Archive for the ‘European regulations’ Category

Social Media vs. Mainstream “opinion”

What can social media show about politics?

It can show that the professional press does not reflect public opinion.

Attentio is measuring and monitoring the buzz around the European Union and its pet policies and problems. Analysis of the project demonstrates the distance the EU has gone to earn popular legitimacy–as well as the distance the EU has yet to go.

Mainstream news is an accurate source of what the EU is up to. The EU elite carefully publicise their efforts through the professional mainstream media. Last week, EU elites at the Commission and the Parliament met to address the issue of illegal immigration and the need for more border security for the Union. As a result of these efforts of the European elite, the mainstream buzz is all about security and border restrictions. (Note the top red trendline highlighting this prominent issue in the chart below.)

Buzz words picked up by the Attentio algorithms (that’s tech speak for the magic that is the Attentio software) include “detain” and “deportation”. Maybe the EU thinks that if it draws a darker circle around all the Member States, the Union will feel a bit more unified, or maybe the elites are genuinely worried about the estimated 8 million illegal immigrants living inside the special European border-free area, the Schengen.

Either way, the political elite are not effectively engaging the public in their concerns. The buzz in the social media, the blogs and the forums created by the unpaid, unprofessional European citizens, is not concerned with non-European immigration to the EU. For the “average European”, the top concern associated with the EU is democracy.

Europeans in the social media are concerned not with the external EU immigrants so much as internal EU integration. Neither the EU nor the mainstream media is reflecting an accurate version of the “average EU citizen’s” opinions. Europe’s population is concerned that the EU institutions are losing touch with the people that they are supposed to represent. This is the difference between mainstream and social media, and this is the distance that the EU elite have to address.

If they are aware of it. Don’t we wish all politicians would pay as much attention to the media that the people produce as the publications produced by the pros?

Addendum from Attentio’s political analyst:

Further Attentio analyst analysis of the data comes up with this short summary: Europe is pretty regional, and the wider the EU grows, the more these regions mix and bump up against each other. The issue for the EU population is not so much European border controls as the lack of internal border patrols. Immigration, for the EU citizen, is a local problem, and it’s the Europeans from other Member States as much as the immigrants from outside the EU that frustrate localised populations. Prior to addressing the regional frustration that is immigration, it might be better for the EU to integrate vertically, then horizontally.

Push me, Pull U

I’ve been reading online about the importance of social media monitoring in reducing the money wasted on advertising. Mediapost had some nice things to say about the recession and companies learning to shore up their budgets by being more cautious about their marketing.

In Europe, word-of-mouth and online marketing is not only a low cost with a great many benefits, it’s the safest, most respectful way to reach clients and consumers. The EU is very protective of European consumers. “Push” advertising, in-your-face, direct-to-consumer ads, is frowned upon. For some corporations, this kind of marketing can even result in legal action.

For example, pharmaceutical corporations are very limited in the information that they can provide to consumers, and they’re even more limited in their methods of distributing this information. France has required Yahoo! to limit the information that can be accessed by French consumers to be more in line with French rules and customs. The French Parliament is now considering making encouraging anorexia a crime, and in some Southern European countries, models are already required to present health certificates to their employers. One has to wonder how this trend in consumer-citizen protection legislation will eventually affect marketing.

Online marketing, however, is saving time, money, and respect for different legal and cultural traditions by creating content that “pulls” consumers rather than push them. This, the EU and European States determine, is okay. If a consumer accesses the information rather than has it foisted on them, then everyone is happy.