There has been a heavy emphasis on communication activities today. This morning I joined Anna Maria Darmanin, the Committee’s Vice-President with responsibility for communication, and Peter Lindvald-Nielsen, our head of communication, in a tutorial on the social media, including the niceties of Facebook and of Twitter. I have been thinking about the latter for quite a while but, after the tutorial, I took the plunge and did my first Tweet (@MartinWestlake). I now have all of the most appropriate bases covered, I think: website ; blog; Facebook; LinkedIn (though I am still uncertain about its use to people like me); and now, Twitter. Later, we had lunch together with Steve Clark, who is head of the European Parliament’s service for web communication and swapped notes with him about the most effective ways of using the social media (the Parliament had some significant successes in last year’s election campaign and has since been building on them). Last but not least, I went to our communication department’s mini-studio to record a New Year’s message to the Committee’s staff. In closing, I would like to reassure Mathew Lowry and all those who followed up his very interesting post (‘not losing the basics’) that I don’t believe the social media can substitute for getting the basics right, but they are increasingly important supplementary vectors and we will ignore them at our cost.
Thank you for the welcome!
A really interesting day, which I enjoyed thoroughly! Welcome to Twitter, even although I am a novice myself, twitter name @ADarmanin
Hi Martin. Thanks for the citation, and the reassurances!
I must admit I wonder whether my post was a good idea, as some people seem to now see me as a bit of a Web1 reactionary. Given than I built the first online community on EUROPA in 2002, this is somewhat ironic …
I’m still planning to write the post I mentioned about scaling up EU social media, as I’m thinking that 2011 will probably be the year that, to paraphrase Ron’s and Eurogoblin’s comments on my post, “EU officials get overwhelmed by the response they’re getting on social media.”
Now they also hope that this would result in pressure to reform EUROPA. Personally I find that optimistic – after all, several NOs in critical EU referenda didn’t do it, setting things back by years, so will a few overflowing Inboxes do the trick?
So in the guise of research for that post, let me ask you: as one of those officials, are you feeling overwhelmed yet?
Ron’s crowdsourcing answer – scaling the solution to match a growing problem – looks promising. While crowdsourcing always looks good in theory, however, as a practical answer it is often too good to be true. The web is littered with crowdsourcing initiatives which have failed due to disinterest or because they were gamed.
I really must get started on that post …
To tell you the truth, Mathew, I have for long felt overwhelmed!
Well, we all expect a massive improvement in EUROPA forthwith …