Big Friday: surfing the eutube

It has been a while since we looked at the YouTube activities of our elected and non-elected officials here in Brussels. As its Friday, we thought we do a round robin of the EU actors we have come across with audiovisual content on YouTube. If you know of more, please do let us know.

EU Institutions

• European Commission – sweaty from the sex sells success, they still lead the way in populating the web with EU content (nearly a million channel views and over 4,000 subscribers).
• European Parliament – one video and about as many regular visitors as this blog.
• Council – does anyone else see the irony in “Council Live“? In any case we couldn’t find the Council on YouTube but the Portuguese Presidency does have a library of press conferences available to download.

European Parliament Political Groups

• EPP
• PES
• ALDE

• UKIP – A small national party rather than a European parliamentary group, we grant you. Despite holding none too popular views in Brussels some of their videos make us chuckle.

Members of the European Parliament

• Richard Corbett MEP (PES, UK)
• Chris Davies MEP (ALDE, UK)
• Dan Jorgensen MEP (PES, DK)
• Syed Kamall MEP (EPP, UK)
• Jules Maaten MEP (ALDE, NL)

There is of course the question of how successful these efforts are in reaching out to potential voters, or even supporters, both on their own and relative to each other.

Happily, we have started to come across tools that will help us map the progress made such as TubeMogul. Once you register, for free, not only can you upload your video to multiple platforms at the click of a button but you can also compile and contrast visitor data over time for your video and that of others.

A visit to the US based Viral Video charts, who offer a tracking and analysis service for a fee to professionals as well as a chart of political videos, reminds us however that the online world can hinder as well as help our politicians.

Our top three European political video bloopers in reverse order:

3. Commission President Barroso comparing Europe to an empire

2. French President Sarkozy appearing to have had a little too much to drink (BTW – he had not)

1. Belgian politician and potential Prime Minister Yves Leterme singing the Marseillaise instead of the Belgian national anthem (BTW – clearly he was joking)