European Union Parliament: Day 11: Tuesday June 11, 2013

Today, our guest speaker was Mr. Stephen Ryan from Ireland. He is the Head of Head of Marketing at fotawildlife. His presentation was in two parts: the first aspect gave us the overview of Ireland culture and how it was used in creating marketing. While the second part of the presentation provided the relevance of social media in marketing. He described the strategy adopted by FOTA to effectively utilize social media as a marketing tool and the results achieved with it. It was very interesting to know that you can use social media to systematically get free commercial on TV instead of paying millions of dollars. The presentation finished at about 1:15pm. I had some few minutes break before we proceeded for the visit to the European parliament.

Brussels is a walking city; it took us about 15 to 20 minute walk to get to the European Union Parliament. The EU parliament building is a modern glass house with great architecture and beautiful design. The front of the building and the lobby has the flags of all the 27 member countries. 

We were received by Mr. Ryan Meilak. He presented to us the structure and the system of operation of European Union. He provides us with the roles of the three institutions that constitute the EU namely EU commission, EU parliament and the EU council minister. Also, some challenges faced by EU were highlighted and some of the ways of overcoming them. The presentation lasted for about 2 hours and we finally left the building some minutes after 4 pm.

I quickly proceeded to Nicolas Wine store about 1 mile away from the EU parliament building. Fortunately for me, I met the manager and I was happy that he granted me audience. The interview went smoothly and had to go get my lunch after the interview. Later return to the hostel at about 6.59pm just in time for dinner.