There has been a heavy emphasis on communication activities today. This morning I joined Anna Maria Darmanin, the Committee’s Vice-President with responsibility for communication, and Peter Lindvald-Nielsen, our head of communication, in a tutorial on the social media, including the niceties of Facebook and of Twitter. I have been thinking about the latter for quite a while but, after the tutorial, I took the plunge and did my first Tweet (@MartinWestlake). I now have all of the most appropriate bases covered, I think: website ; blog; Facebook; LinkedIn (though I am still uncertain about its use to people like me); and now, Twitter. Later, we had lunch together with Steve Clark, who is head of the European Parliament’s service for web communication and swapped notes with him about the most effective ways of using the social media (the Parliament had some significant successes in last year’s election campaign and has since been building on them). Last but not least, I went to our communication department’s mini-studio to record a New Year’s message to the Committee’s staff. In closing, I would like to reassure Mathew Lowry and all those who followed up his very interesting post (‘not losing the basics’) that I don’t believe the social media can substitute for getting the basics right, but they are increasingly important supplementary vectors and we will ignore them at our cost.