Why Spiegel thinks Community is the killer app for EU Communications (Top3ics, Feb 13)

Three articles unpacking the relationship between community, communications, content and EU communications.

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Storytelling and Communities for Europe

I don’t think anyone in Brussels didn’t notice Why Does the EU Get Such a Bad Rap? (Spiegel). My favourite quotes:

EU money flows from Brussels into thousands of projects and ideas. Why does nobody notice?…
some of the worst storytellers happen to be located in Brussels … Spend half an hour on the European Commission’s website searching for funding opportunities, and you’ll end up feeling thoroughly confused…
We no longer need a top-down but a bottom-up Europe… concentrate less on spreading money around Europe and more on sending people around the continent… Europe is when Germans and British install wind turbines together, when Italians, Dutch and Poles get together and think about dairy cows… when that happens, the European narrative is a positive one.

-  Why Does the EU Get Such a Bad Rap?

There’s a lot more - I picked the above because Spiegel’s conclusion effectively calls for EU Programmes to create cross-EU Communities of Interest and Practice, an idea I’ve been banging on about since 2002.

Some more relevant reading:

• How Vox Media’s new Storytelling Studio thinks of stories as products and 79 more resources tagged storytelling
  
• How online communities are faring in 2016 and 121 more resources tagged community
• (blogplug) Of technocrats, journalistic balance and telling EU stories (the Brexit update) and my 27 BlogActiv posts tagged community 
  

Reclaiming Communications with Community 

Spiegel’s piece shares a lot of tags with Everyone’s talking but no-one’s listening: it’s time to reclaim the art of communication (The Conversation), which unpacks the links between ‘community’ and ‘communications’, and why “real dialogue seems to have given way to parallel monologues, paired with an inability to actively listen…  

… “communication can by itself create a community”. This early definition was … in line with the root of the word “communication”, which comes from the Latin communicare (to share or to make common) and communis (belonging to all). Both terms are also related to the word “community”…
We can … replace the idea of conversations as a competition… to find common ground when talking to each other, which is not coincidentally also a definition of the term “community”

- Everyone’s talking but no-one’s listening: it’s time to reclaim the art of communication  

More recommended resources:

• On convening a community is a good case study, concluding with observations on the role of journalists which also apply to government communicators 
• apart from community, the Conversation’s story is tagged communications (35 resources) and participation (19)

Content Strategy for Community

If the above is a little too philosophical, look at ‘community’ from a business perspective with Harvard Business Review.

I spend a lot of time on media sector innovation partly because the media faces similar challenges to public sector communications … but unlike the public sector they have to solve them to survive. Their experiments therefore offer public sector communications a lot, not to mention any company trying to thrive in today’s digital information environment. 

A good example is How Focusing on Content Leads the Media Astray (HBR), where “Bharat Anand, author of The Content Trap and professor at Harvard Business School, talks about the strategic challenges facing digital businesses, and explains how he … designed the school’s online learning platform…

success for the best companies does not come from making the best content, it comes from recognizing how content can connect customers…
the moment you start recognizing that content is not simply about broadcasting information … it’s also about facilitating conversation and connecting your readers. It creates all sorts of possibilities…

-  How Focusing on Content Leads the Media Astray

All you need to do is substitute ‘customers/readers’ with ‘citizens’ to see that he, like Spiegel, also sees that the best way of communicating with people is to connect them together - i.e., convene a community.

Yet more resources:

• How To Build An Effective Social Marketing Strategy, because “the strength of your community has much less to do with how consumers are connected to you than how they are connected to each other”
  
• How audience engagement editors are guiding online discussions
  
• apart from community, the above HBR story is also tagged content strategy (173), moocs (3), media (377) and news (278).

I hope you found that what I found was interesting. If so, let your friends know.