It’s perfect internet material: short, smart, witty, self-ironic, a bit oddball, loaded with wow! effects and, yes, a fair hormonal charge. Here it is:

“Look at your man, now back to me, now back to your man, now back to me. Sadly, he isn’t me.”

Actually, I’m a little worried. I showed this to my wife yesterday and I’m convinced she’s watched it 146 times since then – and she’s still laughing! She may actually have watched the other one I showed her more often. This is the previous commercial from March, featuring “the man your man could smell like”, this one approaching 12 million views on YouTube. (Maybe I’m getting Old Spice for Christmas.)

You know you want to watch it. Here it is:

Now, I’m not Tayebot, and I’m not sure I can theorise satisfactorily about how this works in advertising terms. But I can spend a harmless few minutes wondering whether we have anything to learn from this.

Well, yes. Be short, smart, witty, self-ironic, a bit oddball, loaded with wow! effects and, yes, pack a fair hormonal charge.

Be short, smart, witty, self-ironic, a bit oddball, loaded with wow! effects and pack a fair hormonal charge

Not on a horse

And then get a budget to do something like this… I can’t track down a figure for the single videos, the best I can find is a media blog reporting that Old Spice advertising to June in 2010 cost 20 million dollars, the equivalent of 2/3 of its whole 2009 advertising budget. Sigh! We can only dream.

However, there is one interesting thing we can relate to in these advertisements: they (the first at least) are NOT loaded with computer-generated effects. Take my word for it, or watch this “making of” programme. It was done in one shot, with just a little photoshop-style tidying-up afterwards. Just like our lipdub. Yeah, right…

At the Polling Staion #1

As part of it, I was asked to select a sample of EU online videos to show the seminar. They were supposed to be illustrative of the best the EU had to offer in terms of online video. Come up with two or three from the Commission and two or three from Parliament, they said.

So here are the five I showed:

1. The all-time no.1 Youtube hit from the Commission, its famous “porno” video promoting the MEDIA programme. Classic example of general amazement at a body such as the Commission producing something like this… Watch out, you may have to assert your 18+ age to watch this…

2. The wonderfully retro-geeky “Chemical Party“, which proves slick isn’t everything. This is great. So un-institutional.

3. The contrasting high-production-values, loved-in-the-West, questioned-in-the-East tear-jerker, snappily-entitled “20 years of democratic change“. Nearly fell totally victim to politically correct editing by committee, nevertheless still emotionally powerful, lump-in-the-throat stuff (how often do you hear that about a Commission video?) but maybe leaves you feeling a little manipulated and propagandised? (And was Europe really “reunited” in 2004?) Still, whatever, you can’t ignore it: the Spielberg movie of EUTube…

4. From Parliament, it just had to be the screaming girl election viral video (picture), Parliament’s best seller so far.

5. Couldn’t resist bringing in at no.5 WebCom’s very own 2007 “Friday I’m in Love Lipdub“. We can’t really call this a “Parliament” video, as this was our own, unofficial, after hours thing, but it taught us a lot when it caused a local YouTube sensation and, yes, I just have to smile every time I see it for the joie de vivre it somehow exudes. I hear some of our colleagues have shown this at careers fairs since to show that we’re not all grey bureaucrats in Brussels!

As a bonus, I showed this tiny clip which the Obama team put out just before election day, just to prove that you really don’t have to be fancy to make a cracking online video. (By the way, is this clip from Belgium?)

So there you have it, my “top five” Euro-vids. Yours?

Interesting article comparing the advertising strategies of old arch-rivals Coca Cola and Pepsi (found thanks to @MickSiddle on Twitter). Coke is sponsoring the 2010 World Cup, but Pepsi seems to be going for a social media based approach instead. Pepsi even opted out of advertising during the Superbowl this year (unlike, famously, Google with its Parisian love story) after doing so for 23 years, and seems set to spend up to a third of its entire advertising budget on social media. That’s a fair amount for sure, and advertising like Pepsi’s YouTube spot, featuring Henry, Messi, Lampard and Drogba, doesn’t come cheap. Whatever, first World Cup score to Pepsi, says the article. So the big boys are putting their big advertising bucks online…

Public information film NOT as they used to be. Remarkable, and a hit.

The same article also gives a top ten of current online advertising videos. There is a remarkable ultra slow motion dog food advert (I learnt from a careers fair decades ago that Pedigree pet foods is part of the Mars Corporation, so there’s money there too), and the amazing  Evian baby spot that’s been doing the rounds (am I alone in thinking that, though a cool video, there is something slightly “off” about using babies this way?).

I am however most struck – and mightily relieved – that it’s not all megabuck multinational corporations in there. There is a public safety campaign at no. 6, from the unlikely-sounding source (why do I say that?) of “Sussex Safer Roads Partnership”. I’d already been sent this by someone in the office. Over three million views; how many in Sussex, I wonder. If you haven’t seen it, watch it (whether or not you are in Sussex), it’s superb.

Anyway, there is definitely a place for the smart, highly-produced YouTube/”viral” video in the communications mix, it seems, including for the public sector. Hmm. It’s close to a year since we released our election videos, perhaps it’s time to think about the next official offering. Something based on the euro-West Wing concept perhaps?

WeBelong batting for Lisbon and Ireland

Plenty of No videos seem to be doing the rounds, spreading the message of the Lisbon Treaty ushering in an improbable world of abortion clinics on every corner, Irish soldiers dying in faraway foreign fields under EU orders, the entire fishing fleet scuppered somewhere off he Galician coast and famers cast into destitution by an EU commissioner wearing a monocle and black leather gloves and known to his friends as Dr Death. The End-Of-Ireland-As-We-Know-It generally, in other words.

My quest: find those shy retiring Yes-videos and see what they were doing to counter the, erm, somewhat tendentious, if not occasionally bizarre, claims of the No camp.

But where are the Yes-videos? Google searches turned up plenty of the above, but the Love Lisbon genre seemed a rather rarer beast. Hence my quest: find those shy retiring Yes-videos and see what they were doing to counter the, erm, somewhat tendentious, if not occasionally bizarre, claims of the No camp. I concentrated on independent sources, not political parties.

Did I strike gold? Well, it’s a mixed bag.  I had high hopes at one point of a guy in giant green spectacles, but for all his undoubted commitment and sincerity, I don’t think he’s going to swing it single-handed.

If your idea of a good campaigning online video is something short, graphically neat, with a simple message and a decent tune, I think so far an offering from WeBelong currently has it for me. (They need to make it easier to share though.)

Not bad stuff from an outfit called Generation Yes, either. My favourite from them goes in for a bit of negative campaigning (not unreasonably, given the large quantities of mud being flung by the other side), while another, rather earnest one, focuses on human rights.

The biggest formal non-party organisation campaigning for a Yes, IrelandforEurope, has definitely got the message that it needs to make online videos, and offers over 40 on its website. Most of these though are talking heads videos – many celebrity endorsements, which is great – but I was really looking for something with viral potential. For me, the pick of the bunch was one which attacked the other side AND made a positive case for the treaty.  Mentions too for themed videos on climate change (nice tune) and humanitarian aid.

Characterisations of the politicians on the two sides of the argument – the Yes side being “incompetent, inept and corrupt” and the No side being “unemployable feckin’ headbangers” – give this over-long video some viral potential

As celebrity endorsements go, my own attention was detained for longest by a video which is anything but slick and graphical: the launch of Ryanair’s pro-Yes campaign, featuring Michael O’Leary in typically trenchant form. His characterisations of the politicians on the two sides of the argument – the Yes side being “incompetent, inept and corrupt” and the No side being “unemployable feckin’ headbangers” – give this over-long video some viral potential, but less so than if O’Leary wasn’t already famous, and loved and loathed, for expressing these sentiments frequently in public. His parade of Ryanair girls in the video give it a slightly anachronistic corniness, but will irk as many as it diverts.

And that’s about it (so far). Not an awful lot, it has to be said. It causes me to reflect on how much harder it is to promote something wordy, technical, legal and complicated (however positive and necessary), as opposed to slagging it off any old how, without having to worry too much about detail and accuracy. Inevitably, going for the people on the other side is easier, something which comes out in the videos above.

Maybe, as in rock’n'roll, the devil has the best tunes

So, what do we conclude? Maybe, as in rock’n'roll, that the devil has the best tunes. Maybe too that the Yes camp needs to get its creative juices flowing before 2 October.

Know any good Yes videos, the one that cracks it? Let us know. The angels can sing too maybe.

Meanwhile, from Generation Yes:

Sometimes you have to look at the world as it is

This is probably exactly the wrong place, indeed a self-contradictory place, to hint at heretically relativising thoughts, but being away far from Brussels for a few weeks has made me reflect on digital divides of various sorts.

There is the usual one of course, between people with access to the internet and those without, but it is probably fair to say that, at least in the developed world, no-one need be cut off from the internet, any more than anyone need be cut off from TV or a telephone. No, the important digital divides now lie between the different ways in which people experience the internet. That’s why I mention my own difficult “reintegration” after the break – it made me think about what kind of internet user I am and how that is quite different from other people, including many I work with.

Disclosure: I am white, male, British, university-educated, mid-forties.  So now you know. I am not “generation Y“, I don’t think I ever used a computer at school, and at university I wrote all my essays longhand.  However, when I watch the television (which is not that often, but apparently more often than Generation Y’ers) I notice from the current crop of ”nostalgia” programming (70s and 80s) that my generation is in charge of the (mainstream) media. I further note that Obama is not that much older than me. So perhaps my generation is in charge of the world too. Closer to home, I work daily with computers and the internet, I like gadgets. So how do I use the internet?

The important digital divides now lie between the different ways in which people experience the internet

Email is integral to everyday life also outside work, but most non-professional messages are dross (i.e. advertising). Just a small minority actually get any attention, but these are mostly unimportant and/or unofficial.  I still want my electricity bill in the post. On paper.

I check news sites, often provoked to do so by the two or three automatic newsletters I have signed up for. But, if I’m honest, it’s always the same two or three sites and I still want the “proper” news regularly (meaning the BBC, TV or radio). I still subscribe to paper magazines – which I actually read, but almost never buy newspapers.

The only news where the web really dominates for me is tech news.  That seems appropriate.

I buy things online – books, music, travel tickets, car hire – but only from big, well-known companies. I research offline purchases too, but most real things I want to touch before I buy.  I can’t bring myself to feel comfortable about eBay.

And of course, I find things out from the internet: weather, location, addresses and phone numbers, missing facts, quotes, dates… “Look it up” is something which now basically means “google it”.

So far, so Web 1.0… So what about the much-vaunted social media, Web 2.0 and all that? I share photos and the odd video online, but for me this is an operation, not a spontaneous  everyday mobile experience (like in the adverts). Yes, Facebook and Twitter are on my every day must-check list, but I realise that I am largely a spectator. I want my “friends” to be people I know, and at least feel friendly towards. I like to see what they are up too and, because I know them, don’t see this as voyeurism. I love checking out the cool online videos and websites (here’s one from this week) people link to – this is the greatest use of social networks for me.  Increasingly, though, I realise that 95% of the tweets I follow are just boring (I could cut down to following about five people with few regrets, those who (as we used to say back home) “only say something if they’ve got something to say”). So I consume social media, but it occurs to me more and more that I struggle for inspiration as to what to post myself.  This just doesn’t seem to be an issue for many others, but for me it just doesn’t come naturally to tell people about the trivia of my life, and I so want my updates and tweets to be interesting and pertinent that I self-censor almost anything I might put for fear of wasting people’s time.  That leaves “professional” updates and tweets, but even there I feel the need to moderate the volume for fear of inundating friends and/or spoiling the personal nature of Facebook (no such qualms with Twitter).

So, you might say, if I’m so reticent about talking about myself online, why am I telling you all of this?

Because I need an example.  I do not claim to represent my generation, but I also suspect that I am not untypical: a web-consumer, but not usually a huge web-explorer; a frequent user, but cautious about getting stung; attracted by social media, but not instinctive or natural about opening up my life to all online. The internet is an extra dimension, but not a natural habitat. I am not clueless, but I am not as clued up as many who surround me (thank goodness). I am a digital immigrant (like Svetla’s mother-in-law).

The pressure is always to be cutting edge, to be doing the latest thing, surfing the latest trend.  We need to do that, but we cannot do ONLY that.

None of this is how it’s supposed to be.  Breathless opinionistas and bloggers imply that all web users are spontaneous and opinionated online, smart, faddy, creative, uninhibited, keen to interact, desperate to be heard. They are supposed to be citizens of the world, talking to the world and listening to the world. They flock to the latest hit online video or cool website, aggregate content with their RSS browsers, and share their every move with their friends (whom in their case they probably do not actually know) in real time, tweeting on their mobile phones.

Of course, many, many people are doing exactly that, and more.

But many more aren’t.  The internet is like society in general, made up of people with very different online lifestyles.  People have their groups and their habitual haunts, their comfort zones and their downtime, their professional worlds and their private lives. Some people are young, energetic, adventurous, maybe also gullible, impulsive and fickle, others are more staid, constant, cautious, but perhaps also more stable and committed.

Where am I going with all this?  I suppose it’s no more than a question of trying to stand back for a moment, relativising and remembering that even online the European Parliament has to talk to everyone.  Catering to one world (good thing), must not exclude catering to others (also good thing). The pressure is always to be cutting edge, to be doing the latest thing, surfing the latest trend.  We need to do that, but we cannot do only that.  If our notion of digital democracy is to focus ALL our efforts on Facebook and Twitter (or whatever’s next), we win plaudits from the in-crowd online, but we arguably open up a digital divide of our own, cutting off an otherwise completely sentient crowd of people (I know many of them) who may have heard of Facebook and Twitter, but still think it’s a bit of a waste of time. They exist, yes, they use the internet, and they vote…

This is a huge simplification of course. As we found during the election campaign, different online and traditional media are not sealed off from each other, but feed off each other constantly. Nevertheless, we should not forget that in the great big world of the internet, people still organise themselves into their own little worlds. One of our jobs is not to limit ourselves to yet another little world of our own.

Do I overstate my case?

Design by our friends in the EP StudioWeb.

I heard that in the modern virtual world they call people like my mother in law “digital immigrants”. This is the opposite of “digital natives” – for whom digital technologies already existed in the time they were born. In this sense I am maybe a sort of “digital non-citizen”, or better “digital asylum-seeker”. Let us take the social media. By the time our team started using them in the election campaign I was the last person among my colleagues without Facebook account and who thought that Twitter is a sort of Belgian beer.

And look at me now, two months later! I am administrating widgets on MySpace, publishing posts on Facebook and cannot imagine a day without Twittering. With the same enthusiasm my Danish colleague uploads videos on Youtube every day. It is a special flame! That flame you can also see in the eyes of my Portuguese colleague, when she is inviting friends on MySpace. But nothing can compare with the flame in the eyes of our coordinator announcing almost daily new records of visits on our web pages.

It is amazing how quick it happens – our diving in the social media, and at the same time the change in the European Parliament – from web scepticism to web enthusiasm. (Please, see also the post by Steve). Yes, our work became more, (does Steve see that also?), but I think we enjoy this very much. We’re on YouTube and thousands are our friends in Facebook and MySpace. Yes, we dared to start direct communication with the citizens of Europe and it makes us feel satisfied, it makes us feel real. (See also Tibo’s and Kristiina’s posts.)

And look at me now, two months later! I am administrating widgets on MySpace, publishing posts on Facebook and cannot imagine a day without Twittering.

The best thing is that we really got in touch with our readers. We see how many people react and comment on our articles and are interested in European issues. It is satisfactory to see hundred thousands have watched the viral videos online.

Therefore I tried to answer the question of my mother in law about the blog in a way that makes her like it. I wanted to translate it in her language. “To blog is to write in the Internet about things you have experienced, about things you are interested in. It is something like an online diary“, I said. “Oh really?” she replied. Didn’t I see that flame in her eyes?

I say the “happy position”, because it is great (and easy) to be the cool guys constantly bidding for an idea and able to moan virtuously when the ol’ fuddy-duddies didn’t get it. Trouble is, they did! 

We are on MySpace!

What changed? For us, three factors. First, the world changed (not just for us, but for us too). The internet became what it is, technology moved on and we entered an era where NOBODY could ignore strange phenomena like MEPs’ speeches getting a million views in two days on YouTube or improbable Scottish singers becoming 50-million-view sensations…

Second, Obama happened. Politicians everywhere saw tangibly, and in the highest-stakes democratic contest in the world, how clever use of the modern internet for political communication can mobilise and motivate in ways hitherto unsuspected. Rightly enough, suddenly all politicians want a piece of that particular action.

How many times have we girded our loins, prepared our pitch, convinced that our latest scheme for something dangerously hip on the internet would be a tough sell to our flinty-eyed superiors, only to find the door wide open and be told to get a move on?

Third, the European elections loomed. Let’s not beat around the bush, EU people are worried that turnout could decline once more and the elections fail to receive the attention they are due. So the moment is propitious for trying new ideas, heading in new directions. Turnout is not determined by EU communications campaigns, but the cry went up nonetheless “we have to do whatever it takes!”

So, in a short space of time, we have an environment where suddenly the seemingly impossible, or, better, unimaginable, became urgent, where ideas which had hitherto been pushed in vain sailed through with barely a squeak. It was disconcerting: how many times have we girded our loins, prepared our pitch, convinced that our latest scheme for something dangerously hip on the internet would be a tough sell to our flinty-eyed superiors, only to find the door wide open and be told to get a move on? Will it last? Maybe not, but these are good times for innovation and it is hard to imagine how the internet genie can now be persuaded back into the bottle.

So why a hint of nostalgia for those sunny days when we banged our heads against a wall of seemingly implacable web-scepticism? Well, we’ve gotta do it now, haven’t we! 

Someone once said be careful what you wish for… I sympathise. Once upon a time, the web team of the EP spent its days researching and writing articles for the headlines page of the EP website. It was a full time job, done well. It still is.  (A full-time job, done well). But today your friendly web editors have one or two other things to keep them out of mischief:

+ moderating comments for our interactive features on the elections website

+ administering a MySpace profile, blogging, posting videos and photos, making friends, moderating comments

+ from today, very much the same for a Facebook page

+ managing a Flickr account, uploading photos, responding to users (and a separate “Guest photographer” photstream)

+ blogging on this blog (no, that’s a pleasure!)

+ getting out there, spreading the word, linking, commenting, posting, networking

+ and (soon) managing a new YouTube channel (part of EUTube)

Meanwhile, we’re not out of ideas yet. More projects are in the pipeline, but  a degree of suspense about those for the moment.

It’s great, of course, and there is SO much more to be done (as a rather intimidating encounter with a man from the UK Central Office of Information recently brought home to me), but it’s also rather a lot of work in the meantime. It’s all very well to set up cool new social networking sites, to finally “get it” (thanks Nosemonkey), but once you’ve started there’s no going back. Social networks, by definition, need daily input, a truth the EP web team  is discovering by doing.

So sooner or later, recognising a reality that public administrations traditionally feel hard to deal with, our strategy will have to be as much about what we are going to stop doing as about all the new things we can find to keep us busy. Just for now though, those elections continue to loom, all hands are on deck and there are seven weeks to go (it says so on MySpace) and, dammit, we’re enjoying it!

Mr Hannan's viral video (YouTube)

Who’d have thought it possible? The internet’s most popular video, apparently for rather more than the mythical 15 minutes of fame, at least in the UK, was this week a recording of a three minute speech by a Conservative MEP, sitting as a non-attached member in the European Parliament. 

Yes, that’s a speech by an MEP…  With 1.4 million views at the time of writing (thus in under four days).

The office is buzzing with exchanges, admittedly mainly between the Brits, about how on earth this was possible. Mr Hannan himself seems perplexed, pointing out that he has made many speeches in Parliament, many of them attacking Labour, without any of them making him an internet star. It helps of course that he was speaking directly to the UK Prime Minister, present in the chamber, who just had to sit and listen, but that hardly explains the phenomenon. UKIP leader, Nigel Farage, no oratorical slouch himself, also had a go, but somehow languishes in relative internet anonymity at present. The video, posted on YouTube, has attracted not only views, but also over 9000 comments, many of which call for him to become UK Prime Minister without further ado.

No-one quite knows why one virus catches and another does not, why one rampages through a population and another peters out in short order. It seems however to depend more on the ecosystem than on the virus itself. 

Suffice to say this is an internet communicator’s dream. The snag is that it is difficult to explain why it happened. Doubtless a spot of zeitgeist: there is no doubt that Mr Hannan voices the views of many on the right of politics about the political reaction to the recession being implemented in several countries. This view is supported by the fact that the video seems initially to have caught on with conservatives in the United States, whose views about Mr Brown are unlikely to be as personal and passionate as those of Mr Hannan, but who probably harbour similar feelings about the new US president and his policies. Mr Hannan doubtless also articulates the feelings of a strand of British opinion about their Prime Minister – the YouTube comments confirm this – but he is hardly the only one doing so.

Others have pointed out that the form of the speech, dictated by the rules and habits of the European Parliament, where speakers have brief, but uninterrupted, opportunities to distill their thoughts, lends itself very well to the YouTube format. Had he taken the floor for ten minutes, or suffered constant heckling or interruption, the video would have suffered considerably.

But we’re still not there, are we? Such considerations cannot really explain the extraordinary phenomenon we have witnessed. And I’m sorry, I can’t buy all the slightly heated stuff in the commentariat about Mr Hannan’s popularity representing some kind of mass groundswell of opinion against the liberal media establishment – even if there are many interesting points to be made about how the internet communicates political opinion independently of traditional media. The secret – and the mystery – are in the word which describes what has happened: viral. No-one quite knows why one virus catches and another does not, why one rampages through a population and another peters out in short order. It seems however to depend more on the ecosystem than on the virus itself. What we do know is that once a virus starts to spread, it does so exponentially. Thus it was with Mr Hannan. Most people have surely seen the video not so much because of its intrinsic merits but because hundreds of thousands of others had. It started off speaking powerfully to a small but influential group, but ended up, like the proverbial modern celebrity, by being famous for being famous. (That did not stop it, of course, from speaking powerfully to many of its later viewers too.)

This is not a reflection on the quality of the speech, without doubt a good one, though not one even its speaker considers exceptional, but on why it spread, which is a different question. As this episode shows, viral effects like this are surprises, they happen as often as not out of the blue, as surprising for their originators as for anyone else. What the initial spark was is unclear, but what is clear is that once the fire caught hold, it rampaged.

Whatever the explanations though, in terms of outcomes, Mr Hannan’s experience holds many lessons. First, it is more and more possible for political messages to reach a mass public without the intermediation of the organisations and individuals known collectively as the media. Possible, but not yet reliably so.

Second, traditional media ideas about what people are interested in and/or willing to consume in terms of political news are not always a reliable guide to reality. Exciteable internet chatter about the traditional media “suppressing” Mr Hannan’s speech is clearly wide of the mark, even the man himself started from the assumption that no-one very much would be interested. Few would have predicted, including among those now enthusing, that a three minute speech by an MEP would be of such great interest. Yet it sold like hot cakes.

How should the institution’s press and information services react to an event such as that we have seen this week? 

Third, though politicians and institutions cannot necessarily predict such viral effects, they can certainly not afford to ignore them either. This applies to those with a message, those with a counter-message and those whose job it is simply to inform the public about what happens in the European Parliament. Mr Hannan’s new-found exposure is great for him, of course, and great also for the European Parliament, but it remains only a part of the political and institutional story of that day. In the comments column on YouTube, several ask about Mr Brown’s response, there are requests that it be posted. There were of course other speakers in the debate. Though many are simply delighted or horrified, according to taste, to hear Mr Hannan’s words, for others, with a broad interest in the issues, the speech could be a way into the wider discussion. Thus, for his political opponents, it is vital to be able to react in kind, posting counter views, the Brown response, etc. (No. 10 Downing Street is, for the record, keen on internet communication – I watched with fascination its Twitter coverage of Mr Brown’s world tour this week). But for the Institution itself, and this is where your friendly neighbourhood web-editors come in, the key is to provide the back up information to satisfy the interest and curiosity aroused at such times. Where can internet users find the Brown reply, where can they listen to the other interventions in the debate, when, where, why and in what context did this debate take place? All this information is available on the EP website, and the entire debate, or separate parts of it, can be watched and/or downloaded (that indeed is where Mr Hannan’s video comes from). Unfortunately, as yet, some work is still required of the user, we cannot provide a url for particular video extracts from the session (though the facility is under development).

But as well as the technical possibilities and constraints, there are issues about organisation to be considered. How should the institution’s press and information services react to an event such as that we have seen this week? To me it seems clear that there is a job to be done, that of satisfying the interest in the Parliament generated by what occurred. Yes, this means providing the information on our website, but in the networked internet of today, it is also important to go where the punters are. Mr Hannan was, note, seen not on Parliament’s website – though he could have been – but on YouTube. Thus, Parliament too needs to be there, not only with an institutional presence in its own right (coming very soon to EUTube, by the way), but also in the comments columns, blogs and forums, responding to the express needs of users. There are limits, of course, both in terms of sheer manpower and in terms of the content, which must remain institutional (objective, accurate, reliable, non-partisan, etc.), but there can no longer be any excuses for not trying.

So, let’s be cool, let’s put a virus in our life. It is the trend of the moment. You just need a good and powerful one, it will spread all around and reach people you never though it would. Don’t think I am crazy. Even if the favourite season for our not-so-dear friend Influenza just started, I am talking about a very different kind of virus. A non seasonal one: a marketing virus.

Viral marketing is the advertising El Dorado: viruses are cheap, they spread easily, they normally get to you through a trusted source. There is only a problem: how to create a virus? Some examples have been surprising even to the ‘parents’ of the creature. Others are well thought products. In any case, it is clear that the favourite environment for these viruses to spread is the internet, and we know a bit about it, so why not create a virus?

Some of the most creative members of the team have already come with some ideas, some attempts that have not been able to become stronger than the institutional vaccination. But WebComm creative laboratory never sleeps; sooner or later we will manage to break the barrier. Until we do so, you can start tasting watching our Christmas greetings video “Friday I’m in love” that ended up being an unexpected Brussels virus.

At events such as this seminar, one subject often emerges as the one which sets the debate alive, gets people disagreeing with each other and spills over into the conversations at the table later.  It may have been me who set the ball rolling, but the subject was in the air anyway.  For my presentation, scheduled for the sleepy post-lunchtime slot, I thought I would try to keep people’s attention by showing them a couple of fun internet videos as illustrations of the kind of thing we could potentially do ourselves to promote the elections.  One was the Google Gmail collaborative video, a possible model for a mad-ways-of-getting-votes-to-Brussels exercise of some sort.  The other was the highly successful and utterly joyous first “Where the hell is Matt” video, which shows a man doing a silly dance in locations all over the world, suggesting great “voting-dance” possibilities for us. (If you haven’t seen either or both of these, PLEASE do so, you’ll be grateful to me for weeks, even if you do not reach the end of this post as a consequence.)

The question which these videos raised, and was later reinforced by a discussion of whether EP communications staff could blog and/or participate as such in online debates and comments columns, was that of where the limits are to what we do online.  For some, I felt, the issue was one of decorum, that is somehow does not befit public servants to engage in “unserious” communications of this sort.  Others felt that the attempt to be “cool” would also lead to neglect of older target audiences.  Still others insisted that such activities would compromise the status of public officials and expose them to the risk of criticism for overstepping the mark.  These are indeed all valid concerns (also touched upon in a previous post) but I feel they are all contingent upon a particular view of the world which is changing.  Ultimately, we will simply not be able to stand by as opinions are increasingly formed, news increasingly circulated and publicity increasingly obtained via the informal channels of the internet.  

Moreover, as I was delighted to hear our Director-General point out in her concluding remarks, to be “cool” is not necessarily to be “unserious”.  In the end, it is for the medium to suit the message and the target audience.  I have a notion that she, like me, would be more cautious in practice than she is in theory. There are limits, and we have – for our own good – to be cautious about getting carried away by notions of what is possible for a public institution.  (One of the worst downside risks might actually be the cringe factor (remember this?), “like when your dad thinks he’s being cool”…)  But at the same time, no-one ever made much of an impact in communications without pushing the limits somehow.  It’s all about how and when. 

To conclude, another illustration.  This video, explicitly aimed at getting out the vote (in the US), was released this week.  It’s raking in hundreds of thousands of views. It is cool, yet not unserious. Yes, it has a couple of rude words… Sure, it has celeb pulling power. However, I think this is also just really well done, showing that you don’t have to be silly or obviously funny to go viral on the internet and that a serious message is not necessarily a turn-off.  So is this the sort of thing we could do?