Diplomacy 2.0
Caroline Jaine explores diplomacy in the digital age,
and how new tools can be harnessed for the better.
If you had asked me a couple of years ago about governments using new media to engage with their ‘publics’, I would have responded with a hollow laugh. Digital engagement, much like blogging in its early years, is primarily identified with individual voices speaking freely, unconstrained by either institutions or authorities – for example, community journalists wishing to distance themselves from mainstream media. Not so long ago, the idea of government officials keeping blogs (especially on branded platforms), let alone Facebook or Twitter accounts, seemed to undermine the very spirit of this new and exciting means of communication, where credibility lay in the voices of real people rather than the objectives of policy makers. ‘Web 2.0’ had just arrived: more and more the internet was becoming an interactive platform based on information sharing, collaboration, user-driven ‘wikis’ and social networks. Indeed, it was this phenomenon that prompted Time magazine to staggeringly name ‘You’ as Person of the Year in 2006.
But that was 2006, and if a week is a long time in politics, then three years is a veritable age in our digitally-connected world. Blogs, which first began to appear in 1994 as geeky weblog diaries, now number in the hundreds of millions. (Technorati, a search engine for blogs, follows 150 million of them – a figure that does not include China’s estimated 75 million bloggers). These days everyone seems to have something to say; millions of us are posting regularly, micro-blogging thoughts and interesting links, or joining social groups with shared interests (in everything from vampires to Amnesty International). Some of us are recording audio mini-blogs on Audioboo, or just letting our friends know that we’ve seen a good movie by updating our network status. And with web connectivity now more frequently available on our mobile phones, we are often doing this away from our desk. We can make films and upload them on YouTube for the world to see, or even upload our own news reports on sites such as CNN’s iReport (which now provides up to 10 per cent of the news channel’s content).
Given this new-found wealth of connectivity, is it any wonder that governments have sought to get involved? Although I did not entirely welcome the erosion of what I saw as unique space for the ‘people’s media’, I became a tentative convert when I found myself following the British Embassy in Washington on Twitter (UKinUSA) and reading the Department for International Development bloggers – especially ‘Simon’, who blogs from Iraq – from time-to-time.
To find out more about how British diplomats are meeting the challenges of digital engagement, last week I met with Stephen Hale, the enthusiastic Head of Engagement for digital diplomacy at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). Hale’s team supports 30 bloggers and 255 websites (in over 40 languages) around the world and has regional hubs based in London, Washington, Singapore and Delhi, with five Digital Campaign Managers stationed in London alone.
In the spirit of Web 2.0, the team acknowledge that creating bespoke platforms or using the FCO platform for online engagement aren’t always the best approaches. For example, assigned the task of promoting a culture of economic debate around the G20 summit in April this year, the FCO collaborated with VoxEU.org, a site already recognised as a lively platform for such debates; consequently, while the FCO still showcased the debate on its official G20 summit pages, the real action was encouraged to take place at another (perhaps more credible) site. Similarly, Q&A sessions with Foreign Office and Cabinet Ministers are often hosted online at Yoosk, an interactive interview magazine.
One of the difficulties with strategic campaigns such as these is how to measure their effectiveness. Hale concedes that while the currency of clicks is important, some campaigns are more about engagement and two-way-influence – criteria that can be difficult to assess. That said, the themes of the G20 online debate were clearly reflected in the summit outcome.
Occasionally, however, the power of online engagement is clear indeed. In 2007, Jim Murphy, then the Minister for Europe, received a comment on his blog about French healthcare for British expatriates. As a result, Murphy raised the issue with his French counterpart and came to a favourable resolution the following year. This is the kind of two-way exchange that, in Hale’s own words, represents Web 2.0 ‘at its best’.
The FCO also seems to understand the need for digital diplomacy to be more of a personal conversation. Murphy, like other Ministers (including Foreign Secretary David Miliband), pens his own blog and responds to comments himself. And one man who doesn’t seem to be able to stop commenting is John Duncan, the UK’s Geneva-based Ambassador for Multilateral Arms Control and Disarmament, who has hundreds of followers on Twitter and claims that by blogging and micro-blogging he immediately makes public what would otherwise have to be disseminated via coffee-shop conversations with journalists, thus saving himself time. Indeed, in researching this article I was able to consult Duncan’s recent posting, ‘Government 2.0’, for his views on the subject, and I now follow him on Twitter (JDuncanMAC). The Ambassador understands that new technology has led to ‘the creation of a new, world-wide ‘us’ of shared interests and values’. He actively seeks out engagement with people interested in arms control and disarmament and claims that his online engagement ‘offer[s] direct access to the community that may provide third-party endorsement and at its best the creation of a constituency for change.’ Reading his tweets, it is clear that he responds to questions (very quickly in my case!), tweets back with interesting messages and links and does equal amounts of listening. I, for one, feel perfectly comfortable making way for him in the digital playground.
Another diplomat, Grace Mutandwa, is one of the FCO’s most successful bloggers – her blog from Harare, Zimbabwe, was listed in The Times’ guide to the top 100 blogs earlier this year. The Times claims that Mutwanda is ‘unique in the annals of British diplomacy’ in that she is an embassy official who says what she really thinks; although after my meeting with Hale I am not so sure that she is the only one – this kind of transparency seems to be blowing through the organisation like a breath of fresh air.
Another Ambassador already well-established in the digital world is Mark Kent, who filmed himself walking the streets of Hanoi and posted it on YouTube (earning a modest 1,600 views so far). At first I was unnerved by the Ambassador’s slightly stumbling performance as, wearing a limp suit, he carried a small backpack around the city and explained British policy in Vietnam. But then I realised the mastery of it all. Kent, who blogs in Vietnamese and is just as likely to write about football as diplomacy, is a real person – a true ‘Diplomat 2.0’. Had he been too slick and media-savvy, he would have failed the credibility test. As John Duncan writes, ‘The tools are only as good as the use one makes of them’, and the FCO applies this wisdom by allowing bloggers to be themselves – a lesson that other governments and authorities may have yet to learn.
I must say that my initial cynicism has since vanished, and I now see plenty of room in the digital playground for all sorts of blogs – diplomatic, political, corporate, legal, etc. But one thing that doesn’t seem to have changed since the early days of participatory media is the fact that the credibility of the individual is crucial to the success of meaningful online exchange. This is still about the ‘unofficial’ voice, and about the intimacy and belief conjured up by personal interaction. Those governments and authorities that treat digital media purely as a means to broadcast their policies fail to see the whole picture. Online communication must be about human engagement and sharing, otherwise an increasingly sophisticated public will view it as mere propaganda. This is Diplomacy 2.0 – upgraded and more user-friendly than the original version, for sure.