Last Friday, 1st of June, Green Group hosted a conference of the Green Partie’s press officers and webmasters. Amelia is part of the Green group, therefore I had an opportunity to attend and learn about how to best utilise new media in order to connect with people.

The first module in the morning was discussion about blurring of lines between social and traditional media. First speaker was Duane Raymond, who has managed to make such a great use of social media that he runs his own agency, fairsay.com. The agency helps organisations to make campaigns count, especially in the digital sphere. Duane has experience with a wide range of campaign organisation such as Greenpeace, Oxfam, WWF and Amnesty International.

Second panellist, was a veteran of EU correspondence and environmental journalism, Lorenzo Consoli, who was a new media sceptic. Admitted that he only recently starting using Twitter and hasn’t used any other social media. His lack of enthusiasm for the new media was best showed by lack of response to my twitter message, which had his name was tagged.

Afterwards, we proceeded onto the second module about the challenges of campaign communication, and ´Rising political forces – anti-establishment parties and movements´ which as name suggest was partially based on the Pirate Party with particular emphasis given to the German example. The first part was on nuclear energy and green economy, which was very much the main topic for the green press officers and webmasters gathered in Brussels from different member countries. Set contributions were provided by Mari Kamaja and Pavlina Pacakova.

While the second part of the module concentrated on the Pirate Party. Number of green participants expressed their concern that the Pirate Party giving example of Germany’s case, was stealing limelight from the Green Party. Apparently their current tactics is to ignore, instead of attacking the Pirate Partie’s policies. However, dedicating part of the conference to Pirates, is hardly ignoring, among many of things commented were Pirates lack of position on key policy areas, with particularly reference to the foreign policy.

Introductory speeches were made by Marja Honkonen, who was a panellist from Finland, however she concentrated her introduction on the far-right party in her country. While the other panellist from Germany, Michael Scharfschwerdt, described the German Pirates, as neither left, nor right but cosmopolitan from the Internet side.

The last module of the day hosted two workshops on how to communicate the economic crisis and greens solutions and on search engine optimisation. As the first workshop was primarily aimed at the green party, I went to the second one, which wasn’t anything new, but was a very useful reminder and revisited aspects of SEO that might of been at the back of the head and a bit rusty. Workshop was facilitated by charismatic fellow called Peter Ross, who was from Netherlands and shared a lot of enthusiasm for Internet and use of social media. He runs his own firm admiun.nl, and mobile application design company in Romania.

All the people mentioned in this blog, are on Twitter, so feel free to follow them or me, as I try to tweet on events that I go to, and this will provide you with another insight into the event @edvinpaus

Adios amigos!