Overview: Communications Strategy

One of my favourite writers/thinkers on all things digital future is "finally, definitely, fully leaving X, and probably all social media..."

EurActiv.com is opening one of its media innovations to other media interested in increasing competitiveness through translated syndication. (Update, 31/3/16: this project was covered, among many other things, in an interview with professional EU interpreter Alexander Drechsel in his podcast Demos ex machina? Multilingual communication with Mathew…

The afternoon session at Future Media Lab 2016 showed that while European media are warming to the idea of using advanced language technologies to share content across borders, their audiences are already well ahead of them.

With independent journalism increasingly looking like an endangered species, a EU communication strategy that helped European media build the European Public Sphere would be a smarter longterm move than propaganda and brochureware

Do people really want to have a conversation with brands, or their government?

An array of sophisticated language technologies could help ideas flow across EU borders, link national conversations together and support the EU Online Public Sphere - the demos the EU needs. But BloggingPortal is unlikely to feature them. [update (17/5/15): I finally decided to kick Medium's tyres by reposting this there, with less history. …

Is primetime TV advertising the right way to connect citizens to the EU?

Well, plus ca change - absolutely none of the things some BloggingPortal editors said we'd do after our meeting in January have been done, apart from our own posts and what Stefan did, which is ironic given that he told us he had no time to do anything.

Original linkTonight I'll be toddling along to Grilling Kippers, a UKIP-focused anti-Eurosceptic campaign from deep within the Brussels Bubble.

Last Thursday I finally caught up with Eric Maurice of PressEurop, which recently had its plug pulled by the EC following their decision to cancel its renewal tender some weeks after publishing it.

This video is aimed at developers interested in combining machine translation, automatic semantic analysis, human curation, faceted and federated search, and social media to create a machine-assisted multilingual longform content curation engine.

Gratifyingly, the preview of the Hashtag Europe wireframes seemed to do the job, and allow people to understand just what this tool could do...

Pour le Journée Européenne du blogging multilingue, a video of one minute (waltz) length sur the bloggingportal.eu reboot, avec une "first look" à les wireframes et pas un mot dans mon accent francais de vache espagnol.

Data from bloggingportal.eu, extracted by BrusselsBlogger, gives some idea of the dominance of English as a blogging language on EU policy.

Some of the comments to my initial post showed me that I have to show, not tell, what I mean when I refer to technologies like semantic analysis and faceted search. So, a quick video about faceted search and the role it could play in helping people find opinions and ideas on EU policy via a rebooted BloggingPortal.

I received a couple of interesting reactions to the post about rebooting BloggingPortal, but as some of them were by email I decided to reply in FAQAO (Frequently Asked Questions And Objections) format, which I just invented, in case others have the same questions.

I've finally gotten around to updating my avatars here and there to show my support to Benoit Poelevoorde's call earlier this year to stop shaving. Why? And why won't it help solve Belgium's political crisis? And what's this got to do with Europe? I don't tend to write much about Belgian affairs ...

A while ago I posted the idea that EUROPA could suffer if the EU Institution's limited online communications resources were refocused on social media. While social media offers the EU a great deal, this could be a serious problem, particularly given EUROPA's importance to any EU social media strategy. Commenters seemed to both agree and disagree...

The lack of specialists in EU-oriented blogs is impeding the development of the European online public space.

That's right - curation. Now officially Web2.0-buzzword-of-the-month (not quite sure which one).

So the debate about the Euroblogosphere, or the Eurosphere, or the European Public Sphere, or web2eu, or the European online public space, of whatever-we-call-it-next-week, has sparked again into life, like a Frankensteinian monster with dodgy spark plugs screwed into the base of its neck.

A Twitter conversation betweentwo much-followed EU-oriented bloggers over the weekend caught my eye. I won't identify them as you need to follow them on Twitter to see their tweets.It started when one asked whether anyone out there"still thinks that blogging is in any way likely to have an impact ... why should anyone listen to us? We st…

PR firm interns posting fake reviews about iPhone apps for their clients. Ghost blogging and tweeting by just about everyone, including thought-leaders in social media.  Bloggers not disclosing sponsorship. It's just a matter of time before someone poisons the well for EU social media.

Over on Nosemonkey's blog, in yet another debate on the pros and cons of EU membership, Insideur is of the opinion that there is a real gap in the market, that Open Europe has sought but failed to fill, for serious, informed, and therefore constructive criticism of the EU

Constructive discussions generally require good discussion documents. One of the Commission's major contributions to any European online space should therefore be a EUROPA that supports the conversations

Trans-European online Communities of Practice should become a key element in the European online community, but examples so far are few. This post looks at DG INFSO, which has been using online community principles since 2002, two years before the phrase "Web 2.0" was invented.

Now and then the question arises: how can we get a transnational discourse on European topics underway, or create a European online public space? The two phrases in bold, above, both come from one of the latest posts on the topic, this time from Julien Frisch. They follow initiatives like Steffan's Bloggingportal.eu, which aggregates Euroblog…

Quite a few people look at me in quite a puzzled way when I mention how the techniques and approaches of online community management 'may have something to offer' the EU in terms of communications, but that this may require 'a change in mentality'. When they look like that, I say "You know, something along the lines of the…

Following rapid and significant expansion into new markets and sectors of governance and policy, innovative union of nation states ("European Union", or EU) seeks an experienced Online Community Manager to gain buy-in at all levels throughout our 27 Members, as well as with external stakeholders on a global level.