communications
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.
Dictators are (also) on Facebook
Damascus is only a three hours flight away from Brussels, yet an infinite distance runs between Syria and our understanding of the recent events. I have been to Syria two years ago. Like in the other “Arab spring” countries, nothing could lead to imagine what would have happened today under the puzzled and incredulous eyes of us Europeans. Likewise, we are far from understanding the spam attack on the European Parliament’s Facebook page by pro-Syrian messages that started two weeks ago is still going on.
How to communicate in the European Parliament? Latvian experience
In a post by one of our occasional guest bloggers, we are delighted that Lasma, who works in communications in the Latvian Parliament and who has spent a month with us on a secondment scheme, has recorded some of her thoughts about the experience. She nails us on one important issue straight away! It’s been great having you here, Lasma, all the best for your work back in Latvia.
Time for selFB-confidence
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, [...]
Oops, that hurts.
Our friend Ben Rooney has spotted the The Cold, Hard Numbers Of What’s Happening To Newspapers. If you’re in the print business, this could hurt.
So this is what its like after all
So this is what it’s like? After more than a decade and a half as a journalist, I am now a source. One of the… yes, one of the “faceless bureaucrats”.
Guys in black and no ties
Dilemma. The sartorial angst of the eurocrat-turned-web-dude can become a major preoccupation, especially when facing a new oh-so-cool peer group in public. Damn! I haven’t a thing to wear…
We are all history-makers
I was thankful when someone once told me that “when you surround yourself with people who never want to advance in life, you will be exactly like them”. “You have to surround yourself with people who have a plan in life, in other words with people who are “a life”, because when one has no [...]
Big worlds and small worlds
This is probably exactly the wrong place, indeed a self-contradictory place, to hint at heretically relativising thoughts, but being away far from Brussels for a few weeks has made me reflect on digital divides of various sorts.
May and June most read stories.
Our (recently established) monthly edition of sharing with your our monthly most read stories has suffered from too much work (between May and the Election) but also from too much rest (as I flew away as soon as the last ballot was counted). In order not to let the late posts piling up on my [...]
About cycling and fulfilling election promises
Fishing for public attention is the daily business of politicians; therefore it is always a pleasure to witness some original and positive ideas in this respect. One such election project was a Czech MEPs idea to cycle from Prague to Strasbourg and to announce it as [...]
Gossip and the joy of politics
The fight for positions and influence has been tough, the deals which result in the outcomes to be formalised this week come after tough negotiations and sometimes bitter fights. There are winners and losers. Some are in, others are out. For the well-informed observer, the process is a fascinating one. Yes, it’s even fun to watch.
Now what?
The emerging consensus is that the campaign went well. Speaking parochially, we believe the online part of it particularly so. Of course, indulging in a feelgood factor for a while is fine, but the time is coming now for some serious evaluation. What worked, what didn’t, what did but wasn’t worth it…
Learning to cope with social media
So now it’s all over… Nearly six weeks with intensive online election campaigns. Last week nearly 162 million European voters went to the polls to elect their 736 representatives in the European Parliament. Even though the 43, 2 % turnout is the lowest ever, it was way better than most analyst had expected before the [...]
20 years after communism: two films
It was fascinating to attend this week a conference of public sector communicators from across Europe, including a discussion of how to communicate the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Yikes! Suddenly we are doing all this stuff
Seems only yesterday… It’s not long since we were in the happy position of being the ones pushing for all kinds of trendy, new-fangled ideas against a hidebound establishment. This blog seemed like a distant mirage – it was just too far outside the comfort zone of the way European institutions do communication to be [...]
The importance of being normal
Another meeting, another colleague teaching me about “what is normal”. What normal people are. “If we want to communicate the European Parliament, we have to understand how normal people think.” Not again…
Fact and figures vs. scandal: what are we working for?
What are we doing? What are we working for, and – more important – how? We try to explain what happens at the European Parliament. We want to provide citizens with reliable, high quality and very interesting information. What is the new proposal on tyres labelling about? Who’s for in the House, who’s against? And [...]
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