Where is the web heading? Thanks to Ludwig Gatzke for the pic @ http://bit.ly/tNLmG8

From Nicolas Princen, head of the web unit of the French Presidency

A company called Viewrz helped the French Presidency to tweet live some extracts of the video stream of the G20 meeting in Cannes. The principle is quite easy: you follow a debate, and whenever you find an extract interesting, you instantaneously send a message to the company, which will cut the last 30 seconds (or 20 seconds, one minute… this has to be decided in advance) of the video and send you a specific link to this short video. Then you just have to tweet it.

=> It would be great to use this kind of tool to cover our plenary debates. It's resource efficient (we need only one or two editors) and the format is nicer than a traditional coverage: you have a live tweet (for example one quote for each political group) and right after the debate you put it online as an article (in a kind of a Storify format). You can skip the boring/technical/empty parts of the debate and focus on the main political statements.

From TBWA 365, web agency

It was very interesting to have a look into the way of working and the logic of a private company, and I noted two things:

• They always start the briefings with their customers with a "cold", data-oriented analysis. It allows to assess the efficiency of a campaign/online strategy.
  => Maybe we should try to objectivise the efficiency of our actions in such a way. We do it but it could and should be more systematic: what were the most popular articles on the Parliament website this month? What worked on Facebook, what was the most retweeted? We need an analyst who does not work as an editor – and thus could be impartial. We could gather good practices and improve the efficiency of our coverage.
• TBWA advises to look for editorial partnerships rather than advertising campaigns. In 2014, the Parliament could write objective, neutral stories about the mandate and the upcoming elections and propose it to big newspapers. I know that journalists don't like it, but it seems newspapers do accept it for (obvious) economic reasons…

La Netscouade, web agency

Benoît Thieulin, CEO of this agency that is well-known for its involvement in the French presidential election campaign in 2007, shared his vision of the future of the web. A highly interesting speech from which I'd like to keep only the concrete points:

• The web is now coming back to more "intermédiation". In the last years, the trend was to try to communicate directly with citizens, but now people want to get some analysis. Hence the central role of journalists, bloggers etc. There is more space for indirect communication and we should not (only) aim at targeting citizens directly.

=> All our multimedia products (for example this one or this one) should clearly made available and customisable by internet users and journalists.

=> Our Facebook and Twitter content should be more "MEP-compatible" so that it can be re-used as much as possible.

• He also pointed out the "social television", i.e. the fact that people watch TV to get the news but comment at the same time on Twitter with their tablets.
  => This raise again the question of putting a twitter feed next to the plenary streaming to allow people to comment live.

Slate.fr, web newspaper

The editor in chief explained us how they explained complex issues in an easy, friendly and funny way. For example, for the scandal around French billionaire Ingrid Bettencourt, they put it in the form of a – fake – Facebook stream. It's really worth having a look!

=> Worth trying in order to explain the negotiations on the EU budget or the financial supervision package?

The Choucha refugee camp is run by the UNHCR. It hosted, when we went there, around 4,000 people. During the peak of the crisis, it had to give shelters to 20,000 refugees.

Well, in fact, it’s precisely because of the “Arab Spring” that I went there to get first-hand impressions. Democracy building is now a work in process in Tunisia and the changes brought a lot of challenges with them, not least with a sudden influx of immigrants fleeing the war in Libya. Tunisia shares 500km of borders with its neighbour and generously accepted all refugees, despite its own precarious situation.

No, I was not on holidays!

The reason why I went there is nonetheless not a personal one. An ad-hoc delegation of MEPs visited two refugee camps and met the Prime Minister and several other ministers in Tunis mid-July. This delegation was an interesting communication opportunity because it touched upon sensitive and “citizen-friendly” topics: immigration, humanitarian aid and the democratic changes in North Africa.

Hence it was decided to cover the delegation a bit more in-depth and live: a pilot project aiming at sending a Webcomm editor with the delegation was set up. I had the chance to be chosen, mainly because I was French-speaking, active in our social media activities and following quite closely the Arab revolutions. My responsibility was to underline the activities of MEPs outside Brussels, on the spot, giving a human touch and trying to make use of the possibilities of Twitter regarding live coverage and direct interactions.

A trip into distress and hopelessness

I was quite excited to leave for three days with a delegation and the reality was up to my expectations. From a personal point of view first: of course, we all see images from refugee camps on TV, we all know what happens in certain regions of the world, but it’s totally different to be on the spot, in the desert, talking to refugees whose biggest problem is, in the end, that they “lost hope”. It’s very different to sit in your sofa with a coke and some crisps, watching the news on TV, and to sit in a tent with humanitarian actors and refugees, with 43°C, in the middle of a sandstorm.

I was shocked by the living conditions in refugee camps and ashamed by the absence of reaction from the EU (this is not only a personal opinion, this is also what the whole delegation stated, asking for more resettlement). Reporting back about what I saw was a -small- consolation, but I couldn’t avoid thinking that the same evening, I could sleep in a good bed and fly back home a few days later, to find family, friends, a house, a job and, more important than everything else, dreams and projects for the weeks, months and years to come.

Communicating live on the spot, a track to follow

43°C, sandstorms every day... The hell for refugees. The Tunisian army takes care of the security of the camp since some riots led to several casualties in May.

From a professional point of view, the delegation was also a rich experience. Sharing three days, from 8AM to 11PM with MEPs allows you to develop a different relationship than the one you can have, for example, in a short interview. You’re not only facing a politician (i.e. a public figure), yourself being in an official position. You’re also facing the private person behind. Yes, our representatives are just human like you and me ;)

The communication project worked very well. It seems the Parliament’s followers on Twitter enjoyed the experience a lot. I tweeted about 170 times in the three days, sent live some 60 pictures taken on the spot with my iPhone. The followers got background information, quotes from MEPs, impressions… We also proposed to them to ask their questions to the MEPs. In the end, the feedback was very positive, from the point of view of the followers as well as from the one of MEPs.

One interpreter even came to me the third day (there was a crew of interpreters together with us), telling me that from the beginning he was quite shocked by my attitude, thinking I was taking pictures for myself and sending text messages to friends all the time! I’m afraid that he was not the only one to have this impression and some ministers could have got the same when we met in Tunis…

In conclusion, I think the experience was worth it and could be repeated regularly. The Parliament could identify a few interesting delegation to cover more in depth every year. Would you have some interest following it or would it be too much?

If you want to know a bit more about the delegation:

We published a Focus on the Parliament’s website

You can read all the tweets on the French Twitter feed Europarl_FR

You can have a look at the pictures taken on the spot

You can read the common statement made by the delegation

You can read the debates on Facebook with our fans (here or there) and read the chat with MEP Judith Sargentini

And you can have a look at the announcement Steve made on this blog in July!

I’m still in love with FB…

Every time I feel we are reaching the limits (I learnt from Steve yesterday that I should say “Facebook seems to be faltering“), FB is always able to surprise me and make me fall in love again. Last week, it was the Sakharov event that surprisingly registered more than 500 subscriptions in 12 hours, and the Jane Goodall post, where we proposed fans to ask a question to the famous primatologist, that we would have reported in our interview. The post (two, actually) worked surprisingly well, with more than 180.000 impressions, very pertinent questions and true enthusiasm from the fans, honoured to talk to the “world leading expert on chimpanzee”. Plus, the graceful Doctor Jane, promoted our initiative on her FB wall, showing the virtues of mutual FB-support.

But!

There is one thing where I feel that we are coming to stretch our limits, and it is our FB chats.

Image from http://dianetota.com

We are doing the chats with MEPs for 1 year now (Happy birthday FB chats! Here the first one), MEPs love them and ask more and more. Till now, fans loved it, too. Even if till this week it always worked very well, I have the impression that this honeymoon could finish

soon, or rather that “we need to do something” to make it continue. In these moments I miss Christian – our first and inimitable FB coordinator and “inventor” of the FB chats – more than ever. (For those who don’t know him: Christian combines all the Germanity you can find in a single man with an incredible sense of humour, creativity and capacity to think out of the box).

But Christian has gone, so. Let me tell what I think the key elements are, and then please tell me what you think it should come next.

1. Frequency

In the conviction that “people want to talk to politicians” and galvanized by the success of our chats, we increased the frequency to one per week in the last month. But maybe scarcity is an added value, and when the chat becomes the routine, it loses most of his appeal. Question number one is, hence, a chat per week is too much?

2. Technology

Our chats are very rudimentary: we use the “comment” function on FB, as any other post. Over time, there hasn’t been much evolution, a part the use of a second computer to see the questions on a screen and answer on other, in order to speed up the answering (if you have ever experimented to “refresh” your FB page on any computer inside the European Parliament, you know what I mean).

If in the beginning this could give the impression of being “genuine” and “authentic”, I think we no longer have excuses to adopt a better technology to make the conversation more seamless: it is cute at the start. After one year, it becomes amateurish.

Second question is: if we were to adopt a new program, would you continue with the “written” chats, or would you try out the “video”, as the White House?

3. Integration

In the last weeks, following the example of Toute l’Europe, we tried to involve the Twitterers, giving them the opportunity to ask their question from Twitter. I believe that to make this marriage work, we need to create a “buzz” on Twitter, and I would be very happy if my colleagues who are more expert on Twitter could help to achieve that.

Here too, we need a more automatic integration but: do you think it make sense? Or we should organize separate Twitter activites, eventually Twitter-chats?

4. Politics

And now, the more difficult issues. More difficult because we have less control on them. But we have the duty to think of it, and try to influence those above us to generate change.

For people to be more interested in the European Parliament, we need to show what it is in the first place: politics. We

The last chat on 23 November with Jo Leinen: MEPs normally enjoy it a lot!

need to show that there is a centre-right, a centre-left, a far right, a far left. Like in national politics, it’s not “the Parliament”, but a majority of it who approves laws and resolutions. Here it is more or less the same, despite the historical sense of compromise of this House. But research shows how the EU assembly is more and more polarized. Why not tell this story, explain that there is not such a thing called “the European Parliament”, but rather 736 MEPs, from 27 countries, 7 political families and dozens of national parties?

Sorry but when I see press releases like this and then I discover that what happened is this I get depressed. Why cannot why explain that a resolution has been approved with a centre-right majority, and that the centre-left lost? Because then, when we have reactions like this (from FB):

Ricardo Cristof Remmert-Fontes The EP sucks: it just made the way free for ACTA. Please, all of you MEPs: fly to the moon and never come back.

How can we complain? And do we really do a favour to our MEPs, treating them as “all of them“?

In this sense, I hope that the chat with Joseph Daul, centre-right leader, next week will break a bit this taboo and be a genuine “première” of talking European politics on FB.

5. Participation – influence
People like to “have their say”, but they also want to be listened to. I think that the chats – and our FB page in general- should become also a platform where MEPs listen to citizens ahead of decisions, just as they do with lobbies and NGOs who have the opportunity to visit them in their Brussels and Strasbourg offices.

I don’t think it is too idealistic, if we find the key moments and topics and we offer this format  to our MEPs (“listen” to your citizens rather than “answer their questions”). For example, we might organise chats ahead of a discussion, and not only once it is over.

Again, a question: what is, in your opinion, the best way to do this?

We are really eager to collect your suggestions, and if you don’t feel like doing it on the blog, you can also send an email to: web-editor-it@europarl.europa.eu.

PS: this last remark is NOT valid for Christian. From him, I expect a brainstorming lunch very soon!



It’s great that people have noticed what we do and believe in its effectiveness as a tool of communication for the European Parliament. We could hardly say otherwise: we are still very much evangelising for the use of social media – and social media techniques – both inside the Parliament and beyond. But we are starting to see a new trend which may point to a future where we may be soft-pedalling a little more.

A Twitpic from plenary? Actress Saadet Işıl Aksoy in Parliament in Novmber 2009

It goes something like this. A colleague somewhere in the Parliament, responsible perhaps for organising an event, starts to muse over how to get people to take an interest, turn up maybe. It crosses the colleague’s mind that some quite interesting things are going on using social media… the words “online buzz” spring to mind… And to most, that means Parliament’s Facebook page.

Let’s face it, parliamentary life is not a constant roller-coaster of thrills ‘n’ spills. Not every subject is “sexy”. (By the way, I hate the use of that word in this context – kindly hit me if ever you catch me saying it.) This is how it should be. Parliamentarians deal with important subjects, they have in-depth debates, they examine legal niceties, meet experts in arcane fields. Speaking as a citizen, I am glad someone is doing serious, unsexy (ugh!) work on my behalf. Not every day or debate even in that beacon of “exciting” parliamenarianism, the House of Commons, is Prime Minister’s Question Time. Perhaps we should try to relax a little about a high proportion of meetings being rather dry. It could even be a badge of honour.

All this to say that when the call comes to “do something on Facebook” to whip up a frenzy of public excitement over an interparliamentary conference on the harmonisation of provisions governing waste water standards, our collective heart tends to sink into our boots.

Important point: waste water standards and their harmonisation matter hugely. (The example is, by the way, made up.) Thank goodness someone is doing this work. But it is not reasonable to expect the Facebook community to be galvanised by this. What often does not seem to be understood by our colleagues is that Facebook and similar social media platforms are media to be managed. Some things work well, others less so. It’s our job to know this and act accordingly. If we want these media to work well for us in the long term, they have to be nurtured, our “brand” protected, our “audience” treated with respect . They are not a magic wand to be waved over every miscellaneous parliamentary activity in a random bid for popularity.

There are intermediate cases. Sometimes we have to tell colleagues that though their subject is great, something on which our Facebookers will be highly motivated, this interest will be difficult to transfer to the event itself. A parliamentary hearing is, well, a parliamentary hearing. People sit in seats and talk. There is a limit to which even the most interesting subject can make the event itself a social media focus. If the purpose of doing something on Facebook is to promote the event itself, we get into a raw material issue.

One of the questions I answer most often is what a hashtag is. At least people are asking.

There is maybe a wider question here: how much should parliamentary events themselves by “spiced up” to make them more sellable? This is not just a social media question of course and we all know the media tail has been wagging the political dog for time immemorial, but the question is posed anew, and in a slightly different way when it comes to social media.

Meanwhile though, rather than us “doing something” on Facebook, a more promising route in terms of social media buzz around parliamentary events is to look at Twitter. This actually has less to do with us and much more to with with MEPs themselves. If they are, say, twittering from events, offering live observations on proceedings and reacting to fellow twitterers outside, perhaps a buzz will indeed be created. I wonder. Some would doubtless disapprove of a roomful of MEPs all engaged in possibly distracting parallel conversations online, while others, on the opposite side, will not fail to point that an open wifi network in parliamentary meeting rooms would help… (I believe it will come, one day!) However, the day when programmes for parliamentary hearings systematically include an event hashtag may not be far off. Whether there is yet a critical mass for this idea to take off is debatable, but things move quickly in this field. One of the questions I answer most often is what a hashtag is. But at least people are asking.

So maybe next time we are asked to “do something” on Facebook for an event, we will ask the organisers what their hashtag is. Then we might be in business.

Barroso does his version of the Obama thing. Group leaders weigh in. We twitter. (Photo: EP Flickr)

In our little WebCom corner, we, of course, published coverage of the event on the website in the usual way. Colleagues elsewhere did their usual jobs too: live and recorded video was put out on satellite and online, journalists were briefed, EuroparlTV made a news bulletin… But this time, perhaps prompted by the transatlantic associations the phrase “state of the union” carries, we really thought we needed more. In particular, we thought we should be out there on the social media.

Sources of inspiration were not lacking. One example at the front of our minds for some time has been the coverage of Obama’s last State of the Union speech using Facebook. A collaboration between CNN and Facebook had CNN’s website split in half: on the left live streaming of the speech (with all kinds of useful metadata), on the left, a live Facebook comment feed, where Facebook users, who you could filter in various ways, commented in real time on the speech as it happened. Nice. But beyond our means right now.

We thought of asking a representative group of MEPs to live-comment Barroso’s speech on our Facebook page

We thought of asking a representative group of MEPs to live-comment Barroso’s speech on our Facebook page. I’m sure we would have found some of them up for this. But then, those members would have had to be in front of their computers, not in the plenary and – you may have noticed – attendance has been a touchy issue around here. (BTW, no wifi in plenary, in case – like at least one MEP – you were wondering). In the end, on Facebook, we put up a status update and invited fans to comment on the speech as it unfolded. Some did, but it would have been unreasonable to expect this seriously to take off. As for other social media, we posted some video on YouTube, put quite a neat slideshow on Flickr and did what we could to publicise all this using our 22 Twitter feeds.

However, and here is the point of this post, we also thought we’d try something else: near-live twittering of the entire thing. We do this already, of course. When Barroso attends Parliament for “Question Hour” we sum up each question from a political group leader and each answer from Barroso in a tweet. This is a fair operation, and worth briefly describing.

I won’t pretend this exercise is stress-free. In fact it is horribly stressful.

First, we set up a Google doc, which we pre-format into sections for each question and reply. We then allocate a pair of editors to each question and answer in alternation. The editors listen to the live stream from plenary and write into the Google document snippets which sum up what is said. Meanwhile, the undersigned sits, with the Google doc open in one tab, the Europarl_EN Twitter feed in another and the streaming running in a separate window, and tries to condense the bits into a coherent tweet for each question/answer, adds hashtags and clicks “Tweet”. The rest of the WebCom team, in the meantime, have the English Twitter feed open on their screens, and as the new tweets appear each post a tweet in their own language. Thus, for the half hour while Barroso responds to Group leaders, we multilingually live-tweet proceedings.

I won’t pretend this exercise is stress-free. In fact it is horribly stressful. Things that can (and do) go wrong:

• No-one gets what the speaker is saying. A degree of deliberate ambiguity is of course a useful political art from time to time, and for whatever reason (sometimes including interpretation difficulties) interventions on the floor of the House can sometimes be of less than crystalline clarity. Trouble is, in a minute-long question you don’t get many second chances.
• Who’s that? Occasionally, instead of the reassuringly familiar face of the group leader, a completely unfamiliar individual gets up. Panic! The rush is on to identify the honourable member. Yes, we got it wrong once…
• Backlog. Getting behind adds exponentially to the stress levels (waiting for a name, Twitter on go-slow) and feeds the stress inexorably down the language chain. Thank goodness for supplementary questions, they buy a little time.
• Translation: a wonderful, succinct, idiomatic tweet in English says it all. Maybe, but wait for the howls of anguish from the Finnish editor: “Gimme a break! I can’t say all THAT in 140 characters!”
• Long names. “Daul (EPP)” is fine, but “Cohn-Bendit (Greens/EFA)” gives you fourteen fewer precious twittering characters to play with. We dread the day that Mr Díaz de Mera García Consuegra (EPP) is asked to stand in for his group chair…
• Misrepresentation. The big political danger… The speaker meant one thing, we say something different. The speaker has two key points, we only mention one. Barroso condemns the action of the Iranian government, we say the Albanian government. Oops! Twitter people are tolerant of errors, some politicians may detect a plot.

Presumably we were out of our minds when we decided to do two hours’ worth

Such pitfalls make the experience of twittering a half hour of quick-fire questions stressful enough, so presumably we were out of our minds when we decided to do two hours’ worth of it, covering longer and more involved speeches? With hindsight, yes, we probably were. But we did try to mitigate the trials in store somewhat, specifically in two ways.

First, we decided to go in English only. This removed a whole level of complication from the exercise and had the beneficial side effect of allowing twenty or so people to get on with the day job for the two hours in question. In hindsight, with the much greater complexity, it would have been totally impossible to manage in multiple languages.

Second, we addressed the issue of selection by building in a time lag. The one other occasion we had live tweeted a longer debate had taught us the perils of real time. If you tweet while a speaker is speaking, you have no idea how much is still to come, you are unaware of the magnificent soundbite around the corner, you can get the balance wrong. In our world, you have to make sure the speakers get a proportionate level of coverage, so how to pace your tweets over six minutes of Daul or five minutes of Schulz? On this occasion therefore, we had a policy: we collect soundbites as they happen, but save them up to be tweeted when the speaker finishes, as a kind of summary. It more or less worked. With Barroso (32 minutes) we had the leisure to craft tweets. It helped that we also had a text of his speech. But with the group speakers, whose speaking time got shorter and shorter, the technique involved stress levels familiar from Question Hour, and meant that posting the tweets for the previous speaker almost entirely precluded paying attention to the next, with an attendant risk of misunderstanding.

The question is not “did we cope ?” (we did, just), but “was it worth it?”

Nevertheless, it all got done. I for one, felt totally burned out at the end of the coverage (and could have died when a screen alert told me, as I collapsed in a helpless mass, that I was supposed to be in a meeting ten minutes hence).

At this point, looking back on the week, riding the train back to Brussels, the question is not “did we cope ?” (we did, just), but “was it worth it?”. My colleague Jory, deputy spokeswoman extraordinaire, was reassuringly enthusiastic. “It’s great,” she said, “it’s all there, short and easy to read. We don’t need to do a press release…” She is anything but work shy, so I took that as a compliment, but I have my doubts. Of course, given all the pitfalls I have described, it would be really stretching a point to hope that our Twitter coverage could constitute a faithful record of the debate. Besides, such records exist both in video and (albeit later) in written form. If we are doing this for any reason, it is as ephemeral live coverage, so that Twitter users who are interested can follow what is going on in real, or near-real time.

Was anyone following all of this, or did we just horribly spam the feeds of our dear followers (of whom we lost about ten during the exercise)? We noticed a few retweets, though few, and one or two replies, but we didn’t for example make the top ten trending subjects on Twitter. Nevertheless, I suppose it is possible that there were people out there following proceedings, watching out for a juicy titbit perhaps…

Let me be honest. (That’s what this blog is for, right?) This is too much hard work to do unless it is really useful to someone. If it is, we’re delighted to do it. It’s a dose of adrenaline, definitely a bit of a team-building exercise. If it’s not, don’t worry, we won’t be twiddling our thumbs.

It would be great if people who read this, insiders, friends, outsiders, could comment. Is it worth it? Could a different format work better? Is just English OK? What do you think?

Is it for mad dogs? Englishmen? Both? Neither? Over to you.

IS IT an addiction?! Thanks to Fluxy for the pciture on Flickr @ http://bit.ly/brf29N

I considered myself a “frequent social media user”, with some incipient risk of addiction. Since I read this blog from tech company Retrevo that relieved me. I’m NOT in the top risk category. Apparently, I don’t present the most visible signs of what researchers call “obsession with checking in with their social media circles throughout the day and even the night”.  

Believe it or not, the most dangerous symptom of the syndrome, according to scientists, is interrupting sexual activity (or, as Retrovo delicately phrases it, “intimate moments”), to check your Facebook or Twitter account. According to Retrevo, 11% among young users (under 25) do it regularly. Yes, that’s right, check their fourth chart, third green column from the left… My theory “the youngest, the best” is totally in crisis now.

Another bad sign is if you check your account(s) as soon as you wake up in the morning, sure that there will be somebody even more zealous than you who already posted something. This is a very contagious virus, since it strikes 48% of social media users. Not me.  I’m the kind of girl that avoids any interaction with the world (real or virtual) before 9.00h.

But then, it comes to the third, unmistakable symptom: are you ready to interrupt a dinner for an electronic message? YES! Yes, I am! I am able to start a 2 hours conversation on the phone while starting to eat and I completely forget about my dinner. But then the phone is quite old school isn’t it? I mean, I wouldn’t consider it as “social media”, but more as “social life” addiction.

Naturally, all this left me burning with curiosity… I started to wonder if my colleagues were those kind of very bad addicts, or just we all belong to the old school. Here the result of my Flash Survey 19-04-2010.

Sex and the ex

Definitely happy to discover that the majority of us don’t open Facebook during our “intimate moments”. Only one admits to having had “a chat” while making love.

Worth a mention, the case of “an ex insisting on checking if she got a text to her phone during sex”: maybe a sufficient reason to break up. (ed. How reliable is such information about an ex, I wonder?)

Otherwise, numbers talk clear: we are below the average, with 14 out of 15 answering an unambiguous “NO” to the question.

Night-book?

Unit below the average also there, but with some more positive answers: 1/3 of us check Facebook “during sleepless nights”, when they wake up (no Dan, not everybody does!), or before going to bed. It is, surprisingly, a 80% male majority. Maybe girls have something better to do at night?

Ex are recurrent presences in this poll: “My ex was sticking to Facebook as soon as she woke up. And I would have killed her!”. Poor guy… Take comfort from your colleague who had to deal with the sex-SMS-ex.

Dinner and phone, a popular combination

1/3 of us check Facebook “during sleepless nights”, when they wake up, or before going to bed.

Yes, we’re definitely the old school. Most of us allow interruption of dinner by the phone, but internet is not mentioned at all: we don’t have “our computer at the dining table”.

Some people “try to avoid it” (the phone), meaning that it’s a very frequent practice. Only 5 say a convinced “NO”, whereas the others – knowing that they could be judged under the Fine Dining Etiquette rules – answer a timid “no, unless…”.

No ex this time, but a very liberated family: ” I was always thought those families that wouldn’t answer the phone during dinner were strange. Would they rather have the phone ringing off the hook than answering?!”

And now comes the best…

Eh eh. You thought you were sane, didn’t you? That, despite the hours spent in front of the screen, all the pictures of your school mates you have been browsing, the dangerous chats with the ex, despite Twitter and MySpace entering your adult life, YOU are still immune. I did. Till I got at the end of the article:

“56% of social media users need to check Facebook at least once a day. Even more impressive are the 12% who check in every couple of hours”

Every couple of hours??? What if it’s every couple of minutes??? My god…THAT’s a SYMPTOM! Unless, unless…you have a good excuse…a good excuse like

“I use it for work”

And, uff, I have it. Do you?!

The network is spreading

We don’t claim the scientific method or the statistical sophistication of Fleishman Hillard, but we have some rough and ready figures on how many MEPs are using social media – and it seems the numbers are well up since the elections. Doubtless increasing every day as well…

So, here we go:

Twitter

We found 230 MEPs with Twitter feeds.  That’s just over 31% of the membership of the EP. Collectively, they have over 114,000 followers.  If you want information on who is most followed, most active, etc., the euro-twitter aggregation site europatweets.eu offers some statistics (for which I take no responsibility).

Twitter is of course currently having another of its moments in the limelight, thanks to its role in helping people deal with myriad difficulties caused by the air traffic ban (see Tibo’s post mentioning this and his praise for Eurocontrol’s exemplary efforts on Twitter), and many MEPs have been using their Twitter feeds to tell stories of travel disruption, seek/give information or occasionally vent some frustration.

Facebook

A majority of MEPs have Facebook profiles! We found 401, that’s 55% of them. That’s a comfortable co-decision qualified majority… Unlike Fleishman Hillard, we haven’t got the research firepower to try to assess “extensive” users of social networks, but I think we can assume that the total we found represents a significant increase over the 33% who “used social networks extensively” before the elections.

A majority of MEPs have Facebook profiles! That’s a  qualified majority.

Altogether, and very interestingly for anyone thinking in terms of a burgeoning EP online community, these members have well over 450,000 fans, but, of course, fairly spread out between them.  (We couldn’t help noticing though that almost 90,000 of the total were fans of just two members, but otherwise the numbers are quite even.)

Facebook is the social media platform which seems to offer us the greatest possibilities at present. The number of fans (or, as it now says, “people who like this”) of the EP Facebook page is growing steadily, and stands at 66,640 at the beginning of the day I write this, which also happens to be the page’s first birthday! We are also seeing an increasing level of interaction on the page from fans, and, it is good to observe, from MEPs who wish to join in the debates they see occurring there.

Personally, I can’t find anyone else in the EU institutional framework, or in the wider “official” European parliamentary world, who has built up a number of fans approaching this. (That said, I am not going to compare the page with, say Britney Spears or Barack Obama – 2.6 and 8.0 million fans respectively – but that’s different, right?) So, perhaps, embryonically, the EP Facebook page stands as good a chance as anyone at offering one place where the mythical European public sphere to start taking shape online. Now, moreover, that we know about all those members – and all their fans – it seems all the more clear that the time has come to start getting serious about developing the links and interaction between them all, and maybe creating a kind of institutional hub for their conversation.

But that is another, very interesting, story and doubtless material for many more posts in the future. Back to business.

Blogs

Last in our research, we found 282 MEP bloggers, which is about 38%. I admit to wondering whether we found everything, but do note that the FH study had MEP “extensive” bloggers at 24%.

****

MEPs are increasingly engaging via social media. This must have momentous implications for our own institutional online strategy in the future.

So there you go, just some quick figures. Many thanks to the doughty trainees for their valuable efforts on this. As I said, I don’t pretend it is “scientific” research and I am going to be cautious about getting into more detail, which might be rather spurious. The key thing is we know that, yes, MEPs are increasingly engaging via social media, that a critical mass is surely being reached and that this will have momentous implications for our own institutional online strategy in the future. More anon, no doubt.

This Tweet by Kattabel made my day:

Should you apply?

Two big joys. Fist one: Obama is looking for a Social Networks Manager. Everybody knows that the American President used the social media tools trough all his campaign and continues to feed them actively, with over 7,5 Million fans on Facebook and more than 3 Million on Twitter.

Kattabel made a direct connection between Obama and the European Parliament, suggesting that the vote on SWIFT really affected Americans politics and politicians.

I’m very impressed by this Tweet and I dream of the day when, let’s say Mr. Barroso, or Lady Ashton, who, so far, are still a bit behind, will publish a similar annoucement.

Now… please don’t rush away to go and send your application, stay here to read the rest of this post!

Mia Cambronero, on the left, has been Obama's Twitterer till now

The lucky one (till today a young lady) will be working “closely with the rest of the New Media department” but has to be “ready to work hard”, since ”this isn’t a 9-5 sort of job”. The motivation is important: you should be “passionate about engaging millions of Americans in advancing President Obama’s agenda and changing the country”.

But there is a second thing which makes me feel even better. Kattabel made a direct connection between Obama and the European Parliament, suggesting that the vote on SWIFT really affected Americans politics and politicians.

This might sound a bit provincial (“Uh uh…Obama is talking of us…”). But wait. What if this was really the beginning of a new leading role of the European Parliament on the international stage, a role that the EU never gave to our institution before the Lisbon Treaty?

It will be very interesting, in the years to come, to see how the Parliament will be able to stretch the powers granted by the Treaty to play a role in the world. This was for sure a strong start, whether Obama does actually care or not of what will you write in your application.

Ok, now let’s twitt a bit more about going in the footsteps of Sakharov Prize winners of 2009, couple of days before the award.  

Kremlin

 Last-minute surprise visa on Friday, call to one of Moscow’s hotels, desperate efforts trying to find warmer coat and boots in Brussels right before leaving… No chance of sleeping during the night flight to Moscow.  

In focus: Oleg Orlov

Young, strict, but in the end helpful immigration officer filling in a form for me. Critically thinking bright taxi driver and nice hotel staff not charging me for an extra (previous) night. 

 Some sleep, a hasty steps past the Kremlin crossing the Moscow river to the press conference during the Conference ‘Sakharov’s Ideas Today’.

St. Basil's Cathedral

Catching the legendary Lyudmila Alexeyeva and Sergei Kovalev for couple of quotes. Chatting with journalists from grani.ru and Interfax while finally getting something to eat. 

Sergei Kovalev

Passing Lubyanka (ex-KGB building); hearing a familiar French accent when asking the way while searching for the Human Rights Centre Memorial.  

Seeing the courageous people risking their lives when doing their everyday work. Intensive Facebook chat (huge thank you to Maria for help!) with Oleg Orlov, leaving you extremely exhausted, but happy. 

Oleg Orlov and Lyudmila Alexeyeva

A sip of an excellent Caucasian cognac while hearing an account of  Memorial staff on being questioned by authorities the same day. Conversation with Katia who’s going to study in (…surprise) – Brussels. 

A very rewarding interview with Oleg Orlov and its hasty translation into English before everyone leaves the office. Dead-cold walk through the streets of Moscow, with hot bath at the hotel saving me from „permafrosting“.  

Sorry for 11 twitts packed in one text. Warning: twitting and writing synopses can make your language terribly telegraphic :)  

Special thanks to Oleg, Maria, Tatiana, Aleksandr, Jan, and everyone in Memorial for the friendly atmosphere and sharing their office with me for half a day. Big TNX to Anete, Christian, Rafa, Evita, Tibo, Steve and the whole Webteam for making it happen ;)  

Golden quotes:  

Taxi driver no 1: “Until this country starts producing something, it will go nowhere”  

Lyudmila Alexeyeva: “It is not awarded to me, but rather to all of us, especially those, who have lost their lives for the cause. If they were alive, they would be happy”   

Sergei Kovalev: Russia is currently a stumbling block in the way of international progress. It’s not alone; some other countries are also “splendid” enough.  

Oleg Orlov: “Sometimes you feel that you are scooping the sea with a spoon”  

Taxi driver no 2: “Airports, hotels, nightclubs, you wouldn’t service them without payoffs to gangs”  

@ the Airport café: “Man, move to another café. They sell the same stuff there, I’m busy”