Re: [Int-koordination] PPEU Twitter Account

[Muriel Rovira Esteva <muriel AT pirata.cat>]

Dear Jens,

This issue was already discussed in the European Pirates coordinators mailing list some time ago. I bring back some of the reasonings that brought us to create those accounts to answer to your comments:

1) From a branding point of view, "@eupirates" is a terrible choice. It does not even correspond with the name of the organisation!

The Twitter and Facebook accounts cited at our official web page were created on purpose and have all the same name (europeanpirates), which is also the same name that our official web page has (europeanpirates.eu).

https://www.facebook.com/pages/European-Pirates/456674864436926
https://twitter.com/EuropeanPirates

This is not a coincidence, they were made on purpose because it is exactly the way to go in the advertisement business. Using a consistent name in all social networks and that they also match exactly our official page makes it easier for people to remember the web name and quickly find us.


2) Basing such an important decision, which will have long term consequences in our communication success, on the number of followers that the accounts have right now, it is in my opinion extremely short-sighted (no offence). Nobody would imagine a successful brand (i.e. Pepsi) taking over a twitter account with a different name (i.e. Pepsa) instead of creating their own just because that one already has more followers.

On the other hand, of course that these accounts do not have so many followers! They have been newly created and haven't been used! But this is only now, the moment we start advertising them, using them, and posting relevant content, the followers will quickly grow.

3) If you have no problem with not being in charge on the posted content, and your only honest concern is promoting the organisation European Pirates during the campaign (and as you say you are willing to take advantage of the followers on your account @eupirates), this is great because there is actually no problem watsoever to do so and without the need of the organisation to sacrifice its branding!  :)

Luckily, in Twitter, if you retweet any posts sent from @EuropeanPirates, all your followers will receive them, and will receive them in the same conditions as if they were followers of the official account! So you can always take full advantage of your account followers to promote issues twitted from @EuropeanPirates, you don't need to turn @eupirates into an official account for that.

4) I already assume that this is not an issue in this case, but I bring it up explicitly in case other accounts come up later on:

Any European Pirates official account cannot have an "owner" of any sort, and must belong 100% to the organisation (this was also one of the reasons why the new accounts were created).

This means that the people who are managing the account at any point may not be able to access it at a later point, and have to be willing to completely surrender the account to the people appointed by the Council or the board at any moment (i.e. not necessarily knowing the new password and/or having access to it).

5) I totally agree with the need of setting a communication team, but the communication strategy is something that affects us all. Things said from the official European Pirates account will be said in name of all its members, which includes a lot of organisations.

We have already seen during the creation process that we have many things in common but that we also have many differences so, unless the accounts only speak about the organisation's own issues, it's very easy that it ends up messing it up for a large part of the members if we are not careful enough. Specially if the accounts are only managed by volunteers from a single party, who may unintentionally post things with which many members disagree, not because they have any bad intention but just because they might only be aware of their own side of the story.

Another point is discussing the communication strategy itself. Many pirate accounts basically post any pirate-related content, which some of us don't think is the way to go for the official account of such an organisation. It causes relevant information to be lost in a sea of irrelevance and makes whatever we really want to convey to go unnoticed. Although of course this is a point that we should discuss and agree upon.

I think that deciding on a communication strategy, consensing some guidelines about the kind of posted content, and finding an appropriate team of volunteers for the social networks should be one of the first tasks of the Council and/or the board. And I think it is an issue important enough to wait two weeks and make sure that we agree (not "we" as in whoever is reading this email, but "we" as in the European Pirates founding members).

Greetings!

          Muriel

2014-02-25 0:04 GMT+01:00 JENSEN-URSTAD Anders <anders.jensen-urstad AT europarl.europa.eu>:

Hi Jens!

I previously added @EuropeanPirates and its corresponding Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/pages/European-Pirates/456674864436926 at the request of Muriel of PP-CAT. I believe she had been in touch with Mattias Bjärnemalm about this.

It would be good to have the account with more followers and I agree about the social media team (either way, the office of Amelia Andersdotter would like to have access to any PPEU Twitter/FB accounts before the founding, so that we can inform people about the event). We also need some sort of consensus about how to proceed, so I'm putting Muriel and Mattias in cc.

Cheers,

Anders
Assistant to Amelia

________________________________________
From: Jens Stomber [jens.stomber AT gmx.de]
Sent: Monday, February 24, 2014 23:09
To: ppeu AT ameliaandersdotter.eu; Internationale Koordination
Subject: PPEU Twitter Account

Hi everybody,

for PPEU there exist more then one twitter account. On your website
https://europeanpirates.eu/ you advertise @EuropeanPirates but there exist an
other account @eupirates for which we hold the password and that has by far
more followers.

Therefore international coordination of german pirate party suggests to drop
@EuropeanPirates and go with @eupirates. Please give us a reply if you can
agree with us and change your website accordingly.

Further we need an agreement to setup an social media team. From our
perspective we are allready in an election campaign and therefore need a
social media presence immediately.


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Jens Stomber - Pirate Party Germany
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