Presentation: 2013 Forum on Public Diplomacy

It was an honor to present alongside my grad school colleagues at the inaugural Forum on Public Diplomacy presented by the USC Association of Public Diplomacy Scholars. What are your thoughts on my presentation regarding the digital diplomacy horizon we face in international relations?

– Presentation Script –

Could social media change the way we conduct public diplomacy? And what impact does digital diplomacy have, if any, on foreign policy?

To answer this question, I interviewed 30 different practitioners in Washington, DC, Silicon Valley, and London to attempt to define digital diplomacy and forecast its future. I was driven by my desire to live in a world where publics have a say in the foreign policies that govern them. I quote many diverse sources and my research is ongoing, which you can see on my blog, but I’ll share with you a summary of my findings thus far…

We used to have to gain an audience with our leaders and this opportunity was reserved for an elite few or the able few in Christopher columbus’ case here, who’s privilege it was to be present and listen to what leadership had to say. Now – we have social media that helps publics communicate with leaders about the issues that matter the most to us. “We the people” now has a distinct voice.

But it turns out, my conclusion regarding social media is not about the crowd speaking louder to government, it’s about allowing government to listen more effectively to the crowd. We must change the way we think about social media, utilize its evaluation metrics, and use it as a supplemental tool to traditional public diplomacy.

My interpretation of the goals of Public Diplomacy are: to inform, to advocate, to listen, to connect, to engage and, best case scenario, to build capacity that enhances international relations and foreign policy implementation

Now, applying these goals to digital diplomacy, presents us with some pros and cons… in other words, challenges that my research proves can be overcome.

Skeptics say social media could be just as likely to strengthen authoritarian regimes as it is to weaken them” and this statement remains because we haven’t yet implemented evaluation that can prove this either way. But I would like to contradict this by reminding us that censorship and propaganda have higher costs to maintain than open forums for freedom of speech.

A great example occurred this February when China was pressured to address its environmental standards: The U.S. Embassy in Beijing operates its own pollution monitor, releasing hourly figures by Twitter. In the past two years, citizens noticed large discrepancies between the official Chinese figures and the U.S. ones, and the public began to question whether the Chinese statistics had been falsified.

With a constant digital presence, organizations are forced to become more transparent and accountable. Without digital outreach, Beijing may not have taken emergency action: shutting down factories and taking a third of official cars off the road. Because of the US embassy broadcasting directly to foreign audiences, Beijing is now vowing to cut air pollution by 15 percent over the next three years, something that citizens may not have been able to do without the online forum.

The next con of digital diplomacy is that the true global reach of the Internet is limited and access is selective in many countries. But, as Clay Shirky says “access to conversation is far more important than access to information”, especially in a political sense

This is exemplified through the U.S.’s virtual embassy in Iran: Since the United States does not have a presence, physically on the ground in Tehran, it has a virtual embassy which is headquartered on this website. It’s actually shut down repeatedly by the Iranian internet authorities, but state department officials like Alec Ross and Tara Sonenshine have said that it’s actually encouraging when this happens because it means that Iranian publics are using this resource and if it wasn’t useful, it wouldn’t be targeted. This virtual embassy is one of the only means US diplomacy has to engage with Iranian publics – this digital presence presents an opportunity that traditional diplomacy otherwise wouldn’t.

However, skeptics would say: social media gives voice to those who are dramatic – who want to broadcast their extreme views… but Social Media is, in its fundamental nature, a culture of sharing and an enabler of two-way engagement and collaboration and those voices can be valuable if we let them be in the right ways.

A dynamic example is that of US Ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford:

Who has distinguished himself for his willingness to take personal risks as well as to deliver candid messages directly to the public. As the civil war in Syria began to gain momentum in 2011, the Ambassador engaged audiences by posting on his facebook page: “While reviewing recent posts I found several thoughtful comments by persons who are strongly critical of American policy,” Ford’s note began. “I respect that they asked hard questions, and they deserve answers. ”  This brought a human face to the authorities dealing with the civil war and could have enhanced US soft power while decreasing others’.

More importantly, among his comments, he found warnings that current American efforts to unseat president Bashar al-Assad could endanger minorities in the country, helping to better organize the embassy’s response plan. By embracing social media, the ambassador invited criticism but through analysis, found valuable information he may not have otherwise been able to find through traditional diplomacy.

Given these examples, how can we progress in digital diplomacy?

We must exercise best practices, meaning:

First, Utilize evaluation mechanisms — A campaign is only as successful as you can prove it to be. Social media metrics are currently underused (as we saw in the Beijing pollution case).

I recently conducted website analytics and Facebook insights for the Center on Public Diplomacy, and it’s helping them see what topics are most discussed and where their strongest audiences are located. Note: this is not accurate data for the actual Center, it is a template from Facebook Insights Tutorial.

Next, As public diplomats, we cannot let social media stand alone – it’s important to supplement it with events and genuine people-to-people engagement so that it is enhancing, not substituting for, diplomatic actions on the ground (and this is where well-rounded diplomacy is missing in the Iran virtual embassy case).

My favorite example of this right now is the social media outreach for our very own student-run APDS Annual Conference. We reached completely new audiences world wide with 34 new followers in one day, 630 uses of our own hashtags, and 400 views of our live web stream, but it was entirely rooted in our person-to-person programming here on campus.

Finally, it’s necessary to develop individualized best practices – the most effective way to engage is specialized messaging and the best people to develop that are the diplomatic teams on the ground who will know their audiences in a multi-faceted way (like Ambassador Ford in Syria).

This means integrating the practices of social media into how we train our diplomats in strategic communications. It also means recognizing that there is a digital divide between those that are equipped with and “fluent in” digital media, not only a generational gap but also a developmental one. But the digital diplomacy horizon is one where we can see that everyone will connected by one digital network or another.

I actually started my research more with the question of: could we crowd source foreign policy with social media? In a sense, allowing everyone a say in international relations? My research has proved that the answer is no, but the reason why these findings remain important to me is that, through social media, there now exists a way to measure sentiment, even if it is subtle.

Social media gives us numbers that can distinctly say what people are feeling and how they’re communicating about issues, countries, international politics and these numbers mean more than simple polls because it’s truly what people feel, and believe, and talk about with their most valued contacts.

It is my hope that when governments, such as my own, decide to invade a country like Iraq, public diplomats can approach leaders with the hard, fast social media numbers that state a foreign public won’t appreciate an invasion and here’s when, where, why and how those publics are discussing key international decisions.

In conclusion, my call to action is one that involves recognizing the strengths and weaknesses of social media and using social media as a supplementary tool in public diplomacy. If we want to live in a world where publics start to have a say in the foreign policies that govern them, it’s time to embrace social media evaluation mechanisms that can provide us with the tools to change the way we conduct engagement.

Is a change in Facebook profile pictures a measure of engagement?

This week’s Human Rights Campaign movement, with a good portion of my Facebook contacts changing their profile photo to the company’s logo in support of a US Supreme Court decision in favor of marriage equality, made me think about what a move like this means, as far as engagement with a campaign, and how one could measure this factor to determine success in communications strategy. My main concern is not that it showed engagement (which is useful to note when compiling best practices) but rather what kind of engagement it indicates and how can it be used as a platform for future successes in communications.

Yes – a Facebook profile change is a great measure of engagement. Why? and what does social media engagement mean, especially for communications and advocacy campaigns?

When an entity posts on Facebook, the first level of engagement is a “Like”. However, it is not necessarily a cause for celebration; one “Like” is easy to do and there are not many consequences for any user and certainly not any limit for “Likes” for one user across the entire network.

The key to look for is when your “fans” begin sharing your content – this essentially means that your content is so good or original that your fans and friends, not only want to tell their friends about the post, but they’re willing to let it be a part of the kaleidoscope of posts that define who they are in this social media medium.

A friend adopts your logo as their profile picture? Jackpot. This means they wholeheartedly believe in the cause you are promoting that they are willing to let it define their presence on Facebook completely. To HRC’s social media team: “Quick! Before the campaigns ends and SCOTUS makes their decision, keep a file of all of those fans that have changed their picture because they’ll be most likely to sign up for your email newsletter and donate money when you need it!” — Is there a way to record this and measure it within your Facebook Insights? Surprisingly, no.

Just as you would never throw an event (having spent funding to provide food, drink, entertainment, etc. to draw in a crowd) without setting out a sign-in sheet for further contact with the crowd, no social media engagement opportunity should happen without evaluation, most importantly, as well as with long-term goals in mind. Similarly, Facebook Insights could gain strength by providing more diverse and exact ways to analyze a page’s activities. In the end, is sharing content more representative of better engagement than the profile picture move since it can be measured in Facebook Insights? Or should organizations and businesses on Facebook not wait for Insights to catch up and find their own way to measure this move? Is there a way to measure how many people change on this day? And exactly when? And why? Is there a way to tell where they get the photo from – whether it’s from a friend or directly from a campaign’s page or a news article? Does it matter?

It matters depending on the goals of your campaign. Starting this morning, I saw my friends, mainly ones I knew were already against Proposition 8, changing their profile picture. I clicked on their picture hoping to discover more information to find that there was none, just the plain simple statement of the logo …and perhaps an air of mystery can work in HRC’s favor, inspiring people to be curious and go to search for what this image means. I had to Google search the campaign before I could find any information about it on Facebook, so I changed mediums and left Facebook. The best link I found then lead me back to the campaign’s Facebook page for an additional change of medium. By that time, a user could be bored by the extensive search and opt out of participating.

So, would it have been more effective if the photo had had a website address, news article or Facebook event invite integrated into the image? Once again, depends on what HRC’s goals were for this campaign or if it even had an intentional and thorough communications strategy in tow.

Based on the behavior I saw throughout today on Facebook, I will assume HRC’s only goal was to simply publicize and broadcast their efforts as well as show in numbers/visually who supports gay marriage. Therefore, would their target audience be the undecided, but easily-swayed-by-a-social-media-campaign users? But then what is their goal for the steadfast anti-gay-marriage Facebook users? How would they define their target audience? Did they have one for this campaign?

Your guess is as good as mine, but the lesson of the day is: in all communications campaigns, set clear goals or work closely with your client to define them; even if it takes some soul searching and it isn’t necessarily comfortable to admit you don’t have a strategy, the campaign will be all the more successful for it.

Virtual Embassies: Better than Nothing or Bad PD?

SPECIAL GUEST POST by Matthew Wallin, Senior Policy Analyst, American Security Project

The advent of internet communications has given a rise to the concept of virtual public diplomacy engagement—that is communication with foreign publics without actually having a ground presence to do so. Some call it e-diplomacy. While this sounds like a revolutionary concept, functionally, it is not.

The ability to get information into a country without being on the ground there has existed for many years in the form of various types of electronic communication. Despite this, the announcement of Virtual Embassy Tehran by the U.S. State Department in 2011 has been viewed as a revolutionary occurrence.

In reality, it isn’t. Virtual embassies are fundamentally analogous to some forms of international broadcasting. For instance, though declining significantly in use in recent years, shortwave radio has been historically popular around the world due to its ability to cover vast distances of thousands of miles. Just as virtual embassies are subject to being blocked by authorities in the target countries, radio, too, has always been subject to jamming. Satellite broadcasting, which by measures of sheer distance and quality of signal may be considered the ultimate in remote information transmission, is also subject to jamming. This is particularly prominent in Iran.

In any case, the need to broadcast from outside of a country in order to reach a target audience can be viewed as an indication that diplomatically, something isn’t going well. In a worst-case scenario, there may be no diplomatic relations whatsoever. The U.S. currently has no diplomatic relations or presence in several countries with which it holds an adversarial relationship, including Iran and North Korea. But must it be so? Why is a virtual embassy even necessary in the first place?

During the Cold War, the United States maintained diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, despite the existential threat it posed, the numerous proxy wars waged, and the many fundamental disagreements between those countries over a long period of time. It was simply in the greater interest for both countries to have diplomatic relations because the stakes were too high not to.

Certainly in the case of Iran, there is valid reason for not maintaining diplomatic relations, as diplomatic staff were targeted by the 1979 revolutionaries that now run the Iranian Government. There is thus legitimate concern that if relations were established, the Government of Iran would not be willing to provide diplomatic staff with appropriate assurances or protection. This was made further evident in 2011, when the UK Embassy was sacked by Iranian protestors after new sanctions were imposed for Iran’s nuclear activities.

Even though a virtual embassy doesn’t put staff in physical danger, its message is still able to be silenced. Since a key strength of the internet is the ability to use electronic methods to find out where information is being read, for how long, and how it is being circulated, one might think a virtual embassy is a great idea. The problem with this however, is that due to blocking from inside Iran, it is technically not possible to determine if one is reaching the target audience. As the Iranian people must use proxies, VPNs, or other methods to access the virtual embassy, these connection attempts appear as though they are coming from other countries.

Ultimately, if the best use of the internet as a medium through which public diplomacy can be conducted is as a component of real-world in-person engagement, then do virtual embassies stand out as bad PD, simply “better than nothing,” or actually effective? Without proper metrics, we won’t really know. It will take people on the ground in these countries to really find out.

Thoughts on #e-diplomacy

As I was deciding to commit to the theme of e-diplomacy for my thesis topic, I was nervous there weren’t enough resources present with which to back up my arguments and from which to draw relevant conclusions that would contribute to the field of public diplomacy. This month proved me wrong: especially with e-diplomacy “going mainstream” with a prominent panel at the 2013 South by Southwest Conference, there has been an onslaught of recent articles, studies, and opinion pieces regarding diplomatic actions happening in the digital space. Five themes/trends I’d like to note so far:

1. E-diplomacy has some credible critics. The best and most dynamic pieces I’ve read on this topic have been the skeptical ones. This is good for two reasons: a) it provides a clear anti-thesis to my current one and the best way to prove yourself right is to argue with someone who wants to prove you wrong, & b) it could push e-diplomacy practitioners to strive for better standards and to be more eloquent about their work. BUT as I’m undecided on whether or not the final draft of my paper will be for or against the use of social media in public diplomacy, this concerns me. If the critics are more clearly making their argument against, then will e-diplomacy fans ever gain credibility, or worse, be pushed out of the dynamic work they’re doing?

2. E-diplomacy is unstoppable. The most common theme I’ve discovered is that there is no going back; social media is here to stay and the businesses/organizations/embassies that embrace the trend and seek to join the game with conviction, will be all the more successful.

3. Government is taking the lead. This point was inspired by a recent tweet of @MattJHarmon: “Irony: Government foreign relations offices have better definitions for “success” on social media than most companies. #SXSWdiplomacy.” This blew me away. My hope is that social media has redirected the emphasis to quality of audience engagement and people-to-people interaction rather than profit and product placement. I can’t wait to research this more; I want to dig deeper to find measurable outcomes that may prove how defining success aids international dialogue.

4. Best practices are non-existent. I’m hoping someone/something/some-source-willing-to-go-on-record can prove me wrong with this one. This is really the topic I would most like to focus on in the bulk of my paper, so, for now, I plan to develop my own recommendations (after proper due diligence, of course). The main sources I’ve discovered are through PR bloggers and Avinash Kaushik of Google Analytics fame. When I originally set out to pursue the topic of e-diplomacy, however, I had hoped the idea of best practices would have come directly from social media teams at embassies. Granted, the government can’t publish all of it’s work, but the only major research I’ve been able to find is by the diligent Fergus Hanson focusing on U.S. e-diplomacy. It’s a great start, but my hope is to find more diverse sources, coming from a wider range of nations and diplomats. If you’d like to share your own social media best practices, with the idea that they could be utilized among foreign service officers one day, please do comment below and we’ll get in touch.

5. We should not ignore traditional diplomacy nor cut regular public diplomacy programming. The stand-out public diplomats in the field understand that e-diplomacy, and what they communicate digitally, is simply supplementary to the work they do on the ground. Stay tuned for my next post on my top ten favorite digital diplomacy practitioners to see them in action.

The Digital Diplomacy Horizon

Social media is an excellent supplemental tool in the practice and study of public diplomacy because it holds strategic potential for enhancing communication tactics, promoting policy objectives, and providing evaluation mechanisms. Social media provides a new platform from which diplomats can benefit, provided it is a forum used effectively. It should not, however, replace or dominate the larger practice of public diplomacy. A foundation of PD is the people and the relationships that are affected by the policies it promotes. The negative side effects of utilizing this unique form of communication must be accounted for at all stages of planning. If the main aim of public diplomacy is to inform, engage, influence, empower, and understand foreign publics on behalf of an international actor, then social media offers an innovative opportunity along the road to achieving that goal.

I recently presented my thesis research at the Santa Barbara Global Studies Conference, where I had the opportunity to solicit constructive suggestions for where to go next. I have uploaded my presentation and recorded my lecture here to welcome your feedback.