Mathew Lowry’s Tagsmanian Devil

About Mathew Lowry

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

Articles by Mathew Lowry

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

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:

[Update: 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]

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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An alternative overarching EU communication strategy?

Posted by Mathew Lowry on 16/01/12

At last, an opportunity to blog about gardening and EU comms in the same post.

Those who managed to sit through some or all of my Prezicast on the EU online public space would have picked up the fact that my day job involves helping various parts of the Commission communicate their policies and programmes.

These are quite specific – in the last week of November, for example, I helped a client finalise a new information architecture for a Commission DG; outline a social media strategy for an EU agency; explore technical approaches for a semantically-powered knowledge centre for energy research; and start work on a stakeholder platform to improve policymaking and stimulate exchanges & project proposals in the field of smartcities.

Fortunately for us, our clients have specific audiences and goals, and see the online tools we develop for them as operational: like email, or physical workshops, they support their work, rather than just sell it. Also fortunately for us, they have something to offer their audiences: input to policy development; project funding; networking; maybe even multilingual, cross-border, curated online communities, although that’s still rare.

And because they have content to offer, their specialised audiences will listen and talk back – there’s a basis for a conversation. Wider audiences are welcome, but the focus is on people who care enough about a particular field (smartcities, energy research, whatever) to pay attention to what the EU is doing within it. Which is why those involved in EU programmes and policies are generally more positive about the EU than the wider population – because it’s their job to understand EU Added Value in their sector, they can see it more clearly.

And the general public?

But none of the above projects aim at the ‘general public’ – at least, not primarily. As David Ringrose, Head of Communications for DG Information Society & Media(1), said at a conference last month:

“when someone tells me they want to communicate to the general public, I’m guessing they haven’t thought about their audiences for more than 3 seconds”.

I for one will never forget the Unit that wanted a brochure “for the general public”. Print run: 500 copies. Languages: one. Yeah, right. That’s one brochure that won’t get beyond Places Schuman and Luxembourg.

So what does the general public get? Giant karoakes in front of the European Parliament? This is what Simon Anholt calls EU propaganda – as he points out, expensive wastes of time that can only discredit the EU in this era of austerity.

How about an alternative?

So how about an alternative ‘wide public’ communication strategy for the EU’s Institutions, particularly the parts which care about the wider public: support the emergence of the EU Online Public Space.

Why? 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.

The flipside, of course, is that such spaces are independent – they simply won’t work if they’re not – so they will work just as well for the EU’s critics. This is not, however, a reason for the EU Institutions to shy away … as long as they are sure of their arguments. And if they’re not, then no amount of comms will help anyway.

Note that this is not a call for yet another failed Web2.0 EU website aimed at the wide public. It means supporting an ecosystem: a fabric of platforms, websites, people, events and self-sustaining, independent media – without trying to own it.

And while this support should come from all Institutions, cooperating – not competing – for attention, it is also not a call for a centrally controlled Plan. We’ve had them, and they haven’t worked.

So how can the Institutions help support the emergence of this space without suffocating it? How does one stimulate the emergence of any ecosystem?

Nutrients, light and pollination

I’ve often thought that all this needed a good metaphor, so let me push this one a little further: all ecosystems need nutrients, light and pollination to thrive. (I know, water is essential too. Consider it a nutrient, OK? This is a metaphor.)

The light represents the attention the EU Institutions pay to the ecosystem.
The EU Public Space will only really flourish if those contributing to it can see that quality contributions can be taken on board, rather than being seen as a communications Key Performance Indicator (“Look, we got lots of comments! Let’s ignore the content and make a graph for the hierarchy!“). See the EUCO Twitter Wall for what happens when you take citizens for granted.

The nutrients are the content
Appropriate, when you know what most gardening nutrients are made from By content, of course, I mean the raw material that underpins the conversation, not the conversation itself. So the EU’s reports, studies, white papers and regulations – even their glossy, brochureware websites – are contributions to the garden, not the garden itself.

The pollination is the conversation
OK, this is probably too cute by half, but think of the conversation as bees, flitting from one flower to the next, spreading ideas in a process akin to pollination. I’m stretching the metaphor to breaking point, but no matter.

And the gardeners?

Ecosystems are, of course, wild places. Enter the gardeners to tame the wildness. Gardens are still ecosystems, but they are more ordered and productive, thanks to the gardeners pushing in nutrients and (in this metaphor at least) light, and encouraging pollination.

Gardeners also prune and weed. At the risk of pushing the metaphor well past breaking point, this is the equivalent of increasing the signal-to-noise ratio through content curation and moderation. It is not censorship; more a form of content provision.

So who are these gardeners? Well, we all are – if this garden is to thrive.

There are in fact several different types of gardener. Each wants something different from the garden. And each gardener is able to provide different, unique inputs. The garden will only thrive if it offers each gardener what they need, in exchange for what they have.

Every corporate interest and NGO, of course, wants the garden to evolve in a certain direction. For this they already provide content ranging from studies to press releases, and engage in conversation. By taking ideas on board, they also help bring them attention from policymakers.

But this is a community garden, so individuals and civil society are also required, taking part in the conversation mainly via blogs and social media. Increasingly, individuals and small organisations also curate content in their niche. The problem here is not the lack of activity, but the fact that the vast majority of this politically engaged audience are engaged at 27 national levels, and that there is very little overlap between them and their (few) counterparts in the Brussels Bubble. Multilingual bridges between the 28 bubbles are therefore essential.

Tipping point

If conversation is represented by the bees, then the traditional media is probably the beehive – lots of buzzing, the odd queen, and frequent stings. The single biggest problem facing the EU public space, of course, is probably the lack of attention paid the EU by traditional media, caused by a classic chicken-and-egg problem. However, conversation = traffic = income, which is why the media increasingly follows the conversation.

Perhaps if they see policymakers and increasing number of readers engaging in the EU online public space, they may pay more attention themselves. A virtuous cycle then begins – the more the media pay attention, the more the policymakers will, bringing more media attention.

But we need to kick-start the EU online public space first to get to that tipping point. For that to happen, the garden needs something that the above gardeners cannot provide: light.

Only by having EU Institutions and other official organisations, national governments and so on pay attention to the conversation can growth be encouraged across this particular garden. Through assigning Online Community Managers (see OCM posts, or the June 09 job description), these organisations can:

provide a lot of raw nutrients – i.e.,:
- publish their content onto their own site and – through outreach – elsewhere;
- in forms suitable for supporting non-specialised conversations and for sharing;
be the voice of their organisation to the community (pollination);
be the voice of the community to their organisation (light) – i.e., having ears, as well as a mouth.

As mentioned before, this won’t happen through centrally planned strategies and websites – it’s more of a long-term philosophy that should underpin everything the EU Institutions do.

And it is underway – some parts of the EC of them began this journey 10 years ago; others have not taken the first step. As William Gibson said:

“The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed”

And remember – it’s all just a metaphor.

(1)PS Disclosure: David Ringrose is a client of one of my clients, although he made the above observation at an event which I attended in a purely private capacity.

EU Priorities and Opinion, EU Treaty & Institutions, Online Public Space, socialmedia, web2.0
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How about a citizens’ agenda for the European elections?

Posted by Mathew Lowry on 12/12/11

Via @Niemanlab, a fascinating article on the “Citizens Agenda”, a collaboration between The Guardian and NYU’s Studio 20 program:

” an experimental space dedicated to determining how to get people’s voices heard in campaigns that, though they purport to be concerned with the people’s interests, all too often ignore them.”

- Civic journalism 2.0: The Guardian and NYU launch a “citizens agenda” for 2012

2012 being, of course, campaign year in the US – the project brings together Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) and the Guardian’s US editor, Amanda Michel. But you could have read the article to discover that. Rather than summarise it, I’d prefer to let it speak for itself. So go read it. And then read Rosen’s blog post which started it all, where he set out ten steps to improve media coverage of election campaigns.

Feeling lazy? Here’s a flavour:

Step 1, 4-6 months before the vote, start asking the electorate a simple question: what do you want the candidates to be discussing as they compete for votes in this year’s election?
Steps 2-5: develop, publish, refine, crowdsource… until, one month to go, you have “a list of [6-10] action items and declared priorities” as expressed by citizens;
Steps 6-10: use it to define the master narrative, map what candidates say against it, and stop the default ‘horse-race narrative’ from taking over;

But honestly, you really should go read the above articles. And as you do so, ask yourself:

Would something like this, around the EU Parliament elections, be useful for EU democracy?
How much chance is there of that being done properly?

Please answer in the comments. And if your answers were “YES!” and “Damn All!”, then you get a Bonus Question:

Why is that? Why not in Europe?

My answer – predictably – is that such an initiative could not credibly be carried out by the EU Institutions, and would require resources that will not be forthcoming from professional media because they cannot see the demand for it from their audiences.

But I can’t think of a better way of making them interested…

So how could such an idea be bootstrapped?

Online Public Space
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So the US military is now more open in social media than the European Commission …

Posted by Mathew Lowry on 06/12/11

Over on edition 627 of For Immediate Release, they open their news section (timestamp 04:30) by bringing together a couple of news stories on how the US military is engaging with what could euphemistically be called their ‘challenging public’: young Muslim men in the Middle East, Afghanistan, etc.

Apparently there’s a Digital Engagement Team, scouring websites looking for “… lies, misinformation or just misperceptions” about American military operations and Pentagon policy across the Middle East, and then joining the discussions to debunk and rebut them.

I’ve been working on social media outreach strategies for a few EU organisations now, and long ago realised that the primary challenge is organisational, within the EU Institutions. The most interesting aspect of this story for me was therefore the way DET manages the process, and to compare it with the EU situation.

So how much can we learn?

Rapid, transparent response

First and foremost – transparency. The DET is not a secret, so there’s no chance of them poisoning the well. Instead, the Team:

“operates in total sunshine: all of the online postings carry an official stamp acknowledging sponsorship by Central Command … All engagements are transparent and attributable [except for] the use of online pseudonyms to protect civilian contract employees”

- NYTimes

In such operations, it can take the expertise of several internal people to assemble a useful, convincing response. Texts may need to be translated, and there’s a hierarchical ‘check before publish’ step (the US military call this, ironically, “Permission to Engage”). For example, the NYT describes how a DET member:

“… typed up a translated summary of the Internet exchange [and]proposed a response drawn from Pentagon and State Department policy statements: it described shared American and Pakistani security interests, citing as evidence the large number of Pakistanis in security forces who were killed in battles with insurgents within that country’s borders … he then sent a message up his chain of command.”

This all takes time, which delays responsiveness. Unfortunately, such outreach efforts have to be fast – there’s no point showing up two weeks later with a rebuttal; people have already moved on.

The DET can use the time difference to their advantage: they work in the early morning (US time) so their content appears as the Middle East goes online between dinner and sleep. This is not something EU teams can do, short of outsourcing to Asia and the Americas.

Centres of social media teams excellence

Shel Holtz, one of the FIR hosts, also points out that the DET experience reinforces Altimeter research findings that those organisations successfully using social media have dedicated teams – “centres of social media excellence”. The nearest the EU has to that is the European Parliament’s huge team, which has been piloting, experimenting and generally having a lot of fun with social media for a few years now.

However, one should note that the DET team, like most such dedicated teams, are highly focused on one audience and one policy issue, and belong to one organisation (the DoD).

The EU is both wider and less organisationally coherent – any outreach team would tackle dozens of policy areas, and would need to source content from 20+ DGs of the European Commission, plus the Parliament and Council.

While the DET team must know a lot about what’s going on in the Middle East, how could one central EU team know the intricacies of every single EU policy area?

Hence, when the EP team described themselves as “the waiters and maître d’ in the European restaurant, we deliver the food cooked by the Master Chiefs (sic*)”, I argue that 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.

Tackling pyjama people multilingually

Unsurprisingly, the DET includes “20 native speakers of Arabic, Dari, Persian, Pashto, Urdu and Russian”, proving that the European Union’s communications teams are not the only ones tackling the challenges of multilingualism. Except, of course, that they’re not engaging in any such activity, leaving the field free to conspiracy fantasists who spread the most incredible bullshit about what they call the ‘EUSSR’.

Now such ‘Pyjama people‘ are not going to be convinced when someone from Brussels steps into their echo chamber with a rebuttal, however factual. But, as I’ve argued many times before, outreach is worth it because of the 90% of the people in those communities who are reading those exchanges.

So it was heartening to hear the FIR hosts’ conclusion (12:08):

“While you might not change the minds of the hardcore extremists, everybody else paying attention, who may be on the fence … could be influenced…

It’s not the vociferous, passionate individuals … that you’re worried about … it’s all those other folks paying attention who don’t necessarily say anything.”

“Demonstrate facts and let reality speak for itself”

The team’s work vindicates my earlier point that social media is not good for broadcasting propaganda – instead:

“demonstrate the facts and let reality speak for itself… Juxtaposing factual images — videotapes of the hateful preachings of the Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri against the triumphant protests in Tahrir Square in Cairo this year — can be more powerful, and more effective, than any message the government can transmit…

despite their limitations, these online outreach campaigns were efficient and inexpensive tools”

Other findings worth mentioning:

they are trying to influence people – to change people’s minds – so measuring RoI is hard. And no, Klout won’t help you, because Klout can’t measure influence either, for the same reasons;
NATO’s at it too, with Twitter their weapon of choice (CNN), bringing new meaning to the word ‘sniping’. If all they exchanged with the Taliban were Tweets, I think we’d all be better off.

* Master Chiefs? Clearly they know their Halo in the European Parliament.

eurosceptics, multilingualism, Online Public Space
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Key question 1 for panel X today/tonight/tomorrow

Posted by Mathew Lowry on 29/11/11

I’m going to try to break the habit of a lifetime this [morning/lunchtime/evening] and actually attend a physical [conference/workshop/seminar/PRpissup] about the EU and social media, something so self-evidently oxymoronic that I’ve often been tempted to drop the ‘oxy’.

But, life being what it is, I probably won’t make it due to [family issues/overwork/rampaging gerbil infestation]. And if I do, any question I’d try and ask would probably be as long as one of my posts, which wouldn’t do at all.

So, as insurance to the former eventuality, and as a training for myself in brevity, here’s my question for the panel. Feel free to add your own in comments.

Dear Panel,

A lot of people say very frequently that social media allows the EU to [engage with the citizen/renew its legitimacy/resuscitate European democracy/look cool at last], but I’m wondering whether anyone’s worked out the details yet.

Seeing as the Panel includes [American social media gurus/Facebook ninjas/blogging mavens/invading Martians], I’d like to ask a question.

If someone from within an EU Institution wishes to engage with [citizens/voters/taxpayers/peasants] outside the Brussels Bubble about a particular policy issue, they’ll need to reach out to the existing communities and conversations already underway on that issue, because these audiences are not coming naturally to the EU’s own websites.

Part 1 of the problem is scale (more here):

these conversations and communities are underway in 27 countries, in 20 languages.
no single policy expert in the Institutions can possibly engage with that, even if they had 8 hours a day;
your typical public servants already consider themselves busy enough and are not communications experts;
hence: “this sort of thing is for the communications unit”.

So this leads to Part 2 of the problem, which is organisational, because:

by the above logic, a communications unit will have to engage in conversations and communities in 27 countries, in 20 languages, about every policy topic the DG has;
these conversations, moreover, are often quite specialised and detailed, inhabited by [citizens/voters/taxpayers/peasants] intensely interested in the policy issue;
moreover, these people don’t care that the EU staffer is from DG X’s communications unit, and therefore cannot answer for DG Y, or another EU Institution.

So if you send your communications generalist in there, they may find themselves unable to answer half the questions, particularly given the speed of online conversation.

And simply bringing in subcontractors, while boosting the resources, won’t solve the above organisational problems and risks losing authenticity.

So, dear Panel, how is it done in [America/Facebook/Mars]?

Thank you in advance.

multilingualism, Online Public Space
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EU Online Public Space – the PreziCast (updated)

Posted by Mathew Lowry on 28/11/11

A few weeks ago I was asked to give a training on the EU online public space to a group of political science PhDs taking part in the EXACT Marie-Curie training programme (pre-session discussion here). Being a sucker for flattery I agreed, but being short for time I based it on the Prezi I did for my 2010 Annual Review.

On a whim I decided to record the audio on the day, so I could try to make a Prezicast, something I’ve wanted to do since discovering Prezi over 2 years ago. Prezicasting was harder than I thought it’d be:

the online video needs more graphics and animation than the Prezi given “live” – in the flesh, I’m normally more animation than most people can stand. Unfortunately, I just don’t have the spare time required to jazz it up, so I find the Prezicasted version a bit slow, and definitely lacking in eye-candy;
I did find the time to add a few HotSpot links here and there (the popups in red are links). This is useful, but the resulting file cannot be hosted in any of the usual places (YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo) anywhere without losing the links (more on why). I ended up hosting it on a client’s server, which looks much less professional.

So while it was an interesting exercise to explore Prezicasting, the lack of eye candy, coupled with its length and my (lack of) voice, means I doubt anyone will get through it. It worked pretty well live, though.

Take a look anyway, let me know how far you get through it, and what you thought. Due to the hosting problems, you’ll have to click twice:

Update: As a special favour to Dick Nieuwenhuis, the actual Prezi is here, and embedded below.

It would be interesting if you looked at both and told me whether a Prezi like this – designed to be presented by a human being – can be understood without the narration, or whether the PreziCast approach, above, is a good idea (at least in principle):

ECI, eGovernment, europa, eurosceptics, multilingualism, Online Public Space, socialmedia, web2.0
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Do we need more EU platforms, or sustainable EU media? (Updated)

Posted by Mathew Lowry on 02/11/11

In response to @SocialEUJ, because Twitter sometimes (usually) doesn’t give you the room one needs …

On November 8, MEPs will discuss ’10 concrete political proposals’ for creating the European public sphere via digital media, developed by IHECS (Institut des Hautes Etudes des Communications Sociales) and their partners via Socialeuropeanjournalism.com.

The site looks good. At first glance, it also gives the impression that the ideas were developed bottom-up:

This exercise didn’t represent any political movement or union, and was basically a grassroots dialogue.
- Ten flagship proposals in support of citizen-centred European journalism will be discussed with MEPs

So much for bottom-up

A bit of digging turns up some anomalies, however. For a start, there are only 7 draft flagship proposals. Perhaps the other 3 will be published the day of the presentation to MEPs?

Anyway, most of the 7 ideas have been viewed under 30 times and have garnered a grand total of (count ‘em) 10 comments: two received one each, with one getting 8.

Moreover, three ideas were submitted by one person (Esther Durin, who appears to be the site’s editor), while another three were submitted by someone called ‘Social European Journalism’, who’s ‘about’ link points to a 404 Not Found page. A site editor’s abandoned profile, presumably.

So much for a rich, bottom-up dialogue with citizens about developing a rich, bottom-up dialogue with citizens. This is unsurprising – many of IHECS partners’ are quintessential denizens of the Brussels Bubble.

And one of them is listed as Bloggingportal – when I asked the editors about this, they were as surprised as I was. Either they are taking our name in vain, or they can’t tell the difference between a list of partners and a blogroll. Ouch.

Is this what we need?

Interestingly, the one proposal not apparently submitted by the site’s editors was the one that received 80% of the (10) comments:

“… creating the first interactive meeting place of 4 groups of key stakeholders in European Affairs: EU journalists (correspondents), EU Institutions representatives, European NGO’s and National/local journalists. … these actors hardly ever manage to meet at the same place, which is unfortunate because when they do, they generate a rich and rare pluralistic debate on EU policies.”
- My proposal: an interactive platform to boost pluralistic debate in EU

As Ronny Patz tried pointing out in the comments, this is probably another example of a platform proposed without seriously considering whether it actually offers anything to its target audience. The web is littered with empty communities, meeting places and virtual watering holes that seemed necessary for the Greater Good, but didn’t offer the actual participants what they needed.

Perhaps I am being unfair – it’s possible that there is a demand for the above platform, beyond funding a few interns in the Brussels Bubble.

Still, there are two questions which the MEPs should ask of each and every proposal:

Have you done audience research?
Do you have a razor-sharp focus on who your audience is? How you are going to offer them something original which they actually need?

What happens when the funding dries up?
How will our investment make a meaningful, structural difference to the European online public space after we stop pumping in funds?

The problem with the exercise is that these platforms are conceived as projects, not businesses. This has two consequences:

they will have difficulty competing for peoples’ online time with professionally-run online platforms – websites where a drop in traffic means bankruptcy and unemployment for the owners and editors.
few people will invest their time in a platform that will die after a few years, when the public funding comes to an end.

Such general platforms – as opposed to communities aiming at specific EU programmes & policies – therefore have a particularly bad case of Chicken-and-Egg.

What the European online public space actually needs is a healthy ecosystem of sustainable media businesses, not a series of one-off platforms that come and go like moths in the night, driving media start-ups out of business with the help of public funds.

Still, as mentioned before, this is not a simple debate – state-funded media can be excellent, and when it comes to EU affairs there is a case to be made for answering market failure with public support, particularly if its oriented towards creating something which can live without support after a few years. Unfortunately, public procurement practices work against such projects.

Update (3/11/2011): I just stumbled across an answer to this post over on the Socialeuropeanjournalism.com. Odd that they didn’t post it here, or mention it on Twitter. Not that their response actually answers my points. I did reply, but it seems to have gone into a black hole – no ‘comment being moderated’ message, or anything professional like that. But then even some professional agencies can’t get the basics of blogging right…

EU Priorities and Opinion, Online Public Space, web2.0
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Simon Anholt on EU propaganda

Posted by Mathew Lowry on 27/10/11

Last year, in the runup to the first EuropCom conference, I gave it a bit of a hard time. My cynicism was confirmed by many I knew who went, describing it as a conference about Web2 and social media which allowed little or no participation. Oops.

The organisers of Europcom 2011 seemed less ambitious, at least online: ideas were submitted by email(!?) and there was no online community. So they didn’t even try to walk the walk, preferring to talk and talk and talk. I was too busy to attend (how do people who go to all these events get any work done?), and the Tweetstream led me to believe that it was uneven at best.

Then, with the serendipity which social media makes so wonderfully common, earlier this week I:

watched the Keynote speech by Simon Anholt, embedded within A speaker, a video, a strategy, a thoughtful post from @Tayebot on the Parliament’s blog (video also embedded below);
discovered Building the EU without Europeans by Gareth Harding, one of the best posts I’ve read this year;
enjoyed refreshing discussions with EU staff who are ‘intelligently sceptical’, as opposed to starry-eyed, about the value of social media to EU comms (Yes! They exist! And I’ve found them!);
watched Part 1 of Apocalypse Hitler, which in part explored the importance of propaganda in the rise of Adolf Hitler.

You may think putting these first and last things together in a blog about EU comms is a bit of a stretch, but my very first post here proved Godwin’s law that the odds of an online conversation invoking Hitler rises to 100% if it goes on long enough, so I thought I’d get in early and get it over with.

Besides, it got me thinking about propaganda before I listened to Anholt, who started by breaking the word ‘communications’ into “three completely different things: … providing information, advertising and propaganda“.

From Information…

This reminded me about a point that @nieuwenhuis used to forcefully remind fellow EUROPA webmanagers several years ago – as a public institutional website, EUROPA has a public duty to inform. Not to sell, advertise or propagandize – but inform people about What the EU does, How, and Why.

I still strongly believe that. The EU was born as a rational response to the irrational horrors of WWII. As the world evolved, the EU provided rational answers to many of the international issues nation states face. And those answers boil down to basic common sense: that it makes sense to tackle some challenges at a continental scale.

The EU has a duty to explain that logic – the Why of EU Added Value. As a governmental organisation, particularly these days, it must be transparent – the How. And if it wants to show that it creates results, it should show What it is doing, and has achieved.

So I totally agree with Tayebot when he says that “the institutions have the duty to provide information about the EU affairs“. To say, as Anholt does, that this is a waste of time because “noone is asking for it” simply begs the question: how can we know what information people want? Besides, what’s the alternative – spend taxpayer money behind a veil of secrecy?

… to Advertising & Propaganda

So we must not lose sight of the basics (i.e., EUROPA). But are rational arguments enough these days?

Logical arguments on a subject like EU Added Value do work amongst small groups of specialists, focused on the detail. Throughout the first years of EU construction and the long decades of the Cold War, that’s exactly what we had: a small group (political leaders, civil servants) built Europe in the backrooms of Brussels, with little interest shown by their populations. With the end of the Cold War, populations started to ask questions, just as the EU embarked on an expansion from 12 to 27 members.

But what about when you present logical arguments to 500 million people, 99% of whom are not specialised in governance?

As Jacques Delors observed, “it’s difficult to fall in love with a Single Market“. Gareth Harding’s post reminded me of Chris Patten’s belief that “The nation … is the largest unit, perhaps, to which people will willingly accord emotional allegiance”.

So perhaps it’s not surprising that we’ve started to see EU communications venturing into new areas, with giant karoakes in front of the European Parliament and Flash Games to make EU look cool and fun. All aiming to make us all ‘feel European’.

This may be groupthink in action. As Harding pointed out in his search for a truly ‘European culture’:

“I don’t know anyone – even in Brussels – who celebrates Europe Day and a common European culture is the preserve of a tiny band of young, well-educated and often rootless cosmopolitanites.”

Most of the Europeans doing comms in the Brussels Bubble are exactly those rootless cosmopolitanites. It probably seems obvious to them that everyone feels European – after all, everyone they know does.

But such a group may not be well-placed to make anyone else ‘in the provinces’ feel the same way.

Misusing social media

The irony is that these projects also profess to use social media. This massively misses the point, and the potential, of today’s online world.

Social media conversations offer the EU the chance to outreach to people interested in a specific subject, bypassing national media/politians, and explain the Why, What and How according to their interests. This can carry the logical argument of EU Added Value to people prepared to listen to it – if engaged properly, without propaganda or advertising.

Dedicated web2.0-powered Communities of Practice and Interest, moreover, offer the EU to engage more people on the development of policies and programmes (more on the EC’s first experiments). This is exactly what Anholt refers to when he says:

“Creativity [in communications] only works when it’s exercised at the development of policies”.

There are of course many synergies – outreach can swell contributions to policies and programmes, and open policy processes have higher visibility – but mix these up at your peril.

Launching a social media account and pretend to your new friends that they can now influence EU policy is disingenuous and will blow up in your face, as the #EUCO Twitter Wall demonstrated so vividly. As I argued at the time:

“Does anyone really think that EU leaders… are going to be glancing at a Twitter stream for policy ideas? Few of the people Tweeting did. People aren’t idiots. They know they won’t have any constructive influence via Twitter, and probably agree they shouldn’t…

If someone is not expecting their constructive contributions to be taken seriously, then their contributions will not be constructive, nor serious. Quite the opposite.”

Hence the Tweets on the Wall about Berlusconi’s sex life.

Designed to fail

In no way does social media allow one to transmit propaganda – as Anholt points out:

“Propaganda only works if it is never contradicted. One of the wonderful things about globalisation and the age we live in today is that propaganda has become impossible”.

So using social media for propaganda purposes is a contradiction in terms which has failure built-in. Such exercises will only provide fuel for eurosceptic resentment of wasted taxpayer’s money and drive suspicion of the EU. My head was literally nodding as Anholt concluded that the EU:

“… does advertising when it has nothing to sell and doesn’t know who its consumer is, and it does propaganda almost all the time despite the fact that it’s patently a waste of money”.

Amen.

A primarily organisational, not communications challenge

The other danger, of course, is that such exercises are another way the EU Institutions risk poisoning the well for the constructive use of social media by the EU.

This requires these techniques to be integrated into the organisation – online community managers who are “the voice of the community within the organisation, and the voice of the organisation within the community“.

Does this contrast with Tayebot’s image of EU social media communications staff?

“[we are] not the senior officials and politicians Mr Anholt rightly targeted … we’re the waiters and maître d’ in the European restaurant, and we deliver the food cooked by the Master Chiefs.”
- A speaker, a video, a strategy by @Tayebot;

However, there is probably not a contradiction. Such specialist teams are essential, particularly for the outreach, and for supporting the Web2 Communities. But such teams cannot work in splendid isolation from the policy expertise elsewhere in their organisation if they are to be useful to the people they are conversing with. Pretty soon in any decent online conversation, people will start asking questions which generalists cannot answer. They need to be backed up with an internal network of policy wonks who are prepared – and mandated – to help answer.

And that network must span the Institutions, because people Out There, beyond the Brussels Bubble, just don’t care that their interlocutor from Brussels is from DG X and needs to draft a formal note to get help from someone in DG Y. By the time the answer is forthcoming, the audience has disappeared, frustrated and disappointed.

Social media therefore requires more than a team of enthusiastic writers, Facebookers and tweeps – it requires major organisational change. And a lot less propaganda.

Deeds, not talk

And, finally, a lot more substance. To end with one more quote:

“Places are judged by what they do and by what they make, not by what they say about themselves… We live in an age of gigantic, shared, common, planetary problems. Every country, city, region must answer this question: what am I for?”

In other words, the Why.

There was more, notably on the gap between deeds (‘symbolic actions’) and talk (‘communications’ and ‘branding’), which brings me full circle back to the gap between people talking about social media (at events such as Europcom) rather than actually doing it.

But this post is long enough. Listen to the man:

PS Right near the end, when he claims that “survey after survey show that the only people anybody trusts is somebody like them“, he’s a couple of years out of date. The reality is much more nuanced (specialists are now more trusted than social peers) – see That Edelman Trust result – implications for EU communications?

EU Priorities and Opinion, socialmedia, web2.0
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