and more staff for our projects. (note: when I say results,  I mean real results, not what we sometimes call "results" in the public administration, ie: "it has been a very successful campaign" or "we have produced XYZ press releases").

The list could be much longer – to anticipate trends and see what people are interested in, to identify key multipliers and credible sources, to kill innaccurate rumours on time… but you will find much more on this in blogs and other more authoritative sources.

I like the Archivist for the nice graphic presentation of the results

Do we have to buy the toy?

Engagor and other similar tools combine a lot of other services available for free online. Actually, there are many of them out there, and colleagues from other institutions recommended a few this week at the Europcom conference: Archivist, Tweet reach, Tweeter counter, Social Mention, Trendrr, Trendsmap among others. So, do we have to buy one?  No, but my feeling (confirmed by Jon Worth at Europcom) is that if you want to use the online free tools available, you have to combine them in order to obtain reliable and usable results. So, it's more time and resources consuming, but feasible.

Basically, you can see it as a matter of choices: a complete, comprehensive tool or some more colleagues? Boss, what do we get as a Christmas present? :)

"Estate Liberi!": volunteering and studying on the properties confiscated to mafia. Picture by Elena Tubaro on Flickr: http://bit.ly/psmSBL

Last week we wrote several articles on volunteering on the occasion of the II Youth Convention on Volunteering. A recurrent assumption on voulunteering is that you “help the others”. Allow me to disagree: for me volunteering is, first of all, helping yourself. And – at best – some trees.

Last year’s project to spend a month in Burkina Faso doing a theatre activity was exotic enough to attract the curiosity and even the envy of many friends. This year’s choice, on the contrary, had become the big joke: “and you will spend your summer holidays working in a mafia field in Sicily, right?”, they were asking with unmasked irony.

They had almost managed to convince me, and the day I learnt that my inscription hadn’t been registered (just two days before the start of the camp) I wasn’t too sad. But then they called me to tell that “where 30 can sleep, 32 can fit too”: mmmh, good start, I thought. But the experience exceeded all my expectations, and I will show you how volunteering has first of all helped myself, at least in three regards.

The trees, the nature, the land I love

Basically the idea was: working on a field of orange trees and olives confiscated from a mafia family a long time ago, abandoned for twelve years, now given to a cooperative of 5 people that obviously don’t have the resources to take care of the 95 Hectares assigned to them.
The task was cleaning up each tree from all the weeds and bushes that were suffocating it. They told us that when they were given the land, they couldn’t even see where their land started and where it ended. Now, after one year, you could understand if the trees were olives or oranges, but not much more. And still, they were alive.

We woke up every morning at 5:00 (4:30 when it was your turn to prepare the breakfast), walk to the fields and attacked the trees at 6:00. One of us would pass the rake to take cardoons and asparagus away, the other would cut the dead branches, and another one would remove the grass just under the tree. And then the orange tree would suddenly look like a tree again, breathe again, and even – what a miracle! – show new fruits and leaves, liberated by the vine that covered them.

Meet the Cooperative Beppe Montana: 95 Hectars, 5 people and 1 tractor. Photo by Vincenzo Bevivino

Being 30 Italians in few square meters, you can imagine that the noise was not missing: somebody would sing, another would do impressions, and most of us were chattering and learning of each others’ lives. In the meanwhile the sun would rise, and it’s difficult to describe the beauty of the light on the tree leaves, the bitter scent of the green oranges, and the variety of colors that this earth would get in the different hours of the day.

(Re) starting from the land to solve some of the most urgent problems of the planet: it’s a conviction I had before, and it got strengthened after this experience. That’s why, every tree I was liberating from the weeds, I would feel a bit freer too, and every single drop on my back would sweat happiness and satisfaction.

A “s*** country” plenty of beautiful people

In the afternoon, after a good lunch and a long rest, we had several meetings with people committed in the fight against mafia. I thought that thanks to this I would learn more about mafia. But it wasn’t the most relevant: what I learnt is – there are so many people, simple people, people like you and I, very far away from the news on some “excellent arrest” or other Padrino-style scenes, that fight their daily war against mafias and beyond mafia: against corruption and illegality, against the connivances that hold together the system, against indifference and silence.

Impressive people, starting from the ones managing the cooperative where we were hosted: young or very young, with a simple, common goal. Working in their land, and don’t be obliged either to go abroad or to abide by the mafia’s rule. Having a clean job: it’s a normality that in some places is still a very courageous dream. In the same way as it is opening a private company and refusing to pay a local “tax” to the mafia, or to do your job as a true journalist and not as a servant. As it is working with the thousands of immigrants landed in Sicily after an unutterable journey from Libya or Tunisia.

Even if some think that Italy is a “s*** country”, there are people that love it so much that want to change it.  I met energies that I have never known abroad, flowers that can blossom only in the desert: a mix of courage and lightness, of commitment and joy, of willingness and naiveté, which gave a boost to my ideals and to the belief that change is possible. That it’s already happening.

Men are not islands

26 August, Catania Airport – We had been told to be there at 11:00 to meet “the group”. When I saw this colorful mix of sleeping bags, guitars and backpacks my instinctive reaction was “Run NOW – you’re still on time!”.

Proud to be tired! Photo by Elena Tubaro on Flickr: http://bit.ly/pveCbZ

The first night I went to bed (in my room shared with my boyfriend…and other 15 people) quite early, trying to prepare for the 5 AM alarm. Around midnight I was opening the window to shout against the dozen of people playing bongos, guitar and maracas just below my head. I said to myself “They will get tired soon, too”. I was wrong. The second night, I played cards till 1:00 AM. On the third, everybody could listen to my singing talent. The fourth we finished the beers in the fridge, and the fifth I was already very sad at the idea of leaving them in a couple of days.  The last one, we danced till morning and then we slept all together under the stars.

It must be between the third and the fourth day that the idea crossed my mind: men are not islands; we are not done to live separate. The dimension of community is a natural one. It’s true – you give up some individual freedom – the right to sleep when you wish, for example. But you discover that you don’t need to sleep 8 hours, because there are other energies – such things as enthusiasm and joyfulness – keeping you awake.

Conclusion: the invasion of the red t-shirts

One day we went to a small village to make an excursion. The organizers had asked us to wear the red t-shirt they had given to us, exposing the name of the association and the project we were participating to (I hate wearing t-shirts with things written on them, by the way). When we arrived to the main square, locals were starring at us, with our t-shirts, our quest for “gelato”, our noise and our laughs. Several people, old, young, men, women, got close to ask who we were, what we were doing. Some thanked us; some said “you are the energy that will change this”.

Right in that moment, the time of a gelato, I felt blessed by this incredible human feeling called hope. Do you know anything else to help yourself better?!

PS: if you are interested in the summer camps, consult the list here… and get ready for next year ;)

The last born on the EP's Facebook page: available at the address http://mep.epfacebook.eu

In the beginning, it was ‘Democracy in America’

The idea of the “MEPs Tab” is one year and a half old. We got the inspiration from the Congress, the first to publish a complete list of their members with links to their FB pages.

Christian, our first and inimitable Facebook coordinator, was so enthusiastic at the time that he asked and got from Facebook the name of the US agency who had realised it.

I still remember calling these people and wondering why they would never pick up the phone, to realize only afterwards that I was calling in the middle of the night. When I finally managed to talk to them, they sent us a wonderful list with all series of apps, all of which seemed fancy, modern and – very interestingly – cheap.

Christian and I went with the proposal nicely printed to the Bosses, after having studied all the arguments in favour of establishing further contacts with the mentioned agency.

The golden rule, aka “Framework Contract”

Duh! A little matter of public procurement rules… (Bosses are into that kind of stuff.) You can’t just go and find someone who can do what you want doing, however good and/or cheap they might be. But fear not, there was an option: we work through our Framework Contract (for the outsiders: a sort of contract – awarded after a call for tender – that sets up an ongoing relationship to the same contractor, to whom you can then go for specific services covered by the contract – say “internet services”).

Christian establishing first contacts with the American agency who had developed the Congress members' Tab

First option: we asked the agency in the Framework Contract for a price to build what we wanted. The reply was a rather (for us) expensive estimate just for the conception of the Apps. Hmmm.

Ask the geek!

Things you learn in the job: sometimes asking a price from a contractor is just a way of working out what you really need is something – or someone – slightly different.

The Tab allows users to search by political party, nationality or name of the MEP. The most challenging part of the project was the manual collection of data for the 736 MEPs.

Whence option two: how about an in-house developer to work with our team for a while to make our concepts reality? More effective, quicker, productive and, yep, much cheaper! “Love your geeks!” we had heard; now was the time to turn theory into practice.

Selection was potentially tricky, but fortunately we have friends who speak geek, and they helped us find the right guy for us.

As soon as he came (last December) we put him to work hard, as the ideas on all the Apps that we “absolutely need” had considerably multiplied in the meantime. I will skip the months spent engineering the Chat app, on which Mathieu (yes, for it is he our beloved geek) has said enough.

The Birth of an App

In February, we started working on the MEPs Tab. “This is an easy one”, Mathieu said after the chat experience. I have the impression he is an incurable optimist, as he keeps saying this every time, despite his 8 months at the EP.

A window opens to show how many fans/followers each MEP has, and allows users to "like" them directly from the Tab.

It had to be simple: we just wanted the list of the MEPs and the link to the their FB page. Like the Congress. Yes, but the EP is more complex: you have 27 member states, and then how do you know which is their political party? Ok: we need a search engine. Criteria: political party, country and name. Easy, clear and neat.

We asked the trainees to collect the data. It’s an inglorious task and we know (and we thank them for having done it), but there were no previous data bases on the 736 MEPs on Facebook.

They took it seriously. Well, maybe some less seriously than others (legend has it that one trainee advised his colleagues: “put whatever you want, they’ll never check!”). Result: when we did check the data the first time, we found out that a Spanish MEP was, according to the list, a breathtaking blond living in California.

They had to do it again, at which point they naturally hated us. In the meanwhile, Mathieu was struggling with CODICT. Don’t worry, I had no idea either what CODICT was, and my life went on. FYI, it’s a database containing all the official MEP data for the Parliament’s website. We needed it to get the complete list of MEPs and be sure that when they change, move to another group or back to their country, our FB Tab is updated too.

DG ITEC (the Big Geeks of the House) were very unconvinced about giving access to the data, one day “for security reasons” (you know WebCommers, they are all lunatics with murderous tendencies), another day “because the information is private” (just, um, that it is published on the internet). After a couple of months we got our access. I still don’t know what Mathieu had to give in exchange…

Better than the Congress. At least more complex

We had also decided that, as we say in Italian, “as we were at the ball, let’s dance”. The Tab was becoming more and more complex: we would add the search criteria and then, why don’t we also show those who are on Twitter, since we collected the data? Yes, but you cannot mention FB and Twitter without linking to them. And so on…

(What I understood from this work is that to design a web application you need a talent that’s useful for other thousands of things in life: logic and structure to give order to complexity. But then you need to give the complexity a very simple form, and this is why you need good graphic designers. So thanks to them as well, because they are 100% responsible for the look-good-feel-good of the App, and they devoted time and energy to it in a very busy period for them).

We had thought the work was over with the final check of names, links and pictures by the editors, each in his or her own language. Eh beh no. We had several other little issues – like caps in the Spanish and Irish names, for example, that’s why we finally went for the “all capital” option – before presenting the product to the Big Boss, our director.

The Boss of It All

Thanks to the Tab we discovered that 68% of MEPs are on FB and 38% on Twitter. In total they have more than 1,5 Million fans/friends on FB.

And the Boss liked it very much. So much that he decided to show it to the Boss of the Boss, our Director-General. Who also liked it very much, and approved the idea of sending an email to the all MEPs concerned, to inform them of the existence of the tool. In their own languages, of course.

There, we earned more hate, this time from all our colleagues, who had to translate the letter. I got mad dividing the MEPs per nationality, to discover only then that languages and nationalities are not the same thing, for the obvious presence of very sensitive linguistic minority in almost each country of the EU, of course duly represented in the EP.

July 6: birth of 14th Dalai Lama (and 1st MEPs Tab)

Finally the email got out (on July 6 2011, to be exact). The EP also issued a press release. And we could finally publish the App on our page. MEPs liked it, geeks liked it, journalists were curious to count how many MEPs of their country have FB, how many are on Twitter etc. The general facebook public seems slower to catch on. I can understand it’s not their first thought in the morning to go and check if their MEPs are on FB. Still, I think it’s an useful tool to easily find European politicians and reach them or just understand how do they use internet in their political activity. A step more in the direction of transparency and accessibility, so needed in politics and at European level in particular.

The ultimate goal: integrating more and more MEPs' and EP online presence.

For us, it was a great relief and satisfaction to publish this. I personally check it at least three times per day :)

But what is the moral of the story? First, that when you really want something, you normally obtain it, but it might take a while. Second, that the satisfaction is much bigger when you share it with people who contributed to its realization, each one with his own role and ability.

Special thanks to Christian and Mathieu for opening and closing this circle. And to all the others who have shared pleasure and pain of this last adventure. I’m already looking forward for the next one…

Some of the comments from the first day. "Fans" were using pictures of Assad or the Syrian flag and copying/pasting the same messages several times

What happened

As chance would have it, on Tuesday 10 May I was in the Strasbourg hemicycle following the debate on the EU foreign policy with Lady Ashton. My interest was the EU position towards Bahrain, which was the previous week’s case on the FB page of the Parliament. But the most important and controversial point of the debate was Syria, on which  the EU had just imposed sanctions.

Coming back to the office I found several phone calls and emails. Alarm! During the previous night we had been spammed by some hundreds of pro-Syrian regime messages praising president Bashar al-Assad and the Army (yes, those who killed so far more than 800 people in the streets and tortured at least 8000) and attacking Western media and politicians for mingling with internal politics.

They were posting multiple comments each, with copied/pasted sentences (the most common “We love our president Assad”) under every single post of the EP page, starting from at least the beginning of April. Clearly a spamming action.

How to react?

We immediately informed our spokepersons as well as colleagues in the Foreign affairs business, and contacted Facebook to better understand what was going on.

In the meanwhile Karolina, our new 007, had found a FB page called “Syrian struggle” that was calling on fans to attack ours as well as other Western media and political pages on FB. We also read some articles explaining that there is an ongoing fight between FB and the Syrian government, responsible not only for spamming but also for fake security certificates and for torturing some activists in order to get their FB password and infiltrate their profiles. The articles were reporting suspicions that the Secret services or the Telecoms ministry were behind these actions.

After a couple of hours we published our reaction. In the meanwhile, the word had spread on FB and Twitter: “EP FB page under spamming attack by pro-Assad posts”.

The news rebounded quickly on the traditional media. A friend called to tell us that she heard it on Radio France International. Afterwards, we realised that the news was reported by over 150 online articles only in English and even more in French. Including Libération, the Washington Post and even the Bangkok Post (!).

A small parenthesis. I find very interesting the media reaction: it was the first time that our social media drew the attention of the media without passing through our traditional media channels (press releases, etc). Of course the involvement of our press people has been key, but they spontaneously opted for Twitter when choosing how to communicate what was happening on FB, and journalists quoted our FB post as a reliable source, with quotation marks. But this online-offline circle could be the subject of another post.

Going back to the spam attack, it happened again and more massively the following night and over the weekend, with thousands of messages every time. We were, of course, not the only victims of the attack. We felt almost honoured to be in the good company of the White House, the Washington Post, Nicolas Sarkozy and Oprah Wifrey.

We decided to cancel all the comments and ban the users, but it is very difficult to do it in a timely manner as the attacks were mostly at night. After some quiet days today 23 May they started again, probably in coincidence with the new wave of sanctions from the EU, this time personally targeting, among others, Bashar al-Assad. This week we temporarily closed our page to all posts from Syria, hoping for a better solution in the next days. We continue to be in touch with FB and to follow the situation on the media. We will soon fully brief the upper levels of our administration and the politicians with a complete dossier on this case.

From the Syrian side

We cannot say exactly what and how is happening, who is behind the attacks and how are they done. An article in the New York Times and another in the Washington Post this week explain how the regimes in Syria and other Arab countries are using the same instruments of the rebels: the “Repression 2.0“. It’s really scary.

From our side, in the beginning we thought it was a machine-made attack. We couldn’t believe that human beings could be able to post up to 800 comments in 6 minutes. After we mentioned it in our post, though, Syrians came to tell us that “they were not robots” and even left their coordinates to prove that they were real people. Now we tend to think that it is an organised movement, with a lot of fake profiles, but not necessarily generated by bots.

Indeed, the “Syrian struggle” page gives precise orders on when to attack (at night), and when to stop (in the early morning), as well as the messages to copy/paste on other pages (we discovered how Google Translate can be useful in such cases!). FB removed their page every time we (and, I guess, others) have flagged it up, but they keep opening a new one. At the moment of writing we are at its 13th version.

After the “fans” have done their job (attacked the targeted pages), they get back on that page and write comments like “done”. Yesterday, after we blocked Syrians, they wrote that “the European Parliament page has been shut down. Victory!”. But they promised to monitor it and be ready to come back if we open it again. (Of course we didn’t close the page, it’s just currently invisible  in Syria. Unfortunately, it is impossible at present only to block comments from a particular location while leaving the page visible, an issue we have raised with Facebook).

The “Syrian struggle” pages are linked to the “Syrian Electronic Army” website, that also manages Twitter and Youtube accounts. We still don’t understand how official this page is and what are the links between it and the Syrian government. What is sure, is that there is nothing spontaneous in the proclaimed “love” of the spammers for Bashar al-Assad.  FB is being used as just another weapon of the dictatorship, together with tanks, rifles and torture.

The social media war

When I went to Syria, less than 2 years ago, Facebook was blocked. The regime was afraid of the freedom of the net, as in many other non-democratic countries. But later dictators understood the role of social media in the Arab spring, so they opened the sites better to control them. The repression in Syria is being played with all the possible instruments, including the very same of the rebels: digital media.  FB – after playing a central role in the freedom movements in the Arab world – is now also a weapon in the hands of the regime.

I hope that this entire story will finish very soon. Not the spam, but this horrible, dirty war in Syria. And that the EU is ready to take a stand against the “Arab Tiananmen”, as an MEP put it. From our side, we can survive with some spam on our page. We would just like to hear the joyful, brave voices of freedom coming from Syria, and not those of a gloomy, grim dictator and his obsessive supporters.

The Strasbourg Cathedral is said to be the highest in Europe, but I never managed to find out if this is an urban legend...Photo by Creeping D. on Flickr

Unfortunately I often have the impression that the European Parliament is more known to the outside world for its mass migration between Brussels and Strasbourg than for the laws it makes. This weekend I think I found the solution to the two seats dilemma…

What if we all moved to Strasbourg? The quiet Alsacian capital would gain the international flavour which it lacks today, and we would still have our friends close to us (tell the truth: all of us have very good friends in the EP).

How did I get to this conclusion? By spending the weekend in Strasbourg on the occasion of the Open Days on Sunday, where I took care of the Web Comm stand together with Thilo.

My five reasons to move to Strasbourg

On Saturday I met one of my best friends who lives in Switzerland and came to see me with her 5 month-old baby. This is already the first advantage of Strasbourg: so close to Milan and many other places where I have friends and family. It’s really at the heart of Europe and thanks to French trains you don’t need to fly.

The weather was extraordinary and we walked all day with the baby. We wondered around between the stunning cathedral, the Petite France area, some French ‘bo-bo’ bars, the “quais” greener than ever and a few very interesting shops. What a beautiful city, quelle classe! All clean and at the same time decontracté, not too posh, not too popular, not too touristic and – most important – all the centre is dedicated to pedestrians and bikes…Second reason to be in Strasbourg: everything looks nice, even people!

We had a wonderful lunch based on typical French crêpes and in the evening a fully acceptable pizza in a lovely square, dining outside without a single car passing by. On Sunday the dinner consisted on a very tasty Thai dish in the middle of Petite France, listening to the water falling and – again – not a single car within a radius of 500 m. Third reason to live in Strasbourg: good food and not only French ;)

Yesterday I worked at the Open Days and I came to the EP by boat…what light, what landscape, what a dream! The fourth reason to be in love with Strasbourg is its nature and the water everywhere. Cities with water for me have 100 points more than the others.

I could continue but I’ll stop at five and I’m sure that with this last one I will definetely convince my colleagues. In front of the Parliament, just 3 minutes walk away, there is a huge open-air swimming pool with a lot of grass to lie out and take the sun, 3 minutes away from the Parliament! How could I have been unaware of that for over 7 years?! I promise that I will make up for lost time. During my next weekends in Strasbourg. Or when they will decide to move the Parliament here, following my humble suggestion.

PS: It seems that I’m not the only one thinking like that. Have a look here.

From democratization to accreditation

The Oxford Word of the Year 2009 was “unfriend”. According to Edelman‘s media guru Steve Rubel, that was this week in Brussels at the Centre, this word marks the passage from the “democratization” of the internet to the “accreditation” era.

Social media in the Arab revolutions: something from the past?!

People don’t know how to survive in the jungle of information online, and they are turning to experts and specialists to guide them. If in 2006 the main source of trust was “people like me, my peer”, in 2010 academic, experts, CEOS, NGOs and government representatives gained positions.

Five ingredients for success

This is far from being the end of social media, but it means that to be credible and influential you need a fair dose of “digital authority” on traditional as well as “tradigital“, owned and social media. How can organisations like ours can achieve this? Rubel proposes his 5 ingredients for success:

1. Elevate the experts: identify the credible voices in your organisation and motivate them to enter the dialogue with the public.

2. Curate the content. “This is the age of the digital curator: those who can separate art from junk”. Only way to make content relevant: order, structure, connect, contextualise.

3. Use visualizations and infographics, as this is today’s language.

4. Put stuff where people can find it. Even the most boring documents can find some readers if placed on the right hubs.

5. Ask and answer. As social media become more and part of the media landscape, better to have 100 people using them at 1% rather than one person at 100%.

Where do we stand?

The very inspiring conference made me think that we, “the European Parliament” , are not that bad on the way of the new “accreditation era”, even if we shouldn’t forget that the “democratisation” is not completed yet. We shouldn’t take it for granted, as we are not Obama, Europe is not the US, and we still encounter much resistance to the idea of giving voice to the people. We shouldn’t forget, either, that, just around the corner, in the Middle East, there are people who die and are condemned to death for taking the floor.

Nonetheless, I think we have a certain digital authority thanks to those that Steve (Clark, OUR guru) calls the mix of “old” values (credibility, objectivity, neutrality, accuracy) and “new” ones (listen, debate, be open to admit your mistakes, don’t take yourself too seriously).

While a lot of people around us struggle to achieve a digital credibility, I think that we have some good ground to build on, at least on social media.

But another idea that emerged in the conference is that social media cannot make it all. They are part of a media mix that will continue to exist. If we are not too bad on social media, are we good enough on the rest? One of the biggest challenges is, in my view, is the new EP website we are working on. We should all become digital curators instead of editors or press officers. We should produce more infographics and visual content and less articles. We should distribute the content produced by the EP on the platforms where it is relevant. And we should integrate social media as a part of our daily work.

We know the lesson by heart. Are we ready to pass to action?

Collection of glasses by Billy Wilson Photography on Flickr

There is a strange alchemy for which during the plenary week, even if you are in Brussels and in principle not particularly concerned by the hemycicle’s activities, the strangest things happen. This week we saw it on FB. On one hand, fans are growing vertiginously. On the other, trolls, spammers, and today even pedophiles seem to have found their home on our page, and they don’t want to leave. “It had to happen sooner or later”, Steve says. I guess we have been a bit spoiled till now.

Giving the numbers…

A short update, as it’s a long time since we last gave the numbers. From the last time, fans have grown by more than 40.000 (more than 50% in 6 months), reaching over 120.000 this week. We have been promoting our page on Facebook in a modest way, and are very happy to see that a great many people who come across us the first time click on “like” and come back for more.  

Each post has in average 150.000 impressions (times it is shown on FB), with peaks of almost 300.000. Only a few posts get less than 200 interactions, with peaks of 800 (international adoptions, “happy new year”), and almost 1000 with the post on the liberation of Aung Saan Su Kyi. In december, we hit the record of 3,7 Million impressions…and Janaury will be more.

This week, during the plenary, we got almost 2500 interactions in total, and one post got 275.000 impressions (after this, impression stats on FB went haywire, we hope it will be fixed soon).

What works well on FB?

The most successful updates are either the controversial ones (i.e. Wikileaks), or those who stimulate curiosity and reactions (quizzes), but also the mobilising issues (“stop to human trafficking!”): people feel involved and click “like”.

Unsurprisingly, what also works are good or surprising pictures, direct questions (“where are you from?”: almost 400 answers), and -discovery of the week – people LOVE prizes.

To this we have to add that the Parliament’s FB family grew a bit: Mathieu, an FB developer, joined the team two weeks ago and will be with us for some months. Thanks to his super-efficiency, we went online with a new landing tab for the first plenary of the year, and there are many more surprises to come in the near future…

Of course, not always does quantity mean quality. And if Mark Zuckerbeck couldn’t get to 500 Million friends without making  a few enemies, the Parliament cannot have 120.000 fans without some trolls.

Of trolls, spammers and flooders

As Kostas had previously noticed, our page, apparently, became the favourite one of a angry bunch of lonely people that didn’t find any better place to give vent to their frustration than on the Parliament’s FB.

They enjoy polluting almost every post with rabidly anti-EU speech, full of demagogy, aggressiveness, hate and insults, not to mention plenty of quite unpleasant language. Reasoned political argument it is not. Their speciality is to distract others’ attention from the topic proposed, with subjects that go from the salaries of the EU officials, to the comparison between the EU and several dictatorships. But their favourite one is paedophilia. They enjoy mudding their political enemies with this repelling accusation.  This gives you the stature of their arguments.

This week was a hard one for us, the “community managers”. We had to cancel over 30 insulting comments from the same person, who posted 70 under the same post.  And, we had to threaten another one to ban him from the page if he didn’t stop with his filo-peadophile provocations. I don’t want to report these things here, but to have an idea you can look at this and this post. Very tiring and a bit frustrating for us, imagine for the other fans, the “silent majority” as Florent calls them.

How to behave?

So, now come the questions: a) Should we be happy that the page is going well and consider trolls and dwarves as an avoidable price for the success? b) If not, how should we react? Ignore them, as we most of the time do, answer (but this proved very risky) or be tougher, and decide to start cancelling comments and banning profiles? Something we don’t particularly want to do, but will the day come when we will be obliged to?

PS: The great thing of working in a team is, among others, that when you’re feeling a bit on the down side, somebody can always help to perk you up, and the other way around. When I started writing this post I was a bit depressed, but after a short phone converstion with Steve I felt much better, I hope it’s reflected in the post!

This book is based on the investigation by a prosecutor into the mysterious death (“plain accident” according to the official version) of Enrico Mattei, CEO of ENI, the National Fuels company in 1962; the successive death of a journalist investigating Mattei’s death; and the tragic end of Pier Paolo Pasolini, one of the best, brightest and bravest minds Italy has ever had.

The hero for me is Pier Paolo Pasolini, rather than Julian Assange

Pasolini is said to have been killed in 1975 by a 17 year old boy, in the middle of a “gay quarrel” in the shabbiest periphery of Rome. The inquiry on his death was archived in less than 15 days, and the young boy put in prison. The book explains that Pasolini at that time was writing a novel about Enrico Mattei. And that one already written chapter was missing from the manuscript. Probably the chapter concerning his death.

The thesis of the public prosecutor, and of the journalists who wrote the essay, is that Mattei had been eliminated to favour his number two, Eugenio Cefis, the founder of a massonic group of power that was allegedly also behind the so-called  ”tension strategy” in Italy. This is the way in Italy it is called the supposed support of some deviated parts of the State to the terrorist groups in the 70-80ies. The thesis of those who believe in this version of the history, is that these deviated parts of the State were supporting “the tension” to keep the country under alarm and under control, and to legitimate methods that were not always 100% democratic.

The book supports the theory, that is also Pasolini’s, that these “occulted powers” were orienting the terroristic accusation, first against the Communist, then against the Fascist.

Conspiracy theories? Maybe. I have not enough knowledge of facts and history to judge. But these kind of theories in my country are not original at all. If you ask to an Italian of average culture “who put the bombs in Piazza Fontana, Milan?” it’s very likely that he will tell you “we still don’t know”, despite the fact that all the official investigations were closed many years ago now. If we follow the book thesis (and others’) Italy has a parallel story running next to the official one, and determining it: “a wrong story”, they call it quoting singer De André wrote.

True or false? Not up to me the final judgement, but to judges and historians. The only thing I wanted to share here, are my feelings on Wikileaks. I don’t emphatize much with the furore pro or against Assange. For me, the only important thing behind his work, as anybody else in any way committed to “information”, should be a quest for truth, for how partial, incomplete, and fragmented it may be. In this sense, there are many Assanges, not least Roberto Saviano who came to Brussels this week.

The question that politicians should ask themselves is not how to arrest Assange, but how to adapt to this changing environment, and accepting that internet can do things like the (big) one Wikileaks did. As for Assange&co., they should ask themselves if they are really serving their committment to truth, or rather they are instrumentalising it to serve the “anti-” system, “anti-America”, “anti-everything” discourse, that would only damage truth (and their own credibility).

Also, the cables revealed till now seem to me really light stuff, compared to what I have just read about my country, and that sounds so hard to believe. But, precisely for that reason, it pushes you into reading more, to understand better, make up your own mind, beyond political manipulation that are so common in my country.

That is why, as far as I am concerned, I rather prefer to continue reading books like the one mentioned above, rather than American ambassadors’ opinions on Sarkozy-Merkel-Berlusconi&Co. Opinions that, fortunately, I didn’t have to wait for Wikileaks to form by myself.