Thinking allowed
Twitter in Wonderland
We started Tweeting before June 2009 elections. We tweeted information about the election dates, which were not the same in all countries, about the results, during the electoral night. At that time the newborn Europarl_XX accounts (change XX for the 22 language codes) where just learning how to walk, taking the first steps in a [...]
Killing Smartness… with Smartphones: the disenchantment of memory?
Do you remember the way you used to look at your grandfather? An old man with some leftover white hair, carefully combed to one side in order to disguise the bald spots on his head. Perhaps he would sit in his armchair, smoking an old pipe, blowing grey smoke into the air. Didn't he convey [...]
It’s the quality, stupid
The keywords are “engage”, “inform” and “access”
The War of the Bubbles, or: 1999 Was a Bad Year
I never got her name but I will always think of her as 1999. 1999, the year I went to journalism school and the faculty told us students not to buy a computer, but to invest that money in a driver's license instead. The 15 computers the university had bought and kitted with this new [...]
Discovering Europe through Erasmus
France might be one of the better places for meeting the French, but it also works a treat for making friends from outside the Hexagone. When I left Paris in 1999 after studying there for a year, I did so with an address book spanning the breadth of the European continent. It didn't involve me [...]
Working with the system – A master class with Paul Boag
I was lucky enough to be invited by our colleagues from the European Commission at a Master Class given by Paul Boag. Mr Boag is an expert in many things, including web design. The topic of the class was how to work with the system when you have a web-something job in a big organization. [...]
Frankly about lingua franca
Out of different practical reasons EP’s Facebook page similarly to this blog is being updated only in English (apart from casual insertions in other languages). Our fan community is continuously and quickly growing but how long can we justify our monolingual existence in the main social network of the world? And should we at all? [...]
Togo or not Togo…
This is a blog post I was supposed to write some time ago… But somehow I couldn't find the time to do it last week. Now I sit comfortably in my chair in lovely Strasbourg (yes, it's plenary once again), watching the Christmas market under the snow outside (or almost) and I can remember those [...]
Four gurus and six ideas to improve our web presence
With some other colleagues dealing with social media and the Parliament web presence, we went for a two-days trip to Paris to meet some geeks. Or, to be more precise, to meet web experts, public institutions webteams and web-journalists. A highly valuable school trip which gave some ideas about how we could further improve the [...]
A speaker, a video, a strategy
Like most of the EU Communicating Brussels Bubble, I watched the excellent speech given by Simon Anholt. I wasn’t at the EuropComm 2011 opening session, I only showed up at the workshops where I started to hear about how this speech was great, witty and inspiring. The following weekend saw the video being shared on my teammates’ facebook [...]
Here’s a nettle. Grab it.
Imagine if, when you get out of your house one sunny autumn day in Brussels, the boulevard, normally over-crowded by snaked-shaped car lines near your street is completely car-less. Imagine if this boulevard for once gets filled with bikes and roller blades instead, let’s say ten, hundreds of them… If you are already picturing that [...]
Try the Forgettometer
This is not a discussion on the merits of working for WebCom but an attempt to develop a scientific method of gauging the success of one’s holidays.
Travel blogging with an iPad
I’ve always considered the iPad as a beautiful, wonderful, joyful tool for consulting digital content rather than for producing any. Nevertheless, the range of proposed applications dedicated to writing, editing photography, publishing on various blogs platforms never ceases to impress me. I decided to give it a try. Unfortunately, the EP doesn’t always support my [...]
Case Study: Can Institutions Be Cool? (Part V)
This is the last post of the summer case study on the possibility for institutions to become cool. Before we jump to the conclusions, let’s review what we learnt.
Case Study: Can Institutions Be Cool? (Part IV)
The question in the title has been answered in three previous posts. We’ve seen that some institutions are ontologically cool, such as Unesco, some others benefit largely of their previous and/or current leaders’ cool factor, like the White House, while a third kind can succeed in becoming cool with the support of good communication. It doesn’t [...]
Case Study: Can Institutions Be Cool? (Part III)
Not all institutions are established to save baby seals. Not all of them can benefit from the coolness factor of a leader such as President Obama. Some have to spend a great deal on the communication field to improve their branding and spice it up with some cool factor.
Case Study: Can Institutions Be Cool? (Part II)
In the first post dedicated to this case study, we already answered the question: yes, public and/or international institutions can be cool. Our attention will now focus on understanding how. In the case of the luckiest (or smartest since one can decide to create an institution, after all), the cool factor is ontological, which means it belongs [...]
Case Study: Can Institutions Be Cool? (Part I)
You won’t find this in any of our official job descriptions, nor in our Unit’s mission statement, but we generally consider that, a°) we’re cool and b°) part of our job is to make the EP cool as well. There are many reasons why this is not written anywhere, one of them being the idea [...]
Lessons from the Danish suburbs: Après Aarhus
Do Danish journalists get jobs? Why are Danish trainees so hard to find? Why do students still want to work for newspapers? Are media and journalism the same thing? Are Danes really the happiest people in the world? All this and more in these brief post-Aarhus thoughts.
Euro..what?
A good looking couple from Azerbaijan won
Recent Comments