Some of you might consider my repeated reference to blogging, and online social networking an obsession. It is exactly this group of people that I am trying to reach with this kind of column.

The group of people who may or may not be aware of the existence of blogging, and social networking, but who for sure don’t see its potential for Europe in terms of (to put it in a very well known trilogy of D’s) – Democracy, Dialogue, and Debate. Further to this there is a whole other side which is related to creativity, innovation (wait- aren’t those important subjects for 2009?), and most importantly, entrepreneurship.

People from the European Institutions, on both the political and administrative level, need to start blogging and using twitter. For those of you who don’t know what twitter is: Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

Twitter provides an immediacy that blogging is unable to provide, and social integration which is very easy to achieve with other people of similar interests or professional contacts. This kind of integration is much more difficult to achieve through blogging, or other social networking websites. Europeans are slowly picking up twitter; yet quite slowly on the corporate level. According to Melissa Bounoua, Forbes “Most European companies haven’t even heard of Twitter, and some might think it’s a time waster. A spokeswoman for energy firm Total says that Chief Executive Christophe de Margerie has no idea what Twitter is. British Telecom says it doesn’t have a Twitter account and doesn’t plan to open one.”

European companies are catching on to these magical possibilities, gradually. The landscape however is not as developed in the EU corporate world when it comes to social networking. Mike Butcher responds to Forbes on Techcrunch saying, “As for big companies not using Twitter: Well, the charge is ridiculously out of context. This article is like asking a US company why they weren’t using SMS to communicate with customers 5, or even 10, years ago. Because you can bet European companies were, and US firms almost definitely weren’t.”

However in terms of politicians, and citizens on the national level things are not as tragic as they appear. Indeed it is the language fragmentation and national orientation which bloggers and tweeters have which makes them less collective in nature, and harder to measure.

Robin Grant, blogging on wearesocial.net claims that: “as far as the general population is concerned, Europe is ahead of the US – with a higher proportion of the UK population using social networking and Twitter than the US (and the rest of Europe broadly comparable) and all of Europe but Germany and Austria way ahead in terms of blog readership.” In terms of politics – the local level seems to be catching on; in some countries more than others.

A comment on the techcrunch article by Nicole Simone highlighted this saying : “I have a list of over 130 German politicians twittering (and they are just beginning) as well as over 130 PR people, major German magazines have adapted twitter (with huge followership) … and that is just in the last few months”. In Greece, at least two ministers (including the Foreign Minister (@Dora_Bakoyannis) are on twitter, as well as Parlamentarians. Another important European figure on twitter since January is Michel Barnier (@michelbarnier).

I hope to see many more people from the European Institutions tweeting one day. It will definitely help change the perception certain people have that the Berlaymont and Parliament are an Ivory Tower. Political groups of the European Parliament have started to get on twitter after EU bloggers and media took the first step. This recently born dynamic will eventually pass the tipping point, into a European boom. With the European elections coming up in June, it could well be that we see this boom occur in the next couple of months.

If you want to find me on twitter and say hello I’ll be @neurope