A Working Day

I get off the Metro at Arts-Loi, walk down Loi, passing Commerce and Industry on my way to my destination, Science. (Even after a year I am still charmed by the street names in Brussels). The European Parliament and Committee of the Regions are a stone’s throw away, the Commission a few hundred yards. This is the edge of the European Quarter and though I don’t wear a tie, I make sure to wear a jacket and a pair of polished shoes.

My destination is the HQ of First Solar and my hosts are Sustainability Consult.Every month they run a seminar on sustainable communications. That’s not about the art of keeping a conversation going on indefinitely (a kind of extended ‘Just a Minute’) but communicating about sustainability. In these days when the financial crisis and foreign wars dominate the headlines it’s not always an easy message to sell. It’s a well attended meeting. The attendees are mostly female, overwhelming white and I’m the oldest person there. People have different organisational links: some are from communications consultancies, about a third do communications for environmental NGOs and about the same number represent trade organisations with a green agenda (renewables, recycling etc.) and there are a few free lancers like me.

Usually the meetings follow a traditional theme, a speaker followed by a Q&A session. This one is different, everyone was invited to reflect on their successes in the past year and their goals in the coming one. These goals varied but for most they seemed to be about maximising the visibility of their organisation. People discussed ‘metrics’: press articles published, hits on blogs, web pages, Facebook followers etc.

I’m a bit of a dunce when it comes to social media. True, I write a blog but not with the dedication of most bloggers – and I certainly don’t use it as a platform for my business. I don’t do Facebook and have never Twittered (and would not know how to). My feeling is that social media increase the noise to signal ratio – exponentially.

My experience with discussion groups on various platforms is that people either unashamedly use them as a sales platform, or that they descend into slanging matches where people take opposing positions without listening to – or even trying to refute each other’s argument. Behind a keyboard it is easy to dispense with civilities or to avoid entering into any form of dialogue. (Although face to face contact is no guarantor of such niceties – as any viewing of Prime Minister’s Question Time will reveal).

Still, social media do play an increasing role in the lobbyist/communications portfolio. One NGO said that a Twitter campaign of theirs had been successful in getting several MEPs to change their vote on a key environmental issue. But everyone agreed that it takes a long time on Twitter to sort out the wheat from the chaff, or should that be the wheatear from the chiff-chaff.