A short summary for the pressed reader: Based upon research and experience, we have concluded that only young, cute, hairy MEPs will allow for successful viral communication campaigns. 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 [...]
It’s a simple story about now and then. Then it was early 2009 and I was doing my traineeship at the very same unit where I now, almost three years later, started to work in full position. During this period of time Web Comm has enlarged its grip of using online mediums and I feel [...]
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 [...]
Ancuta has been with us here in WebCom for a month on a study visit. She says she’s learning from us, but we all know that, not long from now, we will be learning from her… Sadly, today is her last day before returning to serious study in Denmark. It’s been great for all of us to have her around, and she leaves us, appropriately, with a blog post on social media.
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 [...]
I went to Tunisia this summer and this experience may be worth a blog… You may think I just went there for nice, relaxed holidays on the seaside in a 5-stars resort. You may also wonder about the choice of this destination provided the recent events and the instability in the region…
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.
It’s been a big week on Facebook for WebCom. You know how we’ve been obsessing about what happens to all those comments we get on our Facebook page? Well, this week provided one answer.
Professor Sreenivasan has a sense of the passage of internet time. The first thing you find on entering his office in Colombia School of Journalism, on the right as you come through the door, is a small mortuary of defunct gadgets, physical testimony to the faddishness and rapid progress of communications technology.
America is of course famously, notoriously even, the country which loves a winner. So why is everyone so keen on failure?
Mid-life, it turns out that some of our obsessions are shared. One of these is worrying continually about What It All Means. Facebook, I mean.
It is obvious that you cannot run FB as « business as usual ». You have to experiment, be new, fresh and come up with some good stuff all the time, if you want your audience to “react”. We, “the FB team” of the European Parliament, have always tried to keep it in mind. But…
Just a quick one to point to an interesting survey from consultants Edelman published last week. I attended the launch event in Brussels ‘The Centre” as one of a panel of three along with Dutch Green MEP Judith Sargentini (@judithineuropa) and lobbyist Caroline De Cock (@linotherhino). Caroline wrote a short post about it on her [...]
Even though « Finance » was my second major, back in Business School, I am not keen on talking with my banker. Somehow, the discussion always ends up about the way I (mis)use my money, with a loth of sighing and frowning in the process. I was not thrilled, then, when Steve asked me to fly to Frankfurt to meet 40 bankers from European and National Central banks.
What’s going on? France is on strike, Belgium was on strike, but also Facebook was on strike during this plenary week. Was there a way to predict that in advance? And do you have any explanations for that?
I also belong to the lucky ones, as my colleague Evita said, who went to Barcelona for the Personal Democracy Forum one week ago. Steve already wrote about this event, the sense it makes for us to be present there, the creative atmosphere there was etc. I don’t want to repeat what has already been said, but just to share the schizophrenic dimension in which we work on Facebook.
Last Tuesday, we had a very interesting meeting with Richard Allan, the Facebook European boss for what is related to politics. I picked up some facts and statistics to give an overview of where we stand in the Facebook-galaxy.
It’s always interesting to see who’s convinced by the use of social media for institutional communication purposes. We had a seminar with our whole directorate at the beginning of the week and it was very telling – not only because of what we said, but also because of the structure and organisation of it.
Everyone’s talking about social media (including us). We are generally keen of course, but, as we all know, there are dangers too. So it was high time for Raffaella to look at the latest research into social media obsession. Her research took her in surprising directions.
Some rough ‘n’ ready figures on how many MEPs are using social media. Thanks to our doughty trainees for an arduous online trawl to produce these. Main finding: a qualified majority of MEPs are Facebook users!
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