The summary that will never get me a PhD

This four part case study looked at the different ways an institution – usually considered as an unattractive administrative body – could acquire the reputation of being cool, as in the combination of the feeling of liking it with the desire to belong to it. Why would an institution become cool is another question that will be left unanswered here.

No way we're talking about being cool without a reference to George.

In a hasty and totally subjective way, with no strong ground on which to build his argumentation, the case’s author identified five kind of institutions:

1. The ones that are just born cool because their « raison d’être » rocks and is supported by adequate actions and needs little communication – the given example being Unesco and the generic class being « cool by ontology ».
2. The ones that benefit from the charismatic essence of their leaders or, even better, of a series of charismatic leaders. What else than the White House could belong to the category is still a mystery to the readers but the generic class is still called « cool by capillarity ».
3. The ones that had absolutely no possible chance to even dream of being cool but which succeeded never the less thanks to huge spending in communication (and possibly other ethically debatable means) – the proposed example being the FBI and its army of influence provided by the Hollywood industry since the thirties and the proposed class being « cool by majoring in mass communication and minoring in blackmailing ».
4. The same kind as the previous one, only they fail in trying, even with good professional communication, the French Hadopi being one of them and the generic class being « most institutions ».
5. The ones that had only slightly better starting chances than the FBI and yet reached the tribe of the cool by making sure their activities fitted with their purposes even if they were founded by possible Dr Evils – only examples the author could come up with being two American foundations, the Gates’ and the Soros’. Generic class: « cool by action ».

Yeah, yeah. And…?

That will sound basic to most of readers in the field of communication, but the key to any success, when it comes to your branding, lies in the identification and definition of your brand’s core values. You only need a few of them, but they must be strong, clear and shared amongst your organization.

From those core values, and depending on the strategy you want to develop and conduct, you might find a benefit in becoming cool. If this becomes your goal, well, some leverage exists:

• Your leadership – but also any representative of your organization. It’s one thing of having one Obama or one Steve Jobs at the top of your pyramid, it’s another to be able to count on thousands well educated scouts, professional ambassadors, devoted evangelists. The organization’s staff, the users communities can do marvels in bringing some coolness to a brand. Charisma can be spread out within any organization if the people selected stick to the core values and make them theirs.
• Your actions – it’s not only what you say, it’s mostly what you do. It pays in the long term and one mishap can fully damage your brand reputation – but if you keep acting within the perimeter of your core values and of your raison d’être, you may acquire a cool reputation. In a few thousand years.
• Your communication – promoting what you do well in a fun, entertaining, interesting way can speed up the reputation building process. It will never be the sole factor – but you’ll hardly reach any cool status without some communication.

In some cases, communication might be your only chance. There is a reason most institutions are perceived as boring, dull, uninteresting – it’s because they serve the public, the community and it’s not always sexy. Yet, by assuming what defines you and by playing with it, rather than denying it, you can become cool.

There is almost nothing cool in a public library in the era of Internet – and yet:

If corporations are psychopaths, I’d say institutions are rather neurotics. What’s the difference?

In his 2003 documentary (and following book), The Corporation, Canadian Joel Bakan “establishes parallels between the way corporations are systematically compelled to behave and the DSM-IV’s symptoms of psychopathy, i.e. callous disregard for the feelings of other people, the incapacity to maintain human relationships, reckless disregard for the safety of others, deceitfulness (continual lying to deceive for profit), the incapacity to experience guilt, and the failure to conform to social norms and respect for the law.”

If corporations are psychopaths, I’d say institutions are rather neurotics. What’s the difference? The former doesn’t know he’s has a mental condition and doesn’t differentiate his (affected) mental perception from reality, whereas the latter knows there is something wrong with his condition. In that aspect, institutions know communication (amongst other characteristics) is not their strongest asset and they are often reluctant to embrace what it takes to really communicate.

Of course, the lines are moving, especially in the US where staff moves more naturally from public administration to private sector and back. The influence of our over communicative world strikes European institutions as well – but for a public organization, there is still quite heavy reluctance to brand and market itself.

The cool factor is not an absolute necessity to reach – yet it does help to carry and spread any messages an organization might want to push. We’ve seen it’s possible for institutions to be perceived as cool – not to all of them and hardly without some effort, but it’s reachable.

However, the cool factor is only the cherry on the cake of a well planned and conceived communication strategy.

From this last example, one could assess any institution could become cool with enough money and with a good communication strategic plan. Let’s now see what happens when this beautiful plan doesn’t work, with the counter-example of an institution which tries hard to become cool with very little chance of success.

Hadopi – When XXI Century brings you 1984

The French Hadopi (Haute Autorité pour la Diffusion des Oeuvres et la Protection des droits sur Internet – the High Authority for Transmission of Creative Works and Copyright Protection on the Internet, see Wikipedia) is a recent institution created in 2009 to fight Internet piracy.

Here how this works, as explained by Wikipedia

On receipt of a complaint from a copyright holder or representative, HADOPI may initiate a ‘three-strike’ procedure:

(1) An email message is sent to the offending internet access subscriber, derived from the IP address involved in the claim. The email specifies the time of the claim but neither the object of the claim nor the identity of the claimant.

The Internet Service Provider (ISP) is then required to monitor the subject internet connection. In addition, the internet access subscriber is invited to install a filter on his internet connection.

If, in the 6 months following the first step, a repeat offense is suspected by the copyright holder, their representative, the ISP or HADOPI, the second step of the procedure is invoked.

(2) A certified letter is sent to the offending internet access subscriber with similar content to the originating email message.

In the event that the offender fails to comply during the year following the reception of the certified letter, and upon accusation of repeated offenses by the copyright holder, a representative, the ISP or HADOPI, the third step of the procedure is invoked.

(3) The ISP is required to suspend internet access for the offending internet connection, that which is the subject of the claim, for a specified period of from two months to one year.

The internet access subscriber is blacklisted and other ISPs are prohibited from providing an internet connection to the blacklisted subscriber. The service suspension does not, however, interrupt billing, and the offending subscriber is liable to meet any charges or costs resulting from the service termination.

Appeal to a court is possible only during the third phase of the action (after the blocking of internet access) and an appeal can result in shortening but not cancellation of the blocking. The burden of proof is on the appellant.

Without entering a political debate about the mere existence of Hadopi, we can nevertheless state that being a kind of cyber-police of the use of the Internet is not exactly cool, especially if not focusing on, say child pornography, but rather on downloading files, an online practice so popular it became the Mother of battle for the whole entertainment industry – especially the music sector.

Without Hadopi, this wannabe movie director will not be able to direct his thriller in 2021. (c) Hadopi

From Hadopi’s side, the accent is always put on the pedagogical nature of its action. Because they do want to change existing behaviors, especially those of the young generation, Hadopi rightly came to the conclusion they should communicate as much as possible. And it’s clear their agency convinced them that becoming cool would help.

First, the logo.

Caveat: Hadopi’s logo is a story in itself, as the first version used a copyrighted font without proper authorization from the font’s creator – oh the irony when you think of it. Anyway, the final logo does benefit from being created in XXIst Century and is rather interesting and nice. There is an Helvetica kind of simplicity to it and it’s definitely better to my taste than most of institutions’.

What a friendly logo

Once you’ve got the logo, you’ve got to make it bigger – as they say in the business. Therefore Hadopi launched a three millions euros campaign mixing print, TV and radio spots. The message says: by not paying today’s copyright holders, you impair the creations of tomorrow, incarnated by kids and pre-teenagers who would never become the stars they should just because someone (you!) downloaded one’s favorite TV Show on Pirats’ Bay. The claim says: « Tomorrow’s creation must be defended today ». The campaign proposes with a new label, « PUR » (« pure » in English) which stand for « promoting responsible uses » and which is stamped on legal downloading platforms.
Campagne de pub de l’Hadopi par Nouvelobs

The campaign is well produced, I’d say. While the posters show future talented people when they’re just kids, the TV spots go further by offering a glance of their future work: a video clip for a pop song, an extract from a thriller movie or the trailer of a TV Show. The TV spots’ narratives are quite cool: high level of production, professional actors and directing, it teases you enough so you would actually like to watch the movie or the TV show. That’s well done. The conclusion final claim is: if you don’t protect today the artists of tomorrow, there will not be any creation in the future.

Once again, I don’t want to discuss this assertion. Just saying it’s a well expressed point of view in a cool way. As a communication exercise, it does change the perception of the institution and renders it less « bad cop » and more « concerned with our creative children’s future ».

Did it work?

I have no objective study to prove this point but my wet finger intuition tells me it didn’t. On the French Internet, Hadopi is, as far as I can tell, since considered as a bad and uncool governmental agency. Critics loathe the campaign’s cost. Haters, trolls and flamers are still active against the very existence of Hadopi in the various platforms surfed by Hadopi’s target audience.

As a bonus, Hadopi itself released a study about Internet uses, in an attempt to legitimize and demonstrate its efficiency. Alas, the study shows that people downloading illegally films and music are also the one purchasing the most (as every study on this subject always demonstrated).

Joe Karaganis, from SSRC, points us to the news that there’s been yet another such study… and this one is from HADOPI, itself. Yes, the French agency put together to kick people off the internet for file sharing did a study on the nature of unauthorized file sharing, too. Not surprisingly (and consistent with every other study we’ve seen on this topic), it found that those who spend a lot of money on content… were much, much, much more likely to also get content through unauthorized means. HADOPI released the results in a somewhat convoluted way (perhaps trying to downplay this result), but Karaganis reformatted the results to make this clear:

Nothing like a bar schema to bring some seriousness to a post (c) SSRC

Karaganis suggests, then, that HADOPI’s method of dealing with this — threatening people to stop their file sharing, won’t do very much to help the bottom lines of the entertainment industry.

(Source: TechDirt: Another Day, Another Study That Says ‘Pirates’ Are The Best Customers… This Time From HADOPI)

Getting cool or die trying

Honestly, I don’t know what Don Draper would do – except pouring himself another glass of brown to clear out his mind. If you don’t like what people say about you, change the conversation – well, Hadopi is essentially the subject of the conversation as it is closely linked to the eponymous French law ruling online intellectual property. Changing the name won’t help neither. Hadopi is the perfect anti-Unesco: it’s a natural born uncool institution, at least for its primary target which is the relatively young Internet users who download stuff. Communication alone might not save the branding. If J.E. Hoover got to run Hadopi, he’d force Hollywood to promote it and might get a result after a decade or two. There is another irony here, knowing some main actors of the entertaining industry support Hadopi and yet don’t help turn it into anything cool.

Does that mean that institutions perceived as evil will never reach a cool status if they don’t have a whole entertainment industry behind them? Two opposite examples jump into my mind, even if there are not « institutions » but « foundations ».

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the George Soros Open Society Foundation were both created by two famous personalities not exactly perceived as being the coolest people on Earth. While Bill Gates was the world’s richest man, he arguably suffered from being Mr. Microsoft, largest Operating System Monopoly of the computer world. George Soros was famous for his speculating talent but not necessarily in a cool way:

He became known as “the Man Who Broke the Bank of England” after he made a reported $1 billion during the 1992 Black Wednesday UK currency crises. Soros correctly speculated that the British government would have to devalue the pound sterling.

(Source: Wikipedia)

To make the story short: two famous but not universally liked rich men created their foundations, one because « All lives have equal value », the other in view of « building vibrant and tolerant democracies ». Both aims are pleasant but they don’t generate the happiness included factor of Unesco. Yet, both foundations became cool, not because of huge investments in communication (even if communication played a part, for example in the notable improvement of Bill Gates’ public speaking skills) but rather because of their actions. Soros foundation played a significant role in Eastern and Central Europe’s transition to democracy and Gates’ has acquired a serious reputation in solving development issues. Their actions are promoted via adequate communication, acknowledged by their audience and their peers.

As a result, both foundations can be considered cool even if such a result was neither easy nor obvious from the start. There’s almost a karma wheel at work here.

On a side note, check out their website. Very good job here.

The leverage to the coolness, in their case, is to be found in the proof by samples or in the action theory. Judging an institution on the quality of its achievements, in how they fit with its general objectives and philosophy might be the easiest way to access the nirvana of cool.

Kindergarden philosophy wins again: not everybody can be cool, some have to stay lawyers or accountants. Kidding apart, before investing an institution’s budget on branding, a quick reality check might prove useful. We’ll detail this in the next and last post on this case study.

Related material

Hadopi

La Quadrature du Net (opposing to Hadopi) (in English)

Numerama.com « Découvrez la campagne de pub Hadopi à 3 millions d’euros » (in French)

SSRC: HADOPI Says: Let’s Try Cutting off Nose to Spite Face

Best example I could come up with is: « This is FBI, open the door! »

The Federal Bureau of Investigation

You never have really time to look at it in the movies

If you look at it with a bit of political mindset, there is nothing ontologically cool in the FBI. While there is nothing wrong with their current mission statement:

Our mission is to help protect you, your children, your communities, and your businesses from the most dangerous threats facing our nation—from international and domestic terrorists to spies on U.S. soil…from cyber villains to corrupt government officials…from mobsters to violent street gangs…from child predators to serial killers. Along the way, we help defend and uphold our nation’s economy, physical and electronic infrastructure, and democracy.

this institution has quite an amount of stains on its reputation. From the beginning, the FBI had to deal with dirty businesses, under the assumption that it takes what it takes to fight crime. Black lists, manipulations, blackmail, illegal wiretappings… One of the darkest but notable period lasted during the emergence of civil rights leaders (1960-1970):

In March 1971, a Media, Pennsylvania FBI resident office was robbed; the thieves took secret files and distributed them to a range of newspapers including the Harvard Crimson. The files detailed the FBI’s extensive COINTELPRO program, which included investigations into lives of ordinary citizens—including a black student group at a Pennsylvania military college and the daughter of Congressman Henry Reuss of Wisconsin. The country was “jolted” by the revelations, and the actions were denounced by members of Congress including House Majority Leader Hale Boggs. The phones of some members of Congress, including Boggs, had allegedly been tapped.

(Source: Wikipedia)

Amongst the debatable actions of the FBI, the harassment of actress Jean Seberg leaves a sour taste to all aficionados of the French movie « Breathless »:

An FBI victim we'd all like to hug and console.

The FBI used illegally obtained information about Jean Seberg to concoct an article it planted in Newsweek magazine that defamed the actress, who was then seven months pregnant with her second child. The FBI’s goal was to “cause her embarrassment and serve to cheapen her image with the public”. Accordingly to some authors and researchers, the FBI’s actions against Jean Seberg resulted in her suicide.

(Source: Wikipedia)

More, after 9/11, the FBI was partially to blame for not preventing the attack:

The 9/11 Commission’s final report on July 22, 2004 stated that the FBI and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) were both partially to blame for not pursuing intelligence reports which could have prevented the September 11, 2001 attacks. In its most damning assessment, the report concluded that the country had “not been well served” by either agency and listed numerous recommendations for changes within the FBI. While the FBI has acceded to most of the recommendations, including oversight by the new Director of National Intelligence, some former members of the 9/11 Commission publicly criticized the FBI in October 2005, claiming it was resisting any meaningful changes.

(Source: Wikipedia)

Yet, the FBI is cool.

Choosing well your profile picture on facebook is vital

Its facebook page only counts 127,985 fans (August 2011) while the facebook’s group “FBI, Open the door !” “No… it’s cool when you break in” totalizes 495,380 fans (possibly because of their profile picture). But the demonstration of coolness is not to be found in their social media popularity. It’s rather in the impregnation of pop culture with FBI and its special agents that counts. Movies, thrillers, TV shows, comic books, the Simpsons… The FBI reaches the status of being a myth by itself which populates, inspires, gives birth to myriads of works pieces of fiction. Why is that? Because there’s nothing better than a story with Special Agents fighting crime.

Actually, there is almost a branding schizophrenia between FBI’s reality and its perception. It doesn’t come from its nature nor from a specific charismatic leader – the most famous being J.H. Hoover who might be quite responsible for the sulfuric reputation of the Agency during the 48 years he ran it. The source of FBI being cool is to be found by external branding management or, to rephrase, by outsourcing the cool factor to the entertainment industry. The FBI knows well the value of good communication, as one of their Special Agent, Mr Cris Hoover, clearly explains in his paper « The Strategic Communication Plan ».

Strategic communication entails packaging a core message that reflects an agency’s overall strategy, values, purpose, and mission to persuade key stakeholders and enhance positioning. Active, not reactive, it establishes organizational clarity and dissuades freelance endeavors that may serve a few well, but detract from the organization’s overall direction and purpose. To this end, one important tool, a solid strategic communication plan (SCP), should synchronize organizational units and align resources to deliver a common core message.

The source of the FBI being cool is to be found by external branding management or, to rephrase, by outsourcing the cool factor to the entertainment industry.

The current mix of the Agency is quite good to look at: website, jobs’ posting, most wanted list (my favorite) and even a fun and games site for kids (check the « Tools of the trade » section, it rocks.) It’s state of the art of institutional agency, with, I suspect, quite some money behind it, and serves as the main channel of their communication to demonstrate the reality of their work, by opposition with the image given by the entertainment industry.

You know you're cool when you appear in The Simpsons

The power of cool comes from the pop culture’s endless use of the FBI. From the start, J.E. Hoover  « was also quite eager to use his new authority to bring Hollywood into line with what Hoover thought was their proper role in society (propaganda organ for the government) and while Senator McArthy grabbed the headlines, Hoover was busy behind the scenes recruiting various people to inform on each other and factionalizing the Hollywood community so that it could not resist him. » (Source: COINTELPRO: FBI Activities in Hollywood).

Important word here is: « propaganda ».

As Yves Chenal tells, « Hoover understood he needed to win the public opinion and tried hard to have media providing a positive image of its agency. He harassed Hollywood producers to obtain his agents would be pictured under a favorable light in the movies. That’s how James Cagney incarnated an agent with all best qualities in « G-Man » in 1935, sparking off many vocations. Since then, the FBI is a media star. »

(Source: Herodote.net, FBI – La construction d’un mythe hollywoodien)

There was a will from the start to sell the FBI, its special agents and its activities to the audience, a will that obtained incredible results by combining threat and influence over the producers with Hollywood dramaturgic know-how. There is everything in the FBI you need for many good stories. Use it properly and constantly and, voilà, you’ve become cool even though some of your daily activities are questionable.

This is hard work which pays off on the long term. It requires a lot of resources, some of them not being directly the institution’s. Not every institution can subtract their branding management to Hollywood. Yet, almost of them could rely more on communication with a good « strategic communication plan » to build themselves as cool.

It’s not an easy way, though, as we will see in the next post of this case study.

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.

In one month I visited or participated in the work of all DG Communication Units – the Web Communication Unit, the Press Service, the Audiovisual Unit, the Media Services and Monitoring Unit and the Europarl TV Unit. What are my main conclusions? The European Parliament’s communication policy is certainly following the new challenges of information era. During the last year it has become more active than ever to respond to all the new requirements by using such new communication tools as Web-TV, Facebook and Twitter. The European Parliament provides all kind of information (written, oral, audiovisual and web) on the EU matters in all official EU languages. So no doubts – wonderful work is done here.

They say here they want to reach their "Latvian Grandmother" - well here the Speaker of the Latvian Parliament (and my boss), Gundars Daudze, shows how it's done! - from Saeimas Flickr page

Also in Latvia we’ve learned the lesson of information revolution and widely opened the door of the Latvian Parliament to the new media. We started to use Twitter in August 2009 and for the moment we have more than 1200 followers (it is remarkable achievement for Latvia). We have put a lot of effort to develop Youtube and Flickr account. But the question probably remains the same as for the European Parliament – how to sell this all these good products that we produce to the general public?

There is no simple answer to this question. But in my view one thing should be done for sure. There is a need to explore internal communication between the different units of the European Parliament. We cannot expect people to know and use all these wonderful products if even our colleagues from the third and fourth floor have only a remote idea about our work. In my opinion this is the general problem in all public institutions, in Latvia as well. We could ask a question in the Latvian Parliament – how many of you know that for almost a year the Parliament is in Twitter? And presumably not even a one sixth of all staff would be informed.

I understand that for such a huge institutional body as European Parliament to make it happen is even more complex task but still it’s worth trying. Only by working as one united body one can expect better results.

I want to thank all the people who were involved in my education process here in Brussels. I was positively impressed about the things you’ve done in a couple last years. And hopefully I will be able to take this good experience to Latvia.

Lāsma Lapinska

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!

Looks impressive... In many ways it is impressive too

So this is what it’s like? After more than a decade and a half as a journalist, I am now a source… Not a real source, you understand, I will gladly leave that to those thus inclined or employed, but one of the many invisible hands behind the EP’s web page. One of the… yes, one of the “faceless bureaucrats”. What the true “sources”, the MEPs, say and do, we publish.

Wait. Isn’t that journalism? No it isn’t, for the simple reason that we are actually employed by our “source”, but it’s certainly as close as it gets. What we publish, citizens read, either directly on the site or because journalists use it as a source for what they publish or broadcast.

And as the absolute newbie of the team (well, Marko our Slovenian editor with whom I share my office is technically even newer, but only by a fortnight, so it doesn’t really count) I can vouch for one thing: everything here is as conscientiously and objectively researched before it gets published as anything you will read in your newspaper. We don’t express our own opinion through what we write, but then journalists really shouldn’t either, should they? After all that’s why all newspapers have a dedicated “opinion” column and dedicated “columnists”.

A few people did actually ask after my first few days with the unit, not what I thought about the job (everyone asked that) but if something surprised me. Well, if I had to point out just one thing, it would be how similar it is to my former job, from the actual reporting to the very warm welcome by everyone when I first arrived…

Ok, its is my first jab at this and it isn’t supposed to be profound, - I formally dislike expressing profound thoughts unless they are really, truly profound- But it certainly is de profundis…

So, want to know exactly what happened in the EP today, yesterday or last week? It’s here. Want to know what is coming up? It’s here as well. Want to know both sides of an argument in the hemicycle? Yes, we usually offer that too and if we didn’t write about it ourselves, check our links, we have you all set up and ready for the jump.

Anyway… hello everyone, good morning and good luck.

I am, so they say, a eurocrat. I work for a European Institution, which means, in the popular imagination, that I am not only a eurocrat, but also a “faceless bureaucrat”. So, as I go about my business in the outside world, I should look the part, shouldn’t I? Meaning (at least in North-West Europe) I should don a nice anonymous business suit and a tie to face my audience. But wait; the event I am attending tomorrow in Dublin is a “Web Summit“, focusing an New Media, Social Media, Online Campaigning, and other hip things that are often written with excitable capital letters. The list of speakers is intimidatingly full of dudes, techie guys who do cool things with internet and wouldn’t be seen dead in a suit and tie. Yep, I’m talking the black polo-neck and designer jeans brigade here. *

Three delegates on their way to the Web Summit

Me, I’d struggle to define myself as fashion conscious. More like generally clueless, leavened somewhat by over twenty years exposure to lots of Italians, who have at least made me aware of some basic no-noes. Nonetheless, true male Brit of my generation, I feel utterly out of my depth when the sartorial going gets tough. Hence the deep insecurities I have suffered since being precipitated into the world of the social internet, especially when faced with gatherings of new media types who live at the interface between state-of-the-art tech and media, thus doubly cool. Suddenly, the office uniform just won’t do any more; there is a different dress code to consider, but one which creates the dilemma I mentioned above.

The worst thing would be to be the eurocrat-trying-to-be-cool, surely?

Clothes send messages, that I know. But what message should I be sending? The worst thing would be to be the eurocrat-trying-to-be-cool, surely? It’s like your dad trying to disco dance… But I don’t want to stick out like a sore thumb either, the poor benighted Web 1.25-er who probably hasn’t aggregated his twitter feed with his LinkedInFaceSpace yet… Intimidated, moi?

So, do I go hell-for leather, all out for an improbable Keanu Reeves/Matrix look, or do I go for wimpy compromise? When push comes to shove, do I wear that tie I put in my suitcase or not?

If you could let me know by 7.45 am tomorrow, Irish time, that’d be really helpful.

* By the way, I use the terms “dude” and “guy” advisedly. Of 28 speakers, only three are women. I’m pretty sure they won’t be wearing ties.

I have asked myself several times who I am, why I am here and why just during this time and I quickly realised that it is me who decides who I am, why I am here, where I want to go and why I ‘m doing it. Yet I have to keep in mind that it is not every dream that come to past, some do, but other never will.

Every person is a champion to me and that includes me, being the only one beside my “siblings” to win the course to my mother’s egg in her womb, I would otherwise not be alive today. Unfortunately some champions realise their dreams and other never do.

The most amazing thing with this position is that I m a little fish, but still I m a fish, because a fish is a fish….

In Sweden, before I came to Web Communication unit, everybody – especially my friends and relatives – was so amazed by the fact that I will come to the EP, they did not recognize the fact that I was about to be just a simple stagiaire – the smaller fish in the sea. The most amazing thing with this position is that I’m a little fish, but still I’m a fish, because a fish is a fish….

Never underestimate my imaginations and dreams, they can become true.

Thinking about this unit, I can see that  everyone is a champion even here. They have realised their dreams by working at the EP. I m happy to surround myself with these history-makers, and I can hear myself thinking: “if they did it, so can I”. I often remind myself of the fact that my dreams are not suppose to die just because I’m a simple trainee. I suppose that the web-com-history-makers probably had dreams about one day being able to work at the European parliament and realised it, but I can not stop thinking that they maybe have other dreams that they would want to see realised. However, are they now my inspiration, they are making me comprehend that my dreams can also be true if I just never forget about them. They are the ones that keep me a life.

Great dreams often lead you to other discoveries

The greatest thing about this dreams-theory is that, by pursuing them I know that I will realise other even greater things that I had not in mind when I started dreaming my dreams. The fact is that I wanted to be a journalist since 2 years of age and when I was admitted to the programme of media and communication it was for me a great moment.

However, after all most 2 years, the other student and I were told about the fact that it was included in the programme to study something else under a period of 1 year. I was really disappointed and decided to try with International Relations and quickly realised that it was an even greater experience than media, it was a non-but-come-true-dream, because I afterwards fall so deep in love with it. The whole world seems suddenly to be open to me, nothing could stop me now, I learned about thing that always wanted to know, such as the foreign policy of the US for instance…

It is hard sometimes to believe in oneself when every thing around seems so dark, but I know that even when the night never seems to end, the day will always come and the sun will always shine.

Soon I will be like these history-makers that I found myself surrounded with. I just have to accept the fact that I am at this the moment a simple trainee in this unit, even so I believe that I’m a person that others will want to be surrounded with, because I’m a big dreamer and have a lot of crazy but probably interesting ideas in my mind. I believe that together we can help each other’s dreams come to pass.

A history-maker does not have to study history at a PhD level, he can be someone like Ikea’s founder who started is business by repairing furniture that he founded abandoned on the street. Today IKEA is one of the most visited furniture’s companies in the whole world.