How many politicians does it take to change a lightbulb?

Image via Wikipedia

We’ve been trying to find out the answer to this question all day in the hope that the punchline might make us smile again after yesterday’s dramatic change of weather.

We saw the ad for the latest online campaign from the Parliament’s Liberal group tucked away on page 39 of this week’s European Voice over coffee this morning.

Alas, the ad is not that clear (or we are just stupid? btw – any comments in support or our intelligence or the ad’s misleading nature are welcome) as we’ve been typing into the address bar “www.changers.eu” all bloody day only to find that the address is www.thechangers.eu

Annoyingly despite now having the correct address, we still don’t know the punchline as the site is not officially launched until 21 May.

Any suggestions of amusing punchlines to brighten a dull weekend are gratefully received.

Why do letters on the size of sow stalls move MEPs?

Source: WikipediaWe highlighted the success of the online petition and social media activities of the Burma campaign last year and it seems that Tibet has also sparked a similar online movement. With the digital world potentially lowering the barrier to entry for those wishing to gather support around an issue, a Friday morning coffee corner conversation overlooking a cold Square de Meeus got us thinking about whether “expressed” public opinion counts more in some policy areas than others.

Why is it that a petition like oneseat doesn’t have an effect, while a regular handful of letters on animal welfare issues get UK MEPs of all political colours speaking in unison in favour of larger sow stalls? It could be of course related to the fact that the site of one of the EU institutions is an intergovernmental decision and our directly elected representatives in the EP have a say in the comfort of the humble pig. The latter are perhaps more suceptible to “public opinion”, after all they are the only elected EU institution. Or perhaps our politicians make a distinction between issues the voting public have something to say and issues that should be left to those that know? They may of course have a point.

In any case, the animal welfare example just goes to show that one doesn’t need a supporting cast of millions to sway policymakers in Brussels and thus targeted online digital grassroots could be an effective way of getting a result, depending on the issue of course. Thankfully, our clients are more likely to be interested in swaying the size of sow stalls than the locations of institutions – small things tend to have big impacts. As such, a cast of millions may grab the attention of Commissioners, but is it needed?

And then there were six…

It seems only fair that we mention the launch of the blog of Andris Piebalgs, Commissioner for Energy, today. He joins Dimas, Potocnik, Wallstrom, Spidla and Fischer Boel as Commissioners that are seeking to reach out to “internauts”(Euro-speak or just French in an English press release?).

With all the good material on energy policy out there, perhaps this Commissioner will have something interesting to say. As one post every Friday is all that is promised, it may take a few months before we see. He clearly does not have the “it’s late on Friday but I am putting off my timesheet entry until after a blog post” urges that we do. In any case if he does succeed, then perhaps Ruud Wassen in our Energy team will revise his list of favourite blogs in the field?

Ask silly questions in Brussels, get silly answers

An interesting article in this week’s Economist Charlemagne column on moves to increase the use of the public opinion polling comes to the opposite conclusion of our own thoughts on the same matter last year (when the move was mentioned in a Wallstrom communication). Perhaps journalists are more cynical than the bright eyed bushy tailed consultants round these parts? Or maybe we got misty eyed about the public affairs opportunities it could present , rather than distracted by the potentially opaque impact it may have on the EU’s often overplayed democratic deficit? (granted we were in DC at the time)

In any case, we too can suffer from a healthy dose of scepticism sometimes. We often get approached by organisations with regard to polling Brussels public affairs audiences for their views. Some want us to undertake a “perception audit” on their behalf, others want to sell us their own ability to poll MEPs through digital means no less. Some not too misty eyed thoughts follow.

Taking the first case, “perception audits” of Brussels public affairs can of course be extremely useful as a benchmarking exercise in measuring how effective your communication activities have been. Unfortunately, in many cases the “perception audit” is sought for all the wrong reasons. The objective is often unclear. Sometimes it is merely something to do for a lack of a clear direction. On other occasions because someone needs management “buy-in” for a course of action they already know to be correct.

If objectives are unclear so are the questions. When the perception of your organisation begins with how you conduct your perception audit this can be disastrous. Polling irrelevant MEPs on subjects that don’t interest them is only likely to lead to your reputation diving to new depths rather than ascending to dizzy new heights. Of course, unclear objectives and opaque questions lead only to confusing answers that move you along not one jot. We would advise against.

In the second case, polling MEPs sounds like a great idea. Especially if one had a panel of 100 MEPs all ready and willing to answer any questions asked, as one vendor has promised us recently. However, here our scepticism kicks in. Perhaps it’s just the issues we work on but in most cases our client’s issues are likely to be top of mind for anywhere between 5-15 MEPs. For the other 770-odd, it’s largely a matter of following the voting list. As Parliament is reliant on MEPs that specialise, do we need to know what a representative sample of MEPs think? The same holds true for corporate reputation raising. Do we care if we raise the reputation of our clients with decision-makers who are unlikely to ever take decisions affecting them? Probably not.

Interestingly for a company that does consumer PR as well as public affairs, MEPs do of course provide an interesting pan-European if somewhat unrepresentative sample of “opinion formers” or “elite consumers”. Perhaps our colleagues would like to survey them over their preference of washing powder? We can recommend a vendor who does it digitally at a reasonable price.

Sex still sells for us and for EUTube

As with all bloggers, watching the statistics on traffic has become a bit of a way to while away the hours. We can’t help but click that refresh button repeatedly in the hope that the line on the graph moves every upwards. Who said consultants aren’t vain?

There are of course some simple home truths out there. There is a correlation between the number of posts we make in any given week and the number of visitors we get. (If only there was less work and more time to write blog posts.) Referrals from our FH corporate and FH Brussels websites generate decent amounts of traffic as do the links on other blogs. However, we are still not being read by the vast majority of the 15,000 “lobbyists” in Brussels. Must try harder.

Just as interesting are the search terms used to find us. There are some good ones from our perspective, “public affairs brussels”, “public affairs digital” etc. But one that repeatedly comes up is “European public sex”. What a disappointment we must be for those who type those three words into Google. It seems however that we are not the only ones still getting traffic on the back of the smutty pastimes of our fellow man. A search term that brought a visitor to our blog, “EUtube analysis”, led us back to TubeMogul to see how the Commission’s YouTube channel was getting on.

As you can see a large proportion of their traffic is still on the video that has a large dose of arghs, oohs and eeks. We added a couple of the Commission’s recent videos to make a comparison. The video on renewable energy, a hot topic around the 23rd January proposal from the Commission, is a small blip in comparison. As is a video from the Comms department on the EU and the citizen. Is there a learning in all of this? Sex sells. Ok, we knew that. But there is a big difference between making informercials about what the EU does and making a video that catches the European public’s imagination. We may be content to have a small audience inside the Brussels Bubble, but is the Commission?

Online polling finds new currency with the EU

The European Commission communicated with the people today. In fact, it launched an online poll, asking us to vote on the design of a commemorate 2 EURO coin. The coin will be released on 1 January 2009 to mark the 10 year anniversary of the Euro.

I’ve never seen an online poll of this nature being launched by the Commission before and I can’t help but think that this could be a useful way to sell the EU concept to the average man-on-the-street. And at last a bit of direct democracy in action. Actually, couldn’t the same principle be used to decide the fine details of legislation? But then again, asking the public to choose the exact auctioning percentage allowance given to industry under an emissions trading scheme probably wouldn’t catch the public’s imagination.

Also is this a dangerous game by the Commission, given the new Lisbon Treaty provisions regarding citizen petitions? If a million people suggest one coin design, win or lose, surely the Commission will legally have to consider it.

Anyway, back to the poll and I’d like to make four points:

Firstly I’ve had to enter my details to vote even though a key democratic principle of voting is that it is anonymous. However, there is a trade-off. By registering my details, I get entered into a prize draw for a high-value set of euro collector coins. I wonder how high “high-value” is. The world’s most expensive coin – the ‘double gold eagle’ coin – was sold in the US in 2002 for almost £5 million. Who knows, in a 500 years, maybe this commemorative EURO coin will be worth the same.

Secondly, coin number 5 is clearly the best.

Thirdly, I’m surprised that UK citizens are allowed to vote. A pre-requisite for choosing the coin must be that you can actually use it in your country. Plus shouldn’t we expect a potential sabotage as UKIP members vote en masse for the coin number 4, clearly the least inspiring.

Fourthly, I’m a little bit disappointed that I can’t submit my own design. One EU step at a time I guess…

Commission Strikes Back with EUTube

In case you haven’t noted, Commissioners are apparently getting lobbied left, right and centre from a plethora of Member States who have all suddenly realised that committing to a renewables target of 20% by 2020 actually means you have to do something to achieve it.

The Commission’s comms department has struck back with a EUTube video reminding us all of why the targets Member States want to back away from are apparently still a good idea; mood music for the long-awaited and debated renewables proposal due out on 23rd January. Whether the Commission sticks to its guns in its allocation of the renewables obligation between recalcitrant Member States is of course a different matter, which is of course potentially subject to the nationality of each individual Commissioner.

Does blogging matter? The world has it say and we have ours

Earlier this week BBC World’s Have Your Say Forum chaired an interesting radio and online debate entitled; “Do political bloggers make a difference?” Certainly the comments in the forum represent a mixed bag. On the one hand we find the likes of Lamii Kpargoi, Coordinator for Initiative for Mobile Training of Community Radio in Liberia, who feel that blogs played an important role in drawing the attention of the world to “the situation in [Liberia] during the tyranny of Charles Taylor.” But on the other hand we come across Dwight, who explains that “As much as I hate to admit it, political bloggers rarely make a difference. I have no illusions that my blog is changing any opinions. The people who agree with me occasionally write and tell me, “I agree”. The people who don’t agree, rarely get past the opening paragraph before they move on.”

Relating this to Brussels, the influence of blogs is one question we are increasingly having amongst ourselves and with others. There are a number of points that we keep coming back to that we thought might be worth sharing:

1. Blogs are helping to shape the communications environment in which work

Data from the likes of Ipsos MORI suggests that 1 in 5 Europeans are indeed reading blogs (Italy apparently comes top with 27% of Italians having read blogs). And while we have (currently) no data to quantify the numbers of policymakers, stakeholders and political media in Brussels reading blogs on a daily basis, if such actors reflect the population then blogs as a form of communication could be influential in shaping the debate around issues in the future. The number of journalists, Commissioners and MEPs that are blogging themselves would suggest that there at least some of the same are reading blogs. (Yes, we know, we need “facts, only facts” in terms of the levels of such readership. We are working on it.)

2. Blogs can be used to amplify your message

Monitoring blogs will of course only tell you what’s going on, not what to do about it. However, it has already struck us (and thankfully some of the people we work with) that in some cases bloggers focused on specific issues of relevance to the policy debate may be fertile ground for what is known as “Online Editorial Outreach” for public affairs purposes. It’s the online equivalent of media relations with some subtle but important differences. Bloggers of course are not journalists…and there are some best practices we have developed as a company that take this into account.

In any case, seeking out expert bloggers, often with decent day jobs, that can amplify an organisation’s message online could prove useful in a public affairs context where policymakers and those that influence them go online to find information and insights. Noise in the blogosphere may become as much a part of the mood music to policy debates in Brussels as articles in the FT. Is it going to change a vote, probably no. Is it going to help make people more receptive to a message, perhaps yes.

3. Blogger influence is more likely to be about quality rather than quantity

When thinking about monitoring or indeed outreach, it’s the quality of the bloggers and their posts that is important rather than the sheer numbers of readers. Who are they, what do they know, how often do they post, who comments and who links to them? All questions to ask. On some of the obscure EU issues we love, the numbers are not likely to be great but the influence may be.

To conclude on the BBC World piece, the advent of the blog does not mean the end of BBC correspondents like John Simpson covertly walking the streets of Africa canvassing opinion. However, his back story may equally come from what has been written by Africans on their own blogs. This of course happened in the case of Burma recently, where the only outlet for many of the individuals involved in the crisis was their blogs. News came out through people involved on the ground and was relayed through the long tail of social media.

In all communications activities, whether you are the Director General of the BBC or the public affairs practitioner in Brussels, the online environment (blogs included) have an important role to play in how people are communicating with each other. It would be remiss of us not to take them into account in what we do.

EU receives petition of 1.294.997 signatures on disability rights

This morning saw the European Disability Forum hand over an EU wide petition of over a million signatures to the European Commission. The petition calls for stronger disability legislation in Europe. Under the new Reform Treaty:

“Not less than one million citizens who are nationals of a significant number of Member States may take the initiative of inviting the Commission, within the framework of its powers, to submit any appropriate proposal on matters where citizens consider that a legal act of the Union is required for the purpose of implementing the Treaties.”

Interestingly, the 1million4disability press release suggests that only around a sixth of the signatures were gathered online, perhaps reflecting the already strong network of the national NGOs who collaborated in the Forum. These groups presumably already have strong support bases who be motivated relatively easily to sign such a general statement that has a direct personal relevance to many of them.

There has been some debate about how easy gathering the requisite number of EU wide petitions will be. Well so far so good, the oneseat.eu campaign managed it and now so have the European Disability Forum. While 1 million may seem a lot of signatures, it is a mere 0.2 percent of the EU population and divided by 27 Member States around 37,000 signatures a piece. European organisations with strong national databases of supporters should be able to gather such numbers with a manageable amount of effort. For those who don’t have such ready-made networks, the internet should offer a platform for creating them given the right issue, resources and tactics.

Of course the question then becomes whether Brussels will listen? Clearly such a petition puts the issue on the Commission’s table. But it also helps if the people you are trying to influence actually have an ability to do something about the issue. The oneseat campaign faced the issue that only the unanimous agreement of the Member States can change the seat of the European Parliament. The Commission has no competence to act despite people power. Their petition probably in the end had a little effect on a problem that can only be solved by a rather large swallowing of gallic pride.

In the case of this new petition, things look more rosy. A Commission cabinet official commented this morning that while the Commission was under no legal obligation under the new Treaty to act on the basis of such petitions, it would find it politically difficult to ignore. With connecting with the citizens/consumers a mantra of the current Commission, it would appear that all those seeking to influence policy in Brussels would be wise to consider when and how to make use of such techniques in the future.

Commissioner Dimas to participate in Blog Action Day

The Commission announced today in a press release that the latest Commissioner to join the blogging trend, the Greek Commissioner Stavros Dimas, will be joining bloggers the world over in blogging for the environment on Monday October 15th. You can join Stavros in a live chat on his blog between 2-5pm CET on Monday in English, French, German and of course Greek.

The blog action day asks bloggers in any field to make an environmentally focused post on Monday and donate any advertising revenue from the day to environmental charities.