The hairier the better!

Besides editing the German website, I worked on two projects last year. One was a comic strip that should explain the Euro crisis in simple terms. The other was a Facebook application for the Sakharov Human Rights Price. It was meant to give people a glimpse of what Facebook would look like without basic rights.

Both were quite different but had two things in common: they were supposed to go viral & they didn’t.

This post is meant to figure out why this happened or rather why it didn't happen, some sort of elaborate guesswork.

First Assumption: Negativity

This is a time of bad news. Your cousin cannot find a job, your friend’s uncle just lost his and you wonder whether your pension will be a worth anything in 30 years – people simply don’t need more negative messages.

Unfortunately, our video and our application do just that – spreading more bad news. The app let’s you choose among a number of ways to get in touch with friends and they all lead to failure: no birthday party during curfew; no Christmas greetings in an intolerant society; not even the freedom to choose what to do in your free time.

In the same vein our video talks about politicians spending lavishly until the financial crisis delivered a rude awakening. The Commission – the good guys – had warned them about it all along. But no one was listening. In short, we are pointing fingers and passing the blame.

Here is how I imagine the inner dialogue of a potential user:
“Wow, the Euro crisis in 1:03 min! My friends should see this! Whom do I send it first? —- Well, my mates in Greece have the crisis 24/7 anyway. —- My British friends? Na, they would only start fretting about the EU wasting money again. —- The German chaps? No way, I’d have to discuss austerity, honesty and Made in Germany for hours.”

Second Assumption: Outmoded

This one is comparable on the layman’s dream of hitting it big at the stock exchange. Every time you hear or read about a hot stock or a great investment it’s either a con or you are too late anyway, the big money has been made years ago.
Applied to Internet campaigns this means that viral campaigns were a thing of the early days of social media when MySpace was still bigger than Facebook and blogs looked more like your grandmother’s diary than the Huffington Post’s tidal wave of categories & subsections.

Third Assumption: Wrong Means

There is something awkward about a stock broker using gangster slang and a Prime Minister trying to communicate with young voters using vernacular from their text messages. The same here, the European Parliament is a serious and honourable institution that is clad in complicated procedures and jargon. No one “buys” viral content from us; people just don’t expect us to be surprising or shocking.

Fourth Assumption: Badly done

This one is the project manager’s nightmare: it could have worked, if only I had done my job properly. If the app was made of more interesting options, if the posts had been more striking, if the video was only shorter or funnier or greener or whatever…

Fifth Assumption: Wrong content

This is a variation of the one above, but with a happier ending. The problem is that this is politics and whatever we do, in the end we have to talk about tedious things like laws and procedure and democracy. If only we could use cats or babies. Things would be so much simpler.

Sixth Assumption: The Zen Way

Buddhism’s different schools all more or less evolve around the idea of life being a futile exercise and heaven a state where one is freed from ego and needs. Some belief it takes endless lives and constant practice to reach this. For Zen-Buddhists, however, it is more like an accident, a byproduct of meditation and practice.

I am not proposing a new cult of the viral, but I like the idea of it being an accident, something you cannot plan for and – even more romantic – that you cannot buy. A campaign that wants to be viral from the beginning would thus be doomed to fail. People will see the calculation and walk on.

Conclusions

We could simply stop trying to go viral.

We could keep on doing what we do and hope for a miracle.

Or, we look for really cute, young and hairy MEPs and just follow them around as they stumble through Parliament.

The brainstorming room encourages people to think outside the box. Here: Sofia, Martina, István and Annastiina

Anywhere

In the New World of Work you have a laptop and access to all documents you need. You can come to the office, but you are not obliged to. On Monday, for example, you are given a task and told to deliver it on Friday. Then, between Monday and Friday you are free to choose your place of work: office, home, internet café or bistro between two meetings etc. It is not important where you work, but you have to deliver the right results by the deadline. In NWOW, managers trust their employees to go out and get results

So you have the freedom to avoid spending hours in traffic in the peak hours and work from home in the morning. Or between two meetings with customers from different areas, you can work a couple of hours in the closest bistro with internet connection rather than spend all this time in traffic to and from the office. Or if your kid is ill, you can work from home instead of spending your day trying to find care solutions.

Anytime

In the NWOW flexibility is key. A presence management software enables people to see who is present (at the office, or home or maybe on the beach, but present online, that is available) who is busy, who is out of office. The same software offers the possibility to chat with colleagues that are 1 click away. The chat is good for quick questions about work and quick answers enables workers to go on with their work without walking to another office to get help.

"J'ai la réponse aux embouteillages. / Moi aussi." To convince people to switch to the new culture, the company used cartoons.

Old to New WOW

When they moved from the old premises and from the old culture, Getronics adopted digital paperless work. But they had an employee who adored paper and whose office looked like the company's archive. He could find any paper at any moment. He couldn't imagine life without paper. And now he works online. "Is he happy?" was our boss's first reaction, thinking of the bookworms in his own team. The transition was slow, was the answer. And he looks happy now.

The NWOW saves time. You don't need to physically check the meeting room to see whether it has a phone, internet connection or how many participants it can host. On the little monitor next to the door you have all these details, plus the schedule for the day, the name of the people who booked it and when it will become available. Of course, you can all these things on your laptop – at the office desk or home.

The new workspace architecture provides fewer desks than staff. However, "we are not chasing people away from the office" told us our hosts. The new office is an activity-based workspace: people come to the office to do something, not just to be there from 9 to 5. They come for example for a meeting, an intensive workshop or a great brainstorming session.

The walls of this room are not transparent so people can feel free to do what Evita did.

Annastiina only tried furniture that matched her clothes

While new ICT try to convince people to work from home, the presence of showers in the office seems to convey the opposite message.

Red frame means the meeting room is booked.

"Team" is one of the company's values, even if people work from different places - like home or café.

Dreaming is the first step towards innovation.

The Architects of the invisible do not only deal with space, but also with technology and culture of work.

This month in the EP Chamber there was also a small but noisy change.. the bell replaces traditional gavel!

From February plenary session onwards the start and conclusion of a speech, debate or vote will be announced with the sound of a bell by the the President and Vice-Presidents.. and, of course, it will be used in the most traditional way:  to keep order in the chamber!

After quite a few years of doing different EU-related jobs and passing the dreaded-by-many competition I found myself in WebComm in the very beginning of January. The first week had a still and eerie feeling to it as Brussels was almost empty and many were still on their Christmas holidays.

My first day started with a briefing by the personnel department and getting a blue backpack with plenty of different guides and papers to guide one through the first weeks. Afterwards we newbies went on to get our badges – and having one finally made being an official feel real instead of a distant dream. We even got those tinytiny calendars to put on the backside of our badges. That was it – I was ready to embark on my great adventure as a newly appointed WebCommer.

The first week passed by quickly as there was much to learn and plenty to read. I received my very own manual for writing stories – the tapas cookbook. Leafing it through was both educating and scary – I learned that writing a good synopsis is far from easy. And after synopsis, what happens then? The magic obviously: editing the story into more than twenty different languages. My colleagues are wizards with words and languages; they really bring stories to life and make them interesting for the general public.

I adore my own language Finnish. I studied it in the university (along with everything else, mind you). It is my native one and playing with its words has been a favourite hobby of mine for years. Still, writing with it is trickier than it sounds. Many of the English expressions if translated directly do not sound quite right. The 15 cases, the language structure and hunting elks and living in the woods for centuries make the language a vivid one with a special character. But new challenges thrill me – and I am more than up for this one!

After a month I am no longer the new girl in the unit. More people have arrived and now they are hitting the learning curve. I have not escaped the curve yet though – tweeting for one is an art I hope to master better soon.

When writing this, Brussels is freezing under a cold spell and with subzero temperatures. But I am still quite happy to be here as today the coldest spot in Finland had -40'C (the photo is from my parent's backyard, they had only -33'C).

2. Maltese is the only real lingua franca. Save for two or three coastal towns or well-to-do suburbs with SUVs parked in the driveway, you'd be hard-pressed to find places where English – rather than Maltese – is the lingua franca. Not that we'll kick up a fuss if you've been living here for thirty years and can't speak a word of it – and it is true we tend to intersperse our Maltese with English (and vice-versa) sometimes – but Maltese is unquestionably our language.

3. Not everyone speaks English. Even if English is an official language the percentage of people who can speak is slightly higher in Sweden and some other Nordic countries. English is a borrowed language we find useful and probably like more than we let on, but the only language we consider really ours is Maltese. According to Eurobarometer 100% of the Maltese population speaks Maltese and 88% can speak English. Portuguese is an official language in Macau and only 5% speak it, so things could be worse…

4. "Ever closer union" and "bringing Europe closer to the citizens" are well and good as slogans, but do they mean anything? The debates in our Parliament in Valletta, our laws*, and our courts are all in Maltese. How could the EU ever elicit to only use a foreign language in Malta – with all the colonial undertones that would suggest (yeah, we're not completely over that yet)? We've been an independent country for less than half a century, so such an attitude would be immediately perceived as arrogant, distant and colonial – not an ideal way to present itself to a member state.

5. The decision to include Maltese as an EU language was accompanied by a renewed pride in our language. Of course, we shouldn't overestimate the impact it had, but the Brussels seal of approval definitely led to increased legitimacy. As I said, we're an ex-colony so we're quite self-conscious of what foreigners think of us and all that.

Klingon is one of the official languages of the EU. Who knew?

6. It is cheap. How much does all this Maltese tomfoolery cost the European taxpayer? Administration costs account for roughly 5% of the EU budget. Of this a way smaller percentage is spent on languages and a minute portion of that, barely visible to the naked eye, is spent on Maltese (or other small languages – Iceland hurry up and join!). There's a great bargain if I ever saw one.

7. It looks cool. I mean – look at it. It is weird and unlike anything else. Sure, Hungarian or Estonian are pretty "unusual" too and some languages effortlessly introduce foreign words as an integral part of their own language, but how many European languages take elements from Italian languages (14th Century Sicilian and Neapolitan in particular), share their lot with semitic languages (phoenician, hebrew and an arabic so arcane it sounds like it is ten centuries old – which it is) and throw in some Norman French, contemporary English, Aragonese or lord knows what else when you're not looking?

–

So, yes, we've got our vernacular, we're quite fond of it, the EU helped increase its legitimacy and we expect to be able to use it. But the question remains. What does it really matter to you, a Romanian or a Spaniard, what goes on with my language?

Unsurprisingly, my answer is that it isn't all in vain. Couldn't we conversely ask when the EU spends money on a rail link in Galicia or co-finances a bridge between Romania and Bulgaria, what is it to us in Valletta? In such a case it isn't the utility of the Maltese language itself which is being questioned, but the notion of solidarity – something the EU was built on and which I personally feel is well worth defending.

The EU isn't all hunky dory, and yes some things need changing. But let us not start by overlooking or disrespecting smaller countries though the deligitimization of their language (a surefire way of telling a nation their identity is unimportant).

Besides, where does it all stop? Shall we deny Icelanders the language they're so proud of because there are even less of them? Shall we get rid of Estonian, Slovenian and Finnish? What then?

* together with an English version which is not legally binding

I can recall when the idea of promoting EP via social media was a new hot topic in the unit. Those days Obama had its successful web campaign and Web Comm was eager to follow. 

Team of stagiaires, we were responsible for series of election stories promoting EPs elections of 2009 and one of the stories was even dedicated to social media networking and to Obama's campaign.

I think I’m not totally wrong when saying that the idea of creating EPs own Facebook account was then also quietly boiling. People were considering how to serve this idea on higher level to get permission.

Obviously EP has now its Facebook account and not only – there’s active Twitter in all languages, accounts in Flickr, Youtube, etc. And this blog was there already three years ago – being like an example of how up to date is Web Comm in a governmental system like EP.

Around 0,3 million likes in Facebook, frequent daily updates in Twitter, Flickr account with notable archive: I see progress. And I can hear people saying that we have to be in line with whatever modern social networks there will start flourish.  (Another interesting question: is social media developed into a more stable phase or is it still going to grow and change in rapid way. But this is to be discussed for someone else.)

Today there's social media teams in the unit and more specialized people are dealing with special (web)projects. As the unit has gathered some expertise during the last three years I feel that I will get a sip from it. I modestly admit that I like it.

Thus the late great American author Kurt Vonnegut defines the moral of his seminal novel Mother Night.

It's about an American presumed Nazi propagandist during World War II. Only the reader knows he is in fact a double agent, recruited on happenstance by a secret agent for the US war department who approached him in a zoo.

The snag is that besides the reader, this agent is the only one who knows.

The book ends with the American, sitting in an Israeli jail awaiting not just trial, but desperately any sign from his mysterious recruiter that can attest to the true nature of his dealings with the enemy.

Why am I telling you this? Well, I made the infamous WebComm Christmas Video, which I'm sure is already be familiar to you all from several posts already published on this blog.

And here's a confession: I am no more a movie maker than I am a war criminal. I'm simply an ex-journalist – not even in television, but print media – who just happened to waltz in to the zoo known on Rue Montoyer 75 as "The Editorial Room".

In the Land of a Thousand Blogs

Egg on my face? No, just champagne on my shirt.

"What's in it for us?" someone asked.

Oh, they have to write a blog about us.

Now, here's where I should have kept my mouth shut. But as I had not yet learned the philosophy of my boss – known henceforth simply as Le Boss – I spoke up.

Nuh-uh, I said.

No good.

In the Land of a Thousand Blogs, the viral video is king. We should make a movie of their visit.

"Great", Le Boss said. "You do that!"

Growing up in public

I tried protesting most vehemently that I certainly don't have the chops to do it and besides, don't we already have two units with film equipment as well as skill in our DG?

Too late. A semi-cheap camera the size of a matchbox was bought and a pilot movie commissioned.

Oh, and now that we have a movie director in our unit – albeit untrained, untried and, as far as anyone knows, unskilled – couldn't he make the Xmas video? Just a simple matter of organizing and perfectly recreating 15 of the most famous TV show intros in the world, right?

And by the way, those videos you make of Facebook fans visiting Strasbourg? You know, the first movies you ever made in your life? They'll be scrutinized and picked over by 200 000+ Facebook fans and Lord knows how many more on Twitter.

Arthur Rambo and I

Right about now, anybody would start regretting ever walking into that zoo. Perhaps even consider fleeing the country, starting up with a fresh identity as a gunrunner on the Horn of Africa. Dear reader, I was no different.

See, WebComm is a very special place indeed. Whichever meeting you walk into, you are sure to be dumbest guy in the room. I know I am. The colleagues who work here are consistently the best and the brightest.

But this is not all there is to it, as I was about to find out when I sat down across from Le Boss.

I can't do it, I said, well aware of the high standard set by my colleagues, the annoying little do-gooders.

"I don't care if you fail", Le Boss replied, much to my surprise.

"Fail as often as you like. Just as long as you fail fast and you fail cheap."

'Tis the WebComm Way.

My love affair with a small brass man

His gamble paid off. It didn't fail – and it didn't not fail both fast and cheap.

What makes a movie maker? 'Cos after having pretended to be one for a couple of months, I've made four videos, half in collaboration with and colleague and composer supreme, Kurt, making them complete in-house productions. Thanks to some user-friendly fruit-referencing technology and Le Boss' sheer bloody-mindedness, the unit now has extended our working resources into movie-making.

And we'll keep the videos coming, you can be sure of that.

The hero of Vonnegut's story ends up awaiting trial in Israel. My ending is not quite as dramatic, but I don't mind telling you it was with great pride I ousted Mr. Spielberg as Best Director at the WebComm Movie Awards 2011.

Oh, I know it's all pretend. But that doesn't make this kiss any less loving or real:

True love?

Mr. Paul Boag's starting point depicts Web Teams in large organizations as being depressed and miserable.

So true

So cuuuuute.

To be perceived as experts, we have to act as experts.

1. Nothing is free, not even your internal Web Team
   So far you are probably perceived as a cost. Establish values in the use of individuals by applying internal charging.
   Associate a price to your work – even if the price is not charged. That way the client (who, in Mr Boag's view, is the internal user) is held responsible for the work undertaken.
   If something you do is going to cost amount X then the clients should think about their return of investment. Use metrics, such as cost by visitor, to demonstrate the quality or the flaws of a requested project. 
    
2. Be enthusiastic and never say no
   Web-people are often grumpy. I know, I am one of them. The reason Mr. Boag gets work (and is a good speaker all the same) is because he sounds over-excited. There is always something exciting in every projects, even in the most boring ones.
   This is also why you should never say "No" to a client (again, clients are your internal users, people asking you to do something for them within your big organizations). Clients have to work with you. "No" doesn't allow a conversation. There is nothing left after a No.
   Say: Yes! No matter how ridiculous the proposal is.And then, take your clients to a journey where they reject their own idea and adopt your solution.
   And when attacked, always take a moment before defending yourself. Don’t respond immediately when you are bursting to do so. If you wait, most of the time someone will step and defend you.

I don't have the slightest idea how this photo happens to be here.

• The radical attitude. Explode the committee and consult everybody in the Universe, gather stats to support the decision. It can work but it’s a lot of work.
• The conqueror's approach
  Find and meet each member of the Committee for one hour. Have a real and good discussion with all of them. Then collate everything and you become the only one who knows it all. When you come back with your set of recommendations in the committee's meeting, you can select and target who you're talking to for each point so everyone feels he’s been consulted, listened and considered.

1. Policy for necessary content. A content template is a good help. It provides a set of questions like « Who is this page aimed at? », « What’s the main message people should get from this page if they only stay on it for five seconds?» « What should the user do after having seen the page? »
   This will structure the client thinking.
2. Legacy of content (how to remove it)
   Convincing your clients that some of their beloved content should be removed from a website is an almost impossible task. It rips out their soul or something. The recommended measure is to establish a clear policy stating conditions under which a content cease to be accessible on your website. Said policy might involve some regular action from your clients, such as checking (and ticking a box in your CMS to prove they did so) their content every six months to grant their interest.