About Mathew Lowry

Author Website: http://mathew.blogactiv.eu
Author Bio: Online communications consultant.

Articles by Mathew Lowry

On Esperanto for the EU online public sphere

Posted by Mathew Lowry on 07/01/13

Ceci n’est pas une relaunch of this blog. It’s just that Ronny’s post (How the dominance of English kills the European debate) has been largely hijacked by Esperantists, and I need more space to react than that provided by Twitter.

The proper place for a debate about Esperanto in the EU online public sphere probably belongs on Joe Litobarski’s posts on the subject in 2009, but he seems to have taken them offline.

Back then, the general feeling I remember was that the Esperantists made very good points in favour of Esperanto as a potential lingua franca for the EU online public sphere. The problem was that English as a lingua franca had, in that delicious French phrase, ‘le merit d’exister’, so Esperanto would face a network effect-driven vicious cycle:

“Why should I learn Esperanto to blog about Europe? Nobody blogs about Europe in Esperanto, so I’ll have nothing to read. And nobody who blogs about Europe speaks Esperanto, so they won’t be able to read my posts!”

Nevertheless, back then the Esperantists made a really convincing case. Moreover, Ronny’s point adds to the case for Esperanto – a European online public sphere using Esperanto as a bridging language would not have any built-in topic bias.

Creating critical mass: Esperanto4.eu

After Toño del Barrio tweeted his agreement that Esperanto needs critical mass to overcome the above vicious cycle (read his 2008 post on the topic, in Spanish), here’s a modest proposal for Esperantists. It’s based on the well-known principle that the only around a vicious cycle is to pump-prime the community with content.

If Esperantists want their language to become the lingua franca of EU policy debates, I’d suggest creating a network of Esperantists – ideally, one or more in each Member State – to launch blogs covering their national policy debates in Esperanto. This could consist of either translating selected blogger’s entire posts into Esperanto, and/or doing a weekly roundup in Esperanto (“this week in Estonia …“).

The trick here is that each blogger could also reflect on and react to the other blogs in this ‘Esperanto4.eu’ network, drawing comparisons between national debates, etc (“in Poland and Hungary, by comparison, the same topic is seen totally differently, as my  fellow Espreanto4EU blogger points out … “).

Such an initiative could unearth the many debates that many believe are potentially out there, but don’t get the oxygen they need because those involved cant/wont blog in English. Non-EN bloggers across the EU could reach wider audiences. Metablogs could tease out similarities and differences between national debates. A real conversation could be created about how EU policy debates vary across Europe, probably for the first time. Papers could be written, conferences could be launched, and speakers applauded. Oh my!

All of which, in turn, would definitely get the attention of a larger audience, prove the value of the language as a lingua franca, and perhaps provide the motivation the rest of us need to explore Esperanto.

So, dear Esperantists, the ball is in your court. I’m sure bloggingportal.eu will support you, as the alternative is to have this debate again in 2017…

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2012 Annual review: closing this blog

Posted by Mathew Lowry on 28/05/12

Time for my 3rd, and perhaps last, annual review.

The idea of an Annual Review is to look back over the preceding 12 months of posts every May and to reflect on if and how my thinking on the European online public space had evolved to “ensure I develop new ideas, rather than repeating myself in the year to come”, as I said in 2010 when I started.

Overall, the past 12 months yielded 22 posts and only 169 comments (including my responses, pingbacks, etc.) – significantly fewer comments/post than in 2011, but that was a year where one post generated almost 70 comments, so my recently formed impression that comments are falling away doesn’t actually hold water that well.

There were two main themes this year: exploring the difference between the Brussels Bubble and the EU Online Public Space (or at least, what the latter could be), and recycling ideas from previous years, which is why I’m considering closing this blog.

Seeing Bubbles

The last year saw the Bubble meme get taken up quite a bit – I even heard my first policy-specific Bubble: the “Bologna Bubble”, although that may have been a new sort of pasta. Or maybe my eyes are just tuned to see Bubbles wherever I read.

Whatever, I guess it was inevitable that I:

The appearance of yet another ‘EU Web2 platform’ created by a Brussels Bubble organisation, meanwhile, kicked off a bit of a diatribe against publicly-funded ‘edemocracy’ projects with zero clear user demand beyond the Brussels Ring (Do we need more EU platforms, or sustainable EU media?), as opposed to sustainable media operations covering the EU.

This was a theme I returned to in An alternative overarching EU communication strategy?, where I developed a gardening metaphor for the Sphere, and the idea that the best thing the EU Institutions could do would be to create the conditions in which the garden thrives, rather than flooding the web with brochureware and propaganda.

Content strategies

Propaganda was a theme I returned to after seeing a stream of Simon Anholt dissing propaganda at EuropCom and a gripping article from Flanders News.

I guess it’s inevitable that we’ll see even more of this for the EP elections, which would be a shame because a citizens’ agenda would be better.

Other posts looking at content strategies explored the potential role of storytelling and the importance of transparency, and compared the use of social media by the EC and the US military .

Navelgazing

This was also a year when I used a couple of public presentations to experiment with more variations of slidecasts: first a PreziCast of a Prezi I presented to some Marie-Curie students, and then a Slidecast of a short presentation at the EESC (Introducing the Brussels Bubble to some of its denizens), created using Slideshare’s mp3 synchronisation interface.

This lead to a conversation which got so long I posted a follow up to answer Ron Patz. As its title (Defining the Bubble from different perspectives) suggested, however, it ended up as just another discussion focused on defining what we actually mean by the EU Online Public space.

As such, it is strikingly similar to something I described earlier:

“What was worrying (to me at least) about the latest discussion was the navel-gazing: is it a Euroblogosphere, a European blogosphere or a EU GeekoSphere? Is Julien a Euroblogger while Nicole is not?…”
- How many eurobloggers can dance on the head of a pin?, December 2009

Repeating myself

That’s right. 2009. 30 months later, we’re still arguing over definitions.

And some people wonder why I was feeling a little impatient by the time BloggingPortal’s third birthday hove into view, where I struck what I think was the only false note among the general sense of self-congratulation.

BloggingPortal is the nearest thing the EU Online Public Sphere has to a map – it is the only conversation hub which could bring together those discussing the EU in social media from both the Brussels Bubble and more national contexts, and allow a conversation to develop between them.

However, its stats show no growth in what is undeniably a growing media landscape (the EU discussed in social media) and almost nobody in the Brussels Bubble has even heard of it. Both phenomena can be explained through one idea: most denizens of the Brussels Bubble are more interested in talking to each other than venturing out into national conversations. The navelgazing I mocked in 2009, in other words, has become the norm as the Brussels Bubble moved online.

I also vented my sense of frustration in 10 things the EU should probably know about social media, which got a lot of excellent comments, and Key question 1 for panel X today/tonight/tomorrow, which got hardly any comments but did get enormous traffic, which shows that black humour at the expense of PA agencies can work wonders, not least for my spleen.

Getting real

I’ve been moaning about the inward-looking nature of the Bubble for years now, but this was the year when my ire turned mainly upon myself.

After all, as I pointed out at the EESC, the Brussels Bubble has been a Community of Interest long before the Web, and it’s perfectly normal for members of a CoI to talk to each other, rather than those who don’t share the same interests.

While some in the Brussels Bubble play lip-service to the idea of trying to reach outside Brussels, most are here precisely because they need and want to talk to others just like them.

BloggingPortal, in other words, meets a need almost none of them have. Moaning about it won’t change human nature.

Neither will publishing self-referential blogs: the EESC post was subtitled “RTFB!, part 2″ because it came after RTFB!, part 1, the latest in a series of self-referential blogs, which is kind of ironic given my irritation with inward-looking Bubbles! In fact, 5 of the past 6 posts have mainly rehashed and rephrased previous posts, rather than developing anything much new. Even the Prezicast was based on the 2nd Annual Review. Small wonder I’m considering stopping.

Finally, there were a few posts which didn’t fit into the above, including my small but enjoyable part in the Robert Schuman Foundation plagiarism storm-in-a-teacup, and me having  a go at Klout and Sony’s figleaf use of their .eu domain.

So, will I close this blog, just as nosemonkey returns?

Perhaps. Let’s say for now that it’s closed for refurbishment, while I ponder where I want to go from here.

 

Pariser

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Defining the Bubble from different perspectives

Posted by Mathew Lowry on 18/05/12

Dear Ronny,

Your comment to my comment to your post criticising my post was long enough – rather than adding an even longer comment to the end, I thought I’d offer myself a little more space and formatting by posting my reply here. I know you won’t mind because you don’t want me to stop blogging ;-)

You write:

… I found is that – to my surprise – the bubble was actually not a bubble of hyperlinked blogs but at best a group or community of “Eurogeeks” that talked about Europe without noticing much what was going left and right to them, neither in the bubble nor beyond.

This is exactly what a bubble is: a bunch of people not noticing anything going on outside their little world.

The fact that bloggers in the bubble don’t even link to each other properly is simply a sign of its (and their) immaturity:

  • Some ‘bloggers’ in the brussels bubble don’t allow comments, and many don’t know what pingbacks are (see long ago rant).
  • For my part, I am/have been personally involved in three different spaces within the Brussels Bubble (IABC’s Ning Community, Blogactiv.eu and BloggingPortal.eu,), and have tried and failed (as you may remember) to get each spaces’ inhabitants to take much notice of the other two.

I’ve always seen this lack of conversation problematic, albeit probably inevitable. But you write:

This finding kind of destroys the idea that it needs bridges or active (hyper)links to define a common sphere.

So the lack of links and conversation isn’t an impediment to a common sphere? I don’t follow your logic. Later, we’ll see that we probably have different conceptions on what a common sphere consists of – or, at least, what a useful sphere would be.

… this blog post on the unlinked EU blogosphere actually provoked a blog debate about European blogging, involving Eurogeeks but also a bunch of blogs (including German and Finnish blogs) which clearly did not belong the Eurogeek category that you define in your presentation. This proved that the bridges you want to build are already there, you just do not notice them until they become walked in such a way that makes you (and me) notice them. The fact that we do not notice them most of the time does however not imply they do not exist.

You choose here a good example of the sort of pan-EU conversation I want to see more of. I never said there were no such conversations (remember my point about exaggeration and simplification?) – what I was saying is that this doesn’t happen enough.

For proof of this admittedly subjective judgement (who decides how much is enough?), look to my second comment to your post. For those who cannot be bothered: in the first 5 posts you cite as examples of conversations on EU affairs involving both Brussels bubble and national conversations, I found no such links between the two.

1 out of 6 examples doesn’t exactly indicate a thriving ecosystem. As I’ve said before, however, what we need are unambiguous metrics, not just personal impressions. This would be an excellent project for BloggingPortal – what would a BloggingPortal Index measure? More problematically, who would do it?

Yes, it is true, these discussions are not hyperlinked and it would be kind of nice if they were. However, the fact that they don’t hyperlink doesn’t say they are not part of a European sphere.

Not ‘kind of nice’. Required for them to be part of a pan-EU conversation. For me, a bunch of people talking about EU issues where each remains in his/her corner, not exchanging with (or learning from) others across Europe,  is not a EU public sphere. Or at least, not a very useful one. So our disagreement could simply be about how we define it.

However, the Eurogeekosphere is also not very well linked, because most tend to mostly link to themselves.

Perhaps because it is a self-absorbed Bubble? See above.

you told them that (almost) no one did [talk about Europe] and that you therefore needed to create specialist discussions.

If that’s what I said, I wasn’t clear. Remember, anyone discussing the details of EU policy in social media is – by (my) definition – a eurogeek. You don’t need to be in Brussels to be in the Brussels Bubble. So there can be plenty of eurogeeks, distributed widely. However, if they are only talking to other eurogeeks, it’s simply an extension of ‘Europe As Usual’ into the online world.

My point was that if my audience wanted to engage the vast majority of people not intimate with EU arcana, they need to think about engaging in conversations about what they’re interested in, rather than the latest procedural outcomes of the EESC (or the transparency of EU Fisheries Council meetings, for that matter).

My gut feeling is there are more people interested in non-EU topics than there are people interested in such Brussels minutiae. This may be difficult to understand for someone so entirely in the Bubble as you, but there you are ;-)

And I said that this was one of a variety of methods (chosen for the audience in front of me) – there’s no one solution, so noone ‘needs’ to do anything. Particularly if you are not interested in stimulating discussions with people who don’t know the difference between the various Presidents of the various EU Institutions. It all boils down to what you’re interested in.

people were actually talking about their and other topics from a European perspective but they were too blind to notice them because they never made the effort to even look for them properly

That’s exactly what I said. Hence the slide I fitted in on Bloggingportal: “here’s the map – check it out”.

So why do you think noone looks? Because they are not interested in doing so! They are writing for other members of their community of interest, as do we all. Human nature.

I think platforms that overcome linguistic gaps or actively linking discussions that are already ongoing can be useful.

Glad you agree. These are the bridges I want to see more of. So what, exactly, is your problem?

these bridging activities are also needed in within thematic bubbles like the Eurogeekosphere were people write alongside each other in English without ever entering into any substantive discussions.

Agree, as mentioned above. It’s actually a fractal problem (you see the same problems at different scales). Here I quote myself, from two years ago:

The point I wanted to make here will recur again and again in this post – the overlaps between these and the other spaces like it are minimal. Most people inhabit one tiny bubble. And as many don’t seem to have gotten to grips with RSS readers yet, the only people they interact with are members of their own community, at best.
- 2010 annual Review

Some things I want to make clear in conclusion:

  • one cannot force people to reach outside the Bubble, and you cannot force them to link to or comment on each others’ posts.
  • in other areas, people do. But people in EU affairs don’t, because its not (yet) in their interests. I’m interested in seeing whether the economics of the environment can be shifted so that it does become worthwhile.
  • I am as bad an offender as anyone else – for example, I haven’t yet absorbed all of Ronny’s research. But at least I link to it ;-)

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Introducing the Brussels Bubble to some of its denizens (RTFB!, part 2; updated)

Posted by Mathew Lowry on 09/05/12

A while back I was invited to make a 10minute presentation to “Civil Society Day“, held at the EESC.

Kwinten Lambrecht asked me to upload the ppt, and others asked for followup links, hence this post. I still haven’t decided whether I’m going to resurrect this blog yet (see previous post), however, so I won’t go into what I thought of the event, other than to regret the rather plaintive nature of some of the rants speeches, and to recommend that you check out the Code of Good Practice for Civil Participation in the Decision-Making Process, presented by fellow panelist Ariane Rodert, if you’re into that kind of thing.

Sort-of new stuff

Blogactiv won’t allow me to upload a .ppt for security reasons, so I slideshared it (view it on slideshare to download the .ppt if you must):


By rob

I might come back here to add the video when it’s available, and/or synch its audio track to the above slides, as I haven’t yet had an opportunity to try slidecasting with slideshare.

Update: I did make a slidecast on slideshare, but – once again – Blogactiv won’t allow me to embed it, so check it out if you want. Slideshare’s done a great job – the online slidecast editing tool rocks – but they still lose your presentation’s animations when you upload it, so if you want to do something similar don’t use animations in your presentation: instead, make a different slide for each animation step.

Update 2: Kwinten Lambrecht tweeted the above image. It’s great – the only improvement could be to turn the denizens of the bubble inwards, to face each other. ;-)

Update 3: watch the video (unembeddable, typically). The good news is that you get the animations with the narration; the bad news is that you get my face.

RTFB* part 2

As promised also, some links relevant to my presentation:

plus some things I mentioned in comments:

Postscripts

* What’s RTFB? See RTFB*! Part I

** My fellow panelist Giuseppe Porcaro shouldn’t miss this ‘worshipful celebration of genius’ of EU youtube videos, by Anonymous (quite the genius him(her?)self).

 

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To blog or not to blog?

Posted by Mathew Lowry on 09/04/12

I smiled wryly this weekend as I saw more tweets by people publicly abandoning some of their social media platforms – i.e., giving up on Facebook in favour of Twitter, or LinkedIn in favour of Google+. I guess it’s part of the evolutionary process, but I must admit I’ve always wondered why anyone thinks they need to converse with the same friends on different platforms – which is what inevitably happens, unless one compartmentalises one’s life and one’s friends carefully, and they reciprocate.

Still, it got me thinking. I probably have more accounts on social media platforms than I have pairs of socks (anyone out there on Wave? MySpace? Buzz? 43things? Bebo?), but after 5 years of playing with them I’ve found myself focusing my limited time on Twitter and (of course) blogs, simply because they complement each other so well: while blogging provides an infinitely flexible ‘long format’ for developing ideas in depth, Twitter provides the exact opposite: ultrasimple & concise opinions, with links.

Would I get more out of social media if I spent more time on Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+? Almost certainly. For a start, if I could have 30 minutes more per day, I’d probably spend it on a few LinkedIn Groups, where discussions are usually pretty good.

But there’s only so many hours in the day (some of us have to work as well as play at social media), and the law of diminishing returns kicks in as you add more platforms: because so many of the people and debates I’d gravitate to an additional platform are also on Twitter and the blogosphere, the signal-to-noise on a 3rd, 4th or 5th platform will be correspondingly lower for me.

At least, that’s what I’ve been thinking. But I’m starting to question one of my basic assumptions: should I maintain my blog? Or replace it with a platform?

Dropping blogging?

I’ve been here before, but basically I’m wondering whether I have anything more to say about the EU Institutions’ use of social media, or the development of the EU online public space.

It would be different, I guess, if things were evolving, but they aren’t – the Institutions are still ‘experimenting’ (which apparently includes telling us things anyone can find out for themselves on Mashable, and filling us in on Latvian easter traditions) without showing much sign of even recognising the challenges, let alone developing a strategy to tackle them.

Meanwhile, us eurobloggers are still debating the existence of the EU online public space, rather than trying to create it (latest instalment, previous instalment, mid-2011, mid-2010, late 2009 …). Even the number of comments most of us receive has dropped significantly, despite the growth in the number of people discussing the subject.

Finally, it’s not just the same old discussion – it’s by the same old people. In such a static environment, we all risk repeating ourselves and going stale, so this blog may go quiet for a moment while I reacquaint myself with other spaces.

Where will I go? What will I do?

I could use your help, so tell me: can you (do you) survive without blogging? On how many platforms are you active for personal interest and professional development (as opposed to maintaining a Facebook page for your employer)? Which ones, and why?

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RTFB*! Part I

Posted by Mathew Lowry on 13/03/12

I had a few visits last month from people interested in my thoughts on the EU’s social media strategy, but who couldn’t be bothered plowing through my blog. I for one can’t blame them.

After all, this is where I think in public, and noone else should be expected to assemble it into something coherent. Those conversations, however, forced me to put a lot of my ideas into a coherent structure, so I’ve now used that as a skeleton for a rehash post. It’s so self-referential I’m almost too embarrassed to publish it, but at least I have not committed the grievous sin of not linking to other euroblogs… ;-)

*RTFB: like RTFM, substituting ‘Manual’ with ‘Blog’.

<rehash>

Why and Who?

A lot of discussions around EU social media (recent example) focuses on the use of shiny new toys - how best to use Twitter, or Pinterest, or whatever else was profiled on Mashable last week. There’s a “ToolsTuesday” series on Waltzing Mathilda, and the guidance for proposals for the EuropCom 2012 “Web communications / Social media Workshop” opens with:

What’s hot and what’s not? Latest trends, technologies and applications and their relevance for public sector communications …

While playing with new tools is easily one of the most fun parts of the job, the hard truth is that any communications work has to start with the Why and the Who, not the How.

Why would the EU do social media? Who are they trying to reach? And why should that target audience pay any attention?

The problem here is that the current answer to “Why?” seems often to be: “Broadcast propaganda!”, something which just doesn’t work, particularly via social media – see Simon Anholt on EU propaganda, or the comments to the latest EU video to see how this sort of thing is received (88 likes, 352 dislikes and accusations of racism in at least two places before they took it offline with commendable speed).

Who and What?

Social media is actually most suitable to reach audiences interested or specialised in a particular subject (see Vacancies: Specialists required to build bridges), and is ideal for outreach to those audiences who are specialised in a topic but not familiar with what the EU is doing within it.

So rather than some vague “Europe is Nice!”, the message should be that Europe is useful to the audience targeted.

But that means targeting people according to the subject that they are (at least) interested in. That means being specific, and focusing more on operational stakeholder communications – communications in support of a specific EU programme or policy, aimed at people who care about the topic – rather than feelgood, generic branding.

A worthy goal would be to bring those outside the Brussels Bubble into contact with EU programmes and policies, demonstrating EU Added Value to them in the process and involving them in their development.

This requires more than social media, by the way – it involves greater interactivity on the EU’s own websites (either EUROPA or elsewhere) to exploit the possibilities offered by Communities of Practice and Interest – see Building Communities of Practice with Event-in-a-Box & Not losing sight of the basics.

Two layers of Online Community Management

It also requires a change of mindset in staff not involved in communications. As Bert (head of the EC’s social media task force) pointed out:

“The tools are easy enough to use and there are enough people in the house that can use them. It is the context in which they can be used that is not yet changed“.
- Bert, commenting to 10 things the EU should probably know about social media

But there’s more to it. Why should a subject matter expert (e.g, EU lawyer or engineer) be bothered with learning Twitter? After all, it’s just so much easier to talk to a few people within the Brussels Bubble – that’s why the Bubble exists.

Let’s face facts – the only subject matter experts who are going to plunge into social media will do it because it interests them. The others won’t, whether “Tweeting” is added to their Job Description or not. And any social media guru who rolls his eyes and mutters “those guys just don’t get it” in a smug, superior way should get a reality check – “those guys” are doing the work that needs to be communicated. Carts don’t go before horses.

So this brings us to a second ‘Who’ question:

Who does it?
An online community manager who doesn’t know the policy in depth?
Or a subject matter expert who doesn’t know social media?

You need both. Borrowing models from the world of technical support, you need a first-line team of OCMs (see Vacancy: EU Online Community Manager), backed up by a second line network of subject matter experts, to whom the first line escalates difficult questions from the community. This allows ‘translucency’:

“Some staff, moreover, are specifically tasked with taking questions into the depths of the building, and returning with answers. While they do this, people outside can see movement through the translucent walls, so they know something’s happening. When an answer takes some time, the staffperson will occasionally return to the window to assure the questioner that they haven’t been forgotten”
- Does more transparency make better comms?

Internal organisation

The bad news is that the way this is currently organised is all wrong – nobody seems to be really thinking through the problems of scale, for example. And it simply cannot be organised by Institution or Commission DG – outside the Brussels Bubble, nobody gives a toss; it’s “Europe” reaching out to them.

The good news is that the internal networks required for this are identical to those required to organise EUROPA along the thematic lines required for presenting Europe according to their interests, rather than an administrative organigramme (see So, farewell thematic portals on EUROPA).

Focusing interactivity on EUROPA at this thematic level would ensure people can discuss an issue with Europe, rather than having to hold separate discussions with different Institutions and DGs on different sites.

Similarly, the same internal networks can help ensure that Europeans don’t find themselves discussing the same topic with DG X on Facebook, DG Y on LinkedIn and DG Z on Twitter.

Without these internal, subject-oriented networks, “EU social media outreach” will be a cacophony.

More:  The Brussels bubble may be growing, but it’s still a bubble

Multilingualism

The thematic approach required to organise EUROPA also makes feasible the multilingual ‘discussion documents’ required for any intelligent conversation about the EU’s activity in any given area. They also make excellent multilingual landing pages.

Of course, performing outreach and online community management in 23 languages is always going to be a challenge, but the above 2-level model helps.

EU Institutions need a Content Partnership: multilingual teams specialised in social media, backed up by internal networks of policy wonks prepared and mandated to help them respond rapidly.
- So the US military is now more open in social media than the European Commission …

And the final strategy is …

Even then, it’s obvious that the EU cannot possibly hope to do this singlehanded. Consider the facts:

  • There are 500 million Europeans.
  • There are something like 25000 EU staff.
  • A small fraction of them are involved in communications.
  • And most of them work for the policy DGs, focused on specific stakeholders.

Do the maths. And then remember:

  • The tiny few trying to get a more general message out are working in an environment which is generally indifferent, uncaring or downright hostile.
  • And they don’t own the content – that belongs to the policy DGs.

So the EU needs to create the conditions so that it doesn’t have to do everything itself. Instead of carrying out a series of small disconnected projects, it’s time to Think Differently.

Smart companies already know that the single best marketing asset they have are happy customers – people recommend good products, services and customer support to their friends, and their friends listen.

Right now, this ’customer brand ambassador’ effect only works for the EU inside the Brussels Bubble. Rather than trying to reach every European directly, maybe the EU should be thinking about stimulating the emergence of the EU Online Public Space:

Because a healthy EU online public space will carry the EC’s message out more efficiently, particularly to non-specialist audiences. As a bonus, if you care for such things, it might also even help improve democracy within the European project, the lack of which is currently the cancer eating away at EU legitimacy in the eyes of the population.
- An alternative overarching EU communication strategy?

Only when this underlying infrastructure exists can the EU really hope to use social media to overcome the barriers of language and ignorance, and actually engage with Europe.

But – once again – it has to be part of an integrated strategy, not a cool add-on, so it needs to be balanced against everything else. One more from the vault: On the EP’s use of Web2.0 …

</rehash>

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10 things the EU should probably know about social media

Posted by Mathew Lowry on 17/02/12

The ever-excellent For Immediate Release (episode 638) put me onto 10 things you still need to know about social media / social business, by Olivier Blanchard (aka the Brand Builder), which sounds like every other post you’ve ever hear of.

But it’s worth a read (the hint is in the use of the word ‘still’). Despite Olivier’s focus on the private sector – where both customer service and marketing are mission-critical, not Nice-to-Haves as they are for the EU Institutions – it got me thinking about the gulf that still separates the EU Institutions from the effective use of social media.

So I thought I’d run down his list from the perspective of the EU Institutions, and see where it lead me:

1. “Social” is something you are, not something you do

This led to a somewhat pedantic debate on FIR, but my take on this is that you have to be social to do social. As Olivier puts it:

“If your company culture doesn’t focus on building relationships with your customers, then chances are that you won’t use social media to do it either.”

Now the EU has, for 50 of its first 60 years, never had to consider European citizens – the only relationships it had were with other denizens of the Brussels Bubble, and governments (the EP elections results show that the EP is no exception here).

This inward-looking culture runs deep. Transforming it into a social culture is an epic task, to say the least.

2. You cannot effectively outsource customer relationships to an agency

Given that my main client is an agency, you’d probably assume I’d disagree. I don’t. Partly because:

“Research and intelligence, sure: that can be outsourced. Creative? That too. Implementing technologies and helping you with strategy? You bet. Marketing, PR and advertising? Of course.”

But the actual interactions? That’s hard. I’ve been looking at this for a few years now, and my experiences to date are behind some of the posts in this blog (example). Essentially, an outreach team needs more than expertise in social media and in the content being discussed, both of which can be outsourced – they also need an escalation path for when the conversations get too technical (or too political), and that is pretty hard for a bureaucracy to outsource, particularly when you remember that these escalation paths need to span organisational boundaries, across which even angels fear to tread.

3. A blog is just a blog. It isn’t a magical trust and influence publishing converter for the web.

“Publishing propaganda or marketing content is just that, regardless of the publishing platform.”

Amen.

Some people in the EU Institutions got this right first time, years ago. Others still don’t.

More: Simon Anholt on EU Propaganda, and When is a blog not a blog?

4. Marketing on social media channels isn’t “social.” It is just marketing on social media channels

Amen. See Point 3.

5. Transparency isn’t just a word. If you don’t intend to practice it, don’t preach it.

This is a biggie. As I mentioned somewhere recently, we’re living in an age of transparency, whether governments and corporates like it or not. And in such an age, it helps to look good naked.

The EU, of course, has been covered up for a long time, but now people are taking a closer look, under the clothes, and finding that it doesn’t look good naked.

Changing this is such a cultural shift that in my pessimistic moments I just don’t think it can happen.

More: Does more transparency make better comms? and just about everything written by Ron Patz.

6. Change management, not social media tools and platforms, is at the crux of social media program development

If you’ve read this far and haven’t grasped this by now, perhaps you’re in the wrong business. Olivier puts it succintly:

“Because social is something you are, not something you do, most organizations cannot succeed in the social space by changing what they do and not who they are… “Social” speaks at least as much to your company’s DNA as it does to its business practices.”

As pointed out above, the EU Institutions’ history means that the DNA is a long way from being social. Adding a layer of doing social on top of the old processes, structures and mentalities is not a recipe for success.

7. People are more important than technology. Hire people who care about other people

Do I need to go into any detail about the impact the EU Institution’s Human Resources policies have on their communications work? No, I didn’t think so.

Suffice to say that this is again about DNA. Bureaucrats are generally process-driven, not results-driven. In any case, there are no rewards systems in place for encouraging them to care about anyone other than their hierarchy.

Olivier’s take on this is not particularly relevant to the EC (which, on the whole, is not populated by particularly unpleasant people), but it’s so damned funny I’m going to reproduce a paragraph anyway:

“If you hire and promote assholes, your company will be full of assholes. It doesn’t matter how much Twitter and Facebook you add to your company’s communications or how many awesome monitoring dashboards you buy… [because] an asshole on social media is still an asshole.”

8. Social media should not be managed by Marketing anymore than your phones should be managed by Sales

Olivier’s point is that social media is about relationships; the relationship a customer wants from a company is generally customer service; so why are the marketers involved?

Probably because the relationship the company wants with the customer is to sell them something, not provide customer service.

If you think this doesn’t transfer across to the use of social media by the EU, ask yourself this: what do you want from your government? Services, and a voice in the laws you must respect? Or someone trying to sell you something?

9. Shut up and listen

Again, some thought is required to translate this from “what a company should do” to “what the EU should do”, because companies have both customers and competitors, and the EU has …?

“Pushing content all day long and measuring likes and impressions won’t get you very far… If your communications serve your marketing department more than they serve your customers or your business on the whole, you are probably doing it wrong.”

I guess the general point is that if the Institutions’ use of social media is aimed at making those doing it look good internally, rather than Being Useful to Europeans, then they’re probably doing it wrong. And to do it right: first, listen.

10. Any consultant, “thought leader,” agency or partner who doesn’t tell you these things isn’t fit to be consulted on the subject

As possibly the only communications consultant to the EU Institutions who blogs about EU communications, I like this one! ;-)

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Happy Birthday, BloggingPortal(?)

Posted by Mathew Lowry on 25/01/12

Apparently tomorrow – apart from being Australia Day – is BloggingPortal’s 3rd birthday. What does it’s state tell us about the EU Online Public Space? How many more friends can I lose anyway?

[Update: read a blogtour of 11 other posts celebrating this auspicious occasion]

BloggingPortal’s USP is deceptively simple: if you want to know what people are saying about the EU in blogs, BloggingPortal is the best – in fact, the only – place to find out.

It is a good example of machine-aided human curation: EU-oriented blogs are fed into it’s CMS, presenting their posts to BP’s volunteer editors, who tag them by category and make the best ones “Editors’ Choice”, pushing them to the home page. Users can thus browse EU-oriented posts from across Europe by category, filtering by 1+ languages.

There are also automated daily and weekly enewsletters, a manually written ‘Week in BloggingPortal‘ best-of, the inevitable Twitter account and probably a few other platform accounts I can’t keep up with. There have also been a few ad hoc projects, resulting in various meetups and a few high-profile campaigns (e.g., highlighting the Hungarian media law, opening up the Council to bloggers).

I’d guesstimate that at least a third of my posts will have mentioned BloggingPortal.eu in some way, and some (e.g., Bloggingportal2: What, Why, How … and When?) have focused exclusively on it. The reason is not hard to find:

BloggingPortal is essential for the
future of the EU online public space

A structuring effect

BloggingPortal (should) offer something important to practically everyone who wants to contribute to debates on EU policy.

To use my gardening analogy, it provides those wanting to do outreach – and indeed everyone who wants to take part in the conversation – with a map of the garden, allowing them to find, reach out to and join conversations.

This, in turn, then allows them to join those conversations together, across national borders. It’s thus a major source of pollination.

Finally, it also (should) provide those who want to contribute views with the visibility they need, motivating more people to pick up a spade.

In other words, it (should) have a structuring effect, flipping the EU Online public space out of its current chicken-and-egg situation into a virtuous spiral, where the network effect kicks in and makes growth exponential.

This is a very short summary – such a platform is also vital for overcoming linguistic barriers in the EU online public space, for example, and should play a major role in bringing specialists on board to bridge national barriers (see Specialists required to build bridges).

There’s only one problem with this theory:

It hasn’t happened

The amount of EU-oriented content running through blogs and social media has massively increased over the past few years. Almost exactly 4 years ago, for example, when I left Blogactiv, there were perhaps 5 bloggers worth putting on the front page, blogging maybe once a week. Last time I looked, the quality and breadth startled me.

And Blogactiv is just one place – there are many blog platforms, and even more individual bloggers. According to Ron Patz, almost 250 of the 900 blogs tracked by BloggingPortal published at least one post over the past seven days (source).

Yet while BloggingPortal is the only player in this growing market, its traffic is remarkably flat. This seems to show that BP is not meeting its potential, nor fulfilling its role.

The reason is unchanged since I wrote that Bloggingportal2 post in mid-2010: there are no resources (BP editors are all volunteers), and we are absolutely unstructured, with no internal process for moving forward. Back then I made some suggestions to turn it into a social business, and was accused of wanting to ‘take it over to make money’ – the second time, incidentally, that I’ve been accused of having secret, evil plans vis a vis the Euroblogosphere (here’s the first).

The accusation was unfounded (it was said, for example, that I would manipulate the market research to make it look more positive than it was, thus ensuring that I would lose money!), but it was a nasty experience which convinced me to stop trying. I hadn’t enjoyed being called a liar by foaming-at-the-mouth Eurosceptics, but when it came from my fellow Eurobloggers…

Since then, bugger-all has really happened. We have lots of fun email conversations, I’ve continued to carp and grouch while others do the day-to-day work, and there’s been the odd ad hoc project.

Let’s get technical

But what BloggingPortal needs is a major revamp to integrate the following technologies:

  • add federated search to human curation: allow users to search everything it tracks, across Europe
  • machine translation: search, browse and read across language barriers
  • semantic web: auto-categorise all content for search and browse, publish the resulting source in RDF format, and unleash the geeks
  • section-specific editorial spaces: reward those willing to put in the effort some proper visibility in their field (see Specialists required to build bridges)
  • country-specific editorial spaces: reward those willing to become a ‘bridging blogger’ serious visibility in both the Brussels Bubble and their country (watch the PreziCast)
  • more social media integration: because while blogs are where the in-depth conversations are, there’s more to the EU online public space
  • customisable enewsletters and RSS streams

Plus, of course, marketing.

All this takes money – more than EP’s Charlemagne Prize, which BP (incredibly) failed to win anyway.

In any case, as I said in mid-2010, public funding for BP (favoured by many editors) would be the kiss of death, not the way forward, for reasons I set out in subsequent posts (e.g., Do we need more EU platforms, or sustainable EU media?): basically, the EU Online Public Space needs to be a living ecosystem, with vital structures like BP run by organisations independent from the Institutions.

That means BP – or its replacement – needs to be an independent media, run along the lines of social business. Once it gets serious, it will trigger competition, growing the space further. But right now, it’s more like the personal RSS feed of the European Mutual Admiration Society of Eurogeeks.

Which is a shame. The guys who got it together did a brilliant job in their own time, for no financial reward and precious little glory. Every week a bunch of editors put in their own time to keep it ticking it over. But it needs to go to an entirely new level if it is to help kickstart the EU online public space, and that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen before its fourth birthday.

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Dear Sony, so much for .eu (Updated 3x)

Posted by Mathew Lowry on 24/01/12

The following text was just submitted to Sony Belgium. I post it here not because I think it will get me improved customer service, but to show the difference between the vision and the reality of “.eu-driven businesses” in Europe’s single market.

The original post follows the updates.

Updates

[Update 1: so I finally heard from the right (i.e., Belgian) customer support team, and have filled out my forms, scanned all sorts of things and sent them off. The point of this post remains valid: a company which asks you to register to a .eu site should at least be able to organise its various national customer support teams.
Update 2: Apparently they now want numbers from the 'tickets de caisse' which don't appear there, or something. Looks like a systemic approach to getting out of the commitment they made when I purchased the set. I emailed them scans of everything, and a link to this post, but the email bounced. Typical. Moral of story: never buy Sony.
Update 3: Now it's getting fun. I was asked by Sony to review my customer experience! ;-) But when I submitted my opinion, I was told my text was 'inappropriate' and so was not published. ;-(

Screenshot You be the judge (click the screenshot to enlarge). My question is what was inappropriate? Stating that "I will NEVER buy Sony again"? The use of the word 'dongle'? Or for claiming that this blog is 'much read'?

/Updates off]

 

 

Original post

The following text was just submitted to Sony Belgium. I post it here not because I think it will get me improved customer service, but to show the difference between the vision and the reality of “.eu-driven businesses” in Europe’s single market:

Dear Sony Belgium,

When I bought my new TV, I asked the salesman at Carrefour whether it connected directly to the internet.

He told me no, but that if I registered the TV on MySony, I would be able to request Sony to send me the ‘dongle’ free of charge via the post.

Well, I then registered to sony.eu (as it said on the card included with the TV), and I saw no possibility to make such a request.

I then submitted an enquiry via the sony.eu site. The result was pathetic:

1) I received an email from Sony France telling me that I had made a mistake, and I should contact Sony Belgium.

2) I told them I used their Sony.eu site, and had registered as a Belgian resident, so I didn’t understand why I was being contacted by Sony France! I invited them to forward my request to Sony Belgium for me, rather than passing the buck like a useless bureaucrat.

3) I then got an ameil from Sony Belgium, giving me a telephone number.

4) I called it. I found myself talking to … Sony France!

5) They were terribly sorry but they:
- couldn’t help me
- couldn’t pass me to Belgium
- couldn’t even give me the Belgian support telephone number “because our system is down”

6) So I replied to them by email, telling them this terrible, sad story.

7) To which I got another email, asking me to START THE WHOLE THING AGAIN ON THIS SITE!

This is ridiculous. I’ve seen better organised riots.

Mathew Lowry

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Of technocrats, journalistic balance and telling EU stories

Posted by Mathew Lowry on 21/01/12

A recent edition of The Infinite Monkey Cage, BBC Radio4′s brilliant chat show combining science and comedy, got me thinking again about the parallels between science communications and EU communications.

The episode (“A Balanced Programme on Balance“) covered the often tortured relationship between:

  • the media, for whom ‘balance’ means getting two opposing views onto a programme and treating them equally;
  • and scientists, for whom ‘balance’ means respecting the data: if 5000 scientists conclude that 2+2 = 4 then on balance it probably is, until evidence comes along to convince enough scientists to re-open the question, as all scientific  knowledge is provisional (cue: Godel and his incompleteness theorems).

As guest Prof Steve Jones (author, among other things, of Review of impartiality and accuracy of the BBC’s coverage of science) pointed out, scientists venturing into the realms of media and politics remain scientists. If they depart from the science rulebook, they will lose their reputation for scientific credibility.

But then the media rolls out someone to provide a ‘balancing’ view, because that’s part of the media’s rulebook: it makes for better programmes.

So every time a radio producer invites a climate scientist to represent the considered view of thousands of scientists who have exhaustively studied and modelled the data and checked each other’s work through peer review, the producer will also invite a climate sceptic who represents a political party and/or economic interests (they’re usually the same) and who wants to convince you that 2+2=5.

But this invitee doesn’t play by the rules of science – he plays by the rules of media & politics (again, two things difficult to disentangle).

Unfortunately for our scientist, our radio producer understands the rules of media better than those of science, and above all wants an entertaining programme. As a result, the listeners come away with the impression that:

“2+2 may equal 4, or it may equal 5. On balance it’s probably closer to 4, but the debate goes on.”

The last thing the media want is for any debate to end.

Technocratic communications

So what’s this got to do with EU communications?

Well, as pointed out earlier, there are many parallels between science communications and EU communications (“Science writing is about explaining a field which is important, very complex and full of jargon, to people without the specialised training.”).

The problems our scientist, above, faces when entering the worlds of media and politics are akin to the problems EU communicators face as well. And this is because the EU is pretty much a technocratic construction these days. Its roots may be in the horrors of the first half of the 20th century, but today the EU is about Adding Value in areas where neighbouring countries are better off cooperating rather than competing … as long as everyone plays by the rules (cue: Nash and his game theories, applied to international relations).

So while the scientist in the radio studio defends the scientific community’s findings, derived through exhaustive experimentation, verification and peer review, our EU communicator represents technocrats who have spent years analysing EU-wide cooperation in technical areas as diverse as research, agriculture and employment regulation.

And across the table from both sits the person brought in to provide ‘balance’, who knows more about soundbites than anything else (cue: Nigel Farage).

And such communicators certainly have the wind in their sails – technocrats are not exactly popular these days. Decrying the EU as an undemocratic technocracy used to be the rallying cry of the loony end of the Eurosceptic movement … until credit agencies and EU Councils started removing democratically elected leaders and installing never-elected technocrats as Prime Ministers to implement austerity programmes devised in Brussels, France and Berlin.

I actually don’t have an opinion on whether they have any choice – I’m no economist. The perception, however, is indisputable: unelected technocrats, primarily in the financial world, now provide absolutely no wriggle room for democratic choice. So while most of the EU Institutions spend most of their time adding value in technocratic, bread-and-butter fields (managing natural resources, pooling R&D resources), only those specialised in the bread or the butter care enough to even look. To everyone else, everything the EU does is tarred with the same, very negative brush.

Enter the storytellers?

The advantage of drawing parallels between EU and science communications is that one can then go hunting for solutions from science communicators. Those unfamiliar with science communications may be surprised how developed this world is (cue: Richard Dawkins, leading scientist and bestselling author).

Anyway, in The case for narrative: why scientists need to tell a better story, Laura Shields points out:

“Scientists and journalists are often at loggerheads because their respective professions emphasise completely different skill sets. Scientists stress the importance of facts by amassing large amounts of evidence with which to support (or not) theories via painstaking experiment and replication. This is an anathema to the journalist who prefers the big picture, generalisations, snappy quotes, one or two facts, anecdotes and emotion.”

Just substitute ‘EU’ for science, and ‘EU technocrats’ for ‘scientists’, and you see my point. Shields points to research suggesting that:

“storytelling is a powerful tool not only for making core messages memorable but also for persuading people to do things that scientific data alone can’t. And by storytelling, I really do mean a narrative sequence of events with a clear beginning, middle and end.”

So why do we not see such techniques in EU communications? I’ve certainly tried this with some of my clients, but I hit a brick wall every time. It’s simply not in scientists’ or technocrats’ nature to “tell stories”, which sounds (to them) an insultingly fluffy way to communicate their scientifically-derived facts, and their carefully-weighed analyses.

Both suffer, of course, from groupthink. After all, everyone they know understands them. So why, oh why, can’t everybody else?

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