In the light of the Commons vote on an EU referendum, Michael Burton comments on a recent euro-conference for central regional and local government communications managers.

By coincidence last week, just days before this Monday's Commons vote on holding an EU referendum, some 700 national, regional and local government PR managers met for the second Europcom public communications conference in Brussels, with yours truly as one of the speakers.

The main theme was why the public across Europe has fallen out of love with the EU as an institution and how this might be changed. But it was also about how public organisations generally in an age of austerity struggle to connect with an increasingly sceptical public. Speakers from across the EU member states including the UK addressed a dozen workshops on issues such as place-branding, social media (especially popular), online reputation and going local.

Some key comments from the event, organised by the EU and the Committee of the Regions - which is made up of local and regional councillors - stuck in my mind. The first, from the CoR president Mercedes Bresso, was that ‘the idea of Europe is no longer seductive'.

The session chairman, a UK journalist, joked that ‘the UK's most successful export is euro-scepticism.' Another speaker, billed as an ‘independent policy adviser to governments' said communications was ‘either information, advertising or propaganda' and ‘attempting to give information on a subject people haven't asked for and don't want is a waste of time.' Places, he added, are judged by what they do not by branding. In his view organisations or places that say they have an image problem usually turn out to have an internal problem about how they perceive themselves.

Like UK councils, the delegates were fascinated by social media, its opportunities and its threats. One consultant said it should be seen primarily as a means of finding out what the public is thinking, not as a communications tool.

A ‘politics and government specialist' from Facebook told us of the UK police force that has two Facebook sites, one of them in the name of a police dog to make its serious messages palatable.

The phrase ‘go local' was also well-trodden, the inference being that only through municipalities could EU issues be translated to the public. In that case, perhaps the EU might spread some of its largesse to cash-strapped council PR units. Speaking remarkably frankly the head of comms at the European Council – which drives the EU – admitted: ‘Even in times of trouble we have plenty of money.' Don't tell that to the Tory backbenchers who defied Cameron over the EU vote this week.