Last Friday, 1st of June, Green Group hosted a conference of Green Press officers and Webmasters. As Amelia is part of the Green Group, I had an opportunity to attend and learn about how best to utilize new media to connect with people.

The first module in the morning was discussion on the 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, which helps organisations to make campaign count, especially in the digital sphere. Duane has experience with a wide range of campaigns organisations such as Greenpeace, Oxfam, WWF, Amnesty International. 

Second panellist was a veteran of EU correspondence and environmental journalism, Lorenzo Consoli, who was more of the sceptic towards the new media, admitted to only recently starting to use Twitter and no other social media. His lack of enthusiasm for new media was best showed by lack of response to my twitter message, which his name was tagged in.

Afterwards we proceeded onto the second module on the challenges of campaign communication, and ´Rising political forces - anti-establishment parties and movements´ which as name suggest was partially based on 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 inBrusselsfrom different green member countries. Set contributions were provided from Mari Kamaja, and Pavlina Pacakova.

While the second part of the module concentrated on the Pirate Party. Number of green participants raised their concern that Pirate Party giving the example ofGermany, was stealing the limelight from the Greens. Apparently their current tactics is to ignore, instead of attacking our 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 fromFinland, however she concentrated her introduction on 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 the Search engine optimisation. As the first workshop was primarily aimed at Green party, I went to the second one, which wasn't anything new, but was very useful reminder and revisit aspects of SEO that might of been back of the head and a bit rusty. Workshop was facilitated by charismatic fellow called Peter Ross, who was fromNetherlandsand shared a lot of enthusiasm for Internet and use of social media, he runs his own firm admiun.nl, and 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!