Stephen Hale

Can I have a new website?

If you work in a digital team in a big organisation you'll be familiar with this scenario:

Someone you haven't met before phones you and says something like:

"I'm working on [insert strategy/product/policy/event]. We'll need a website. How do we get one?"

Your instant reaction might be "No chance. How about using the extensive web presence we've already got?"  but you don't say it quite like that. You say something like: "That's interesting. Tell me what it is you want to achieve?"

How do you turn this scenario into an outcome that satisfies everyone? It's not something we've always got right in the Foreign Office in the past. Here are some ideas:

1. Have a coherent online strategy

You need to do this before you receive the phone call. But if you don't have a positive vision for how you intend to use the web as an organisation, you're not going to be able to convince anyone to follow your advice.

So set it down. And make sure it's ambitious.

If you work in UK government, the Transformational Government website rationalisation programme actually makes it pretty hard to set up new government websites. But you need to offer your excited policy team more constructive reasons to follow your advice than saying "the Cabinet Office won't let you".

In the Foreign Office our digital strategy, policy and guidance is all published on our digital diplomacy website. This includes our vision for digital engagement and outreach into other spaces, as well as explaining how we benefit from a single web domain for all our official sites.

2. Don't say no

It's likely the people that want new websites are exactly the people you want to be working closely with - finding people who have ambitious ideas about how they might use an online presence should be a blessing for any digital team.

And maybe their definition of "website" is actually compatible with your vision of an integrated online presence.

So find out what it is they want to achieve. They might present a compelling case. You might be able to offer them something much better. But you need to work with them - saying no isn't a good way to start.

3. Demonstrate what you can offer

In the Foreign Office our web platform is home to 255 official sites in 40 languages. And we've delivered effective digital campaigns that mainly make use of online spaces that other people run. We've thought very carefully how to present the work of the office online. So we can usually demonstrate what can be done by showing what we've done already.

So for example, we have already thought about how to present foreign policy campaigns and big cross government campaigns, partnerships with NGOs, and policy engagement on subjects that aren't really campaigns, and content about the UK and one other country, and content about multilateral organisations. We have plenty of good precedents, and we have case studies, evaluation reports and a whole bunch of people we've worked closely with in the past to draw on.

4. Share your methods

However good your internal comms, it's likely that a lot of people in your organisation don't really understand what the digital team actually does.

In the Foreign Office we spend a lot of time explaining what we mean by "digital diplomacy". We know that staff don't understand what a digital campaign manager does in the same way that they understand what a press officer does.

So you may need to demonstrate what your team actually offers. For us that means talking through our digital diplomacy method (listen, publish, engage, evaluate), offering to run workshops for policy teams, and demonstrating what we've done for other teams or campaigns.

5. Offer to help them produce a wider digital strategy

Sometimes people think they need a website, but actually just need some help thinking through how they might use the web to meet their objectives. Sometimes a request for a new website might turn into an online marketing strategy, or a blog, or a set of digital partnerships.

As a digital team you should be able to offer them something better than they imagined. By combining their enthusiasm to do something and your expertise you'll be well on the way to doing brilliant work.

You can help them to work through this by developing a comprehensive digital strategy for their project. It doesn't need to be long. We use a set of 5 headings for our digital campaign strategies: Context, Objectives, Audience, Activity, Evaluation. 1 side of A4 is usually enough.

6. Be realistic about resources

The person making the request for a new website might not have considered the resources it takes to maintain it.

And you might find that by sharing all this expertise and good practice, you end up with a long list of tasks to deliver yourself. You might be very happy with this, but if you have other priorities you'll need to decide how you're going to deliver them all.

You don't need to take all the actions yourself. Some campaigns will need full time staff to deliver them - if you want to run an online community then you'll probably need to recruit a full time community manager. If you want to update web content every day, then you probably need to train some new devolved editors. If you're recommending personal digital outreach or blogs then you need to be clear about they time it will take for staff to carry this out.

Digital engagement often comes with no technology cost. We often run big ambitious digital campaigns in the Foreign Office without spending any money on technology. The main resource is usually staff time, and you shouldn't underestimate the amount of time it takes to deliver successful digital campaigns.

7. Set up a new website

If you're done all of this and you conclude that it's the right thing to do, then you should set up a new website. That's exactly what we did for our London Summit campaign, and it's kind of what we're about to do with our cross government Afghanistan content, although both sites make use of existing platforms and are part of wider engagement strategies.

So there you go. A 7 point plan to avoid your heart sinking at the moment that you ought to be delighted by a new opportunity to work on something brilliant. I'd be interested to hear what you do when you take the "new website" call.

Posted at 13:58 09 November 2009 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[7]

Digital diplomacy in Vietnam - guest blog from Rory Cellan-Jones

One of the most interesting things I do in my job is talk to people from other governments to compare notes about what we're trying to do online.

I was in Vietnam last week to take part in a digital diplomacy event organised by the Vietnam Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the British Embassy in Hanoi.

Online culture in Vietnam is clearly very different from the UK, but we have a lot in common too. I didn't know how our stories about crowd sourcing ideas and blogging ambassadors would go down in Hanoi. But it seemed to me that there was a real appetite to understand how changing online culture will impact the lives of citizens and the work of government.

Among the other speakers at the event was Rory Cellan-Jones and he kindly agreed to share his account of the trip as a guest blog:

Rory Cellan-Jones is the BBC's Technology Correspondent but is writing in a personal capacity. His views here do not represent those of the BBC, the British Embassy in Vietnam or the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

It was one of the most daunting audiences I've ever faced. They sat in formal suits ranged behind tables in the windowless conference room of a Hanoi hotel and as I began my presentation I was not quite sure just how I'd ended up there or whether anyone wanted to hear what I had to say. But a quick trick I've used on audiences ranging from schoolchildren to business leaders seemed to relax everyone.

I got out my mobile phone and took a picture of the audience encouraging them to wave at me and just a few minutes later I was able to show them that a photo featuring some of the cream of the Vietnamese civil service had been posted on the social networking site Twitter, where they were now waving to the world.

The event was the Digital Diplomacy Workshop organised by the British Embassy and Vietnam Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and I had been invited to come and speak. As I explained to my audience, I am neither a diplomat nor a politician, but a journalist - so in fact it's my job to be as undiplomatic as I can manage without getting into trouble.

But I did feel that we had something in common in that my world as a BBC reporter had been turned upside down by technology in recent years, and theirs was undergoing a similar revolution. My presentation was entitled "Learning To Talk", and my message was that in a world where just about anyone can get their voice heard there is no alternative to joining the global conversation.

When I started in broadcasting more than a quarter of a century ago, news editors thought they knew what was good for the millions who tuned in to our TV and radio news bulletins  - and those audiences had few alternatives but to sit back and accept what they were given. Similarly, politicians and diplomats in the analogue age were able to talk for hours, and the world had to listen, or at least fall asleep quietly.

Now the internet has given just about everyone the chance to talk back at journalists, politicians and diplomats - whether though blogs, through YouTube videos or most likely through social networks like Facebook and Twitter. The reaction of those who used to be in charge of the conversation was at first uncertain, but now mainstream journalists, governments, corporations, governments and diplomats are plunging in, writing blogs, recording YouTube videos, tweeting and Facebooking as if it were going out of fashion - which may indeed happen once something new comes along.

My message to my Hanoi audience was to embrace this new world - but be aware that there are new rules, and just because you are keen to talk it doesn't mean the world wants to listen. So I showed them one  blog from a big pharmaceuticals business which had attracted no comments at all - and a YouTube video from the same company where comments were disabled.  Not much of a conversation there.

And I warned them that they might find it difficult to walk the hazy line between the personal and the professional which is an essential feature of blogging and social networking.

When it came to question time, I was pleased to discover that the audience was keen to engage. They'd already shown that they were not shy about cutting through to the essentials, putting Stephen Hale from the UK Foreign Office on the spot about the cost of digital diplomacy.

But   it was that issue of personal and professional  which was the focus of many of the questions to me - and the other speakers. How could institutions trust individuals to blog - or tweet - without strict supervision so that they did not make up policy on their own? We  explained that this was an issue of trust - my employer expects me to be as impartial in my blogs or social networking activity as I am when broadcasting, and the Foreign Office trusts its ambassadors to behave as cautiously in the digital sphere as they do elsewhere.

Still, there was already widespread familiarity at the workshop with Facebook, Twitter and other aspects of modern web culture and everyone seemed keen to plunge into digital diplomacy - as long as it could be done within existing departmental budgets. There was, however,  an elephant in the room - the question of free speech in a society where the government has not been tolerant of bloggers and journalists considered to have acted against the interests of the state.  Before the workshop, someone had sent me on Twitter a link to an article in The Economist about the recent arrests of three people who had written critically online about Vietnam-China relations.

At various stages during the workshop, I attempted to steer our debate towards the free speech issue, stressing that once you plunge into the digital conversation you can expect to hear plenty of views you may find annoying, ridiculous, or just plain wrong. But I detected some reluctance, not just amongst the Vietnamese officials but also from two overseas online businesses working in Vietnam, to confront this issue.

That evening, I did get another chance. At a British Embassy reception, I found myself talking to the  spokeswoman for Vietnam's foreign ministry and, plucking up courage, I asked her why her country had chosen to arrest bloggers for expressing their views. Politely, but firmly, she corrected me, insisting that it was  not what they had written that had got the bloggers into trouble but their involvement in other public protests. Amidst the hubbub of the embassy party, I found it difficult be quite clear exactly what they had done  but one message did come through loud and clear - don't try and tell a country where memories of the war with the United States are  still fresh that it does not have the right to impose limits on what can and cannot be said.

To this first-time visitor, Vietnam appeared to be a country making rapid strides into the technological future - from the young people answering their mobile phones from speeding motor scooters, to civil servants working out how to use the web to promote their country's interests,  to the bloggers testing the limits of their government's patience. It will be fascinating to see just how Vietnam adapts to a world where everyone seems to want to be part of the conversation.

Update: If you speak Vietnamese, this blog also appears on the BBC Vietnamese website, and you can read Mark Kent's account of the day on his Vietnamese language blog.

Posted at 13:59 03 November 2009 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[1]

New look Foreign Office website

Posted at 14:17 26 October 2009 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[9]

Blog Action Day - climate change

I'm handing over my blog today to Charlotte Slayford, our digital campaign manager for climate change:

Today is blog action day. The theme? Climate change. As the digital campaign manager for climate change, there is no better time for me to share with Stephen’s blog readers what the Foreign Office is doing online for climate change. 

I’m responsible for bringing the offline (climate events, debates and issues) online. I help the Climate Change and Energy Group meet their climate change objectives online. I also work on the cross Whitehall campaign website Act on Copenhagen. 

On 26 June the Prime Minister launched the Road to Copenhagen manifesto. The same day we launched Act on Copenhagen. The site is run by the Road to Copenhagen teams from the Foreign Office, Department of Energy and Climate Change and Department of International Development. Its purpose? 

1) Profile the UK’s position on climate change

2) Follow the developments, positive or negative, towards negotiations

3) Explain how climate change is affecting the world domestically and internationally and offer examples of how things can change.

Because climate change is such a huge priority for every government department, it made sense for the information to be in one place. This is sounding a little like the London Summit I hear you thinking? Yes, we were influenced by the cross Whitehall collaborative working approach we took for the London Summit. 

But this campaign is very different. We’re not hosting the event. We are not the central point of the debate. Cop15 the host of the United Nations Climate Conference, is the ‘official’ website. We have a responsibility to provide an authoritative account of what the UK government is doing. We also sign post relevant debates and feature non government officials (in fact the more so the better!). We decided not to set up unique social media channels – instead we’d utilise all our existing followers, friends and subscribers through the DECC, DfID, FCO & No10 YouTube and Twitter channels. Twitter is one of our biggest referrers to the site.

The NGOs including TckTckTck, 10:10 and Oxfam do a fantastic job of lobbying individuals to take action.  Act on CO2 lets individuals know how they can personally take action to reduce their carbon footprint. Act on Copenhagen is the place to get the official policy in a digestible way. And we encourage people to show their support for an ambitious, effective and fair deal at Copenhagen with our back the bid campaign.

One of the lessons learned from the London Summit was to involve our international staff more in the actual campaign. Act on Copenhagen has been built so that our web editors around the world can update content – particularly useful for our global action channel.  

Some personal highlights:

1. Live streaming the joint press conference from David Miliband and Ed Miliband Copenhagen in the balance. It was pretty surreal to be present and know that it was simultaneously being live streamed to viewers across the world.

2. Ed Miliband dropping in to our web planning meeting to find out what we were cooking up.

3.Running a webchat with David Miliband for Guardian Online. It was fascinating to be in the room with the Foreign Secretary as he answered questions posted to him. It was a low key, low cost set up – but highly effective and attracted 5,000 unique views on the day.

4. Getting the PM to blog for Blog Action Day!

If you too are blogging for Blog Action Day, please pledge your support. You can keep up to date with activities as we head towards Copenhagen by adding us to your feeds.

Posted at 12:40 15 October 2009 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[1]

Digital diplomacy website

We all revert to the tools we know. So it's probably not very surprising that the Foreign Office Digital Diplomacy Group run a website about digital diplomacy.

The site describes what we do, why we do it, and how.

This is not new. The FCO has been using the web to share guidance and best practice with our network of devolved editors for ages. It has tended to sit on intranets or behind passwords, but that's not really in the spirit of the transparent approach we're trying take to our digital diplomacy work. So we've removed all the barriers to access, and made (pretty much) everything public.

The site is really a set of resources for FCO staff,  containing policies, guidance, case studies and help. But it's now also close to a statement of intent for digital diplomacy, describing our ambition as well as our method.

The content is aimed at people inside the Foreign Office network. Much of it is too specific to be useful for a wider audience. But if you're interested in reading the Foreign Office social media policy and guidance, or learning more about our agreement with devolved editors, or our approach to video, you can do it now on the digital diplomacy website.

(We'd welcome any feedback on the site, either by commenting on this blog or by sending an email to Debbie, our Head of Comms.)

Posted at 19:11 14 October 2009 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[1]

Geneva Conventions at 60

Earlier this year we marked the 60th anniversary of the Geneva Conventions by running a small digital engagement exercise in partnership with the British Red Cross.

We:
- worked with FCO policy officials and the BRC to identify how digital engagement might be useful to them
- used a joint Foreign Office/Red Cross event at the end of June to launch a 6 week online consultation
- promoted the exercise via existing Red Cross and Foreign Office communities

And we've just published a joint action plan on the future of the Geneva conventions, based on the comments we received.

I enjoyed the process. It seemed to lend itself to digital engagement because we had:
- policy teams who really wanted to hear what people thought to help shape future policy
- a set time period, defined by physical events
- a partner with similar objectives and reach into specialist communities
- existing online communities of interest

At the centre of the engagement was our very simple consultation site - a homepage, and 5 pages for comment on particular themes. We started building it with the ubiquitous Wordpress Commentariat theme, although we stripped it down and changed it so much to meet our emerging user experience requirements that you probably wouldn't know what theme we started with from looking at it. As others often say, Wordpress is pretty good for this kind of thing.

We generated 57 published comments, some way short of our 200 target. But we were after quality rather than quantity, and I think that's reflected in the comments we received.

Our plan to promote the site was based on plugging into existing already-engaged Foreign Office and Red Cross communities, rather than seeking out new or general-interest users. Our stats show that as well as the people who followed links in our corporate websites, blogs and tweets, 518 different people arrived at the site from targeted Red Cross and FCO newsletters. By targeting people in this way I think we managed to meet the policy team objective of generating useful comments from existing communities.

I think we met our basic digital diplomacy aim too - the useful application of techniques and tools to help meet policy objectives. And the only cost was a little bit of a lot of peoples time, from people who led on policy (Emma, Andy and Michael), online news (Claire), content (Alison), user interface (Rob), development (Colin), comments (Shane) press (Lucy), Red Cross online (Alex) and Red Cross press (Mark).

Posted at 14:41 02 October 2009 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[1]

New head of digital engagement for the Foreign Office

You might have spotted that the Foreign Office are advertising for a new Head of Digital Engagement.

It's a new job, created to take the digital diplomacy project on to the next level.

You might also have noticed that my own job title contains the words "Head", "Digital" and "Engagement" in a slightly different order. This is a different job - it's for our head of department. When the position is filled, it could change the dynamic of the team I work in. And my responsibilities (and job title) might have to change too. A lot will depend on who we recruit.

It's a great job. If you've done brilliant work elsewhere, and you're excited by the challenge of doing things that haven't really been done before, then you should apply.

Posted at 08:19 29 September 2009 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[2]

Digital diplomacy campaigns - what are they then?

We've changed the way we describe our work on the web in the Foreign Office. We used to mostly talk about managing websites. Now we mostly talk about running digital diplomacy campaigns.

The approach is significantly different. Before, we might have worked with policy teams to make sure we presented their work in an clear, engaging and useful way. Now we ask policy teams what they're trying to achieve, and then help them to make use of online culture and tools to solve their policy problems.

Of course, we do still manage websites (255 of them in 40 languages), but increasingly we are focusing of our work around high priority foreign policy issues, rather than managing a set of tools.

We have a campaign methodolgy (Listen, Publish, Engage, Evaluate) that we think we can apply to any problem. But the digital activity that we suggest can vary hugely depending on what it is we're trying to do.

So we run some big public-facing influencing campaigns, which might involve setting up new official online spaces, or work in partnership with others to reach broad audiences. But we also run less publically-visible engagement with small target audiences which involve us helping diplomats to collaborate with, or influence specific groups.

Some of our campaigns have a natural home on our official websites. Some of them are entirely delivered elsewhere.

To do all this we've recruited digital campaign managers who have a slightly different set of skills to typical web staff. We wanted campaign managers who could really get stuck into policy issues, and design and lead digital campaigns.

That's the theory. But it'll make more sense if I describe some of the problems we're currently trying to solve, and the campaigns we're working on to solve them. That's what I'll do in the next few posts.

Posted at 16:12 25 September 2009 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[3]

What does government 2.0 mean to you?

I was really interested to read John Duncan's contribution to the Reuters Great Debate: What Does Government 2.0 Mean To You?

John is a something of a pioneer in the Foreign Office, using the tools of digital engagement to help him do his job, so he speaks from personal experience about technology and diplomacy. And having "worked on mainframes in the 1970s" and having "once jammed an IBM mainframe in a perpetual loop" he's we'll placed to comment on changing technology, as well as its impact on government communication.

If net-based communication is changing the way we all access information and opinion, the impact on diplomacy and government affairs may well be equally profound.

And on why the social web creates particular opportunities for diplomats and public diplomacy:

The internet allows the creation of a new world-wide “us” of shared interests and values. Social media networks and the blogosphere provide new tools to speak directly to [a] wider community of actors [...] going beyond the confines of traditional state-to-state interface, to test and be challenged on our ideas in a dialogue and sometimes in a partnership with civil society.

He has an interesting take on the value of diplomats engaging with online communities to market ideas:

Opinion formers act as the multipliers. Having a well argued case is seldom enough by itself [...] Diplomats need the opinion formers as the people who give the “third-party endorsement” that reinforces our message; a classic marketing technique to respond to a trust deficit.

 And on the niche communities of interest that make up his target audience:

They comprise a wide range of people from think tanks to journalists, students, to members of the public who care about the issues and are often willing to become involved with other decision makers. They offer direct access to the community that may provide third-party endorsement and at its best the creation of a constituency for change.

John is still a relatively rare example of a government official who actively participates in the social web in an official capacity. He is conscious of the perceived (and real) risks of public participation but is a powerful advocate for the opportunities:  

For government officials, engagement with this new virtual community is a challenge. It is unfamiliar and fraught with the risk of making mistakes. But there are also opportunities to multiply the effect of what we are already trying to do [...] Officials and governments should, and many are, seizing the opportunity.

Read the full article on the Reuters Great Debate: What Does Government 2.0 Mean To You?

You can also read Johns' blog and follow him on Twitter.

Posted at 09:04 03 September 2009 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[0]

Help us to make our blogs better

We're doing a some work to evaluate the impact of Foreign Office blogs.

We want to know what our readers like and dislike about our blogs, what you’d like to see diplomats writing about, and how you respond to the tone and style of our current bloggers.

I'd be really grateful if you'd take a few minutes to complete our short survey: 5 minute survey

I'll publish our findings - including the results of the survey - here.

Posted at 16:47 01 September 2009 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[0]

How to train a digital diplomat

We have digital diplomacy staff based in Washington, Singapore and New Delhi, as well as London. It's rare that we're all physically in the same place, but we were all in London last week for our annual bout of knowledge sharing, training and brainstorming.

Because it's so rare that we're all together, we try to pack a lot in when we do meet, sharing experiences from the last year and planning what's next. It's exhausting, but it's my favourite week of the year.

We spent a lot of the week doing and talking about training. We currently run 3 training courses for Foreign Office staff: 2 aimed at people who publish web content (which are really about how to use our content management tools), and a new course about digital campaigning.

They're all important, but it's the last one that I'm most interested in. At the moment we manage several campaigns out of our London based team. But we want people around our network to deliver digital diplomacy. There are 16,000 staff in the Foreign Office network, in 150 countries. If we're going to make the the most of digital diplomacy opportunities, we have to spread the word.

Our new digital campaigns course aims to do just that. It is aimed anyone who will be responsible for digital campaigns (which tends to be policy teams rather than web editors).

So how do you train people to embrace digital diplomacy? We try to cover a bit of theory (short), a workshop (using a real example), some case studies (recent things we've actually done), some practical help, and space for discussion.

I think that the key to the success of the course is to keep it rooted in the real world, avoiding hypothetical scenarios. We don't want to run an academic course on the theory of digital engagement - others can do that. We want the people we train to go back to their jobs and begin delivering practical digital diplomacy activity.

In practice this means using:

• real case studies (things we have actually done, or even better, digital diplomats talking about their work)
• real scenarios (so our workshop is introduced by a policy officer with a problem that needs solving, with the aim of developing real working solutions that the participants can then go and actually implement)

Having spent a week participating in expertly run sessions, I know there are lots different ways to share knowledge. I'm interested in finding the best ways to remove the novelty from digital engagement, so that the Foreign Office can make the most of opportunities to use digital diplomacy methods and tools. It will start with our brilliant digital diplomacy staff and our digital champions, but if we're successful, we'll spread the word much wider. 

Posted at 17:23 29 July 2009 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[2]

Twitter guidance and the Foreign Office

It's been fascinating to watch the UK government Twitter guidance story play out in the press.

"Official publishes thorough guidance document" doesn't seem like a story that should attract popular attention. Nor does the subject - corporate Twitter channels - really represent new or novel opportunities for government digital engagement.

We published a Views on News blog about the evolution of the Foreign Office approach to Twitter so I won't repeat what we said there. If you're interested in how the Foreign Office is using Twitter now, you can follow us on one of our channels.

Corporate Twitter channels are fine, but I think it's more interesting to see how individuals (like John Duncan) are embracing the medium for their own benefit, using Twitter to engage in conversations with niche communities of interest.

Posted at 10:59 29 July 2009 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[4]

An interview with digital diplomat, episode II

Mark Kent is the British Ambassador to Vietnam. He is also a blogger (in Vietnamese), and an avid web user. 

He was in London this week, so I took the chance to ask him a few questions. He talks about his blog, getting Dizzee Rascal to answer questions from the Vietnamese public, and the role of digital diplomacy.

Transcript

My role 

Mark Kent: I'm the Ambassador to Vietnam. The context of our relationship with Vietnam it's developing very quickly. The  UK hasn't traditionally been a major partner with Vietnam, so what I'm trying to do is get the message out about where we can cooperate with Vietnam. For example, in the area of education bringing more Vietnamese students to the UK, trade and investment, and international issues - Vietnam is on the Security Council and is a major player in ASEAN.

My blog

It's part of engaging - especially with a younger generation in Vietnam who are very technologically literate. Something like 65% of the population are under 30 and the blogging scene there is very active. So it helps getting some of my messages across, but also getting feedback from them about the kind of issues that they're interested in, climate change for example something that's been really high on the agenda there.

Yoosk

We were really lucky in meeting up with Yoosk because Tim Hood who runs Yoosk is actually based in Vietnam. And the Yoosk project is about promoting interaction between celebrities, well known people, and the general population who send in comments and questions. So we ran a trial of that in Vietnam with a range of people involved from Dizzee Rascal to Mark Lynas on climate change, to celebrity footballers from the premier league.

Using the web

I've become very avid as my wife would point out to me,  looking at other blogs, both in Vietnamese, from other government and FCO bloggers, and internationally. In fact over time my own reading habits have changed so that a more of what I read is direct off the net rather then through publications or magazines and newspapers.

Finding the time

You can do a lot of this in down time, whether it's in an airport, in the back of the car, or just when I come home in the evening when  I'm perhaps having a beer, writing down some of the main thoughts from the day. So it doesn't take a lot of time I've found.

Reaction

First of all it's a reaction of surprise and novelty, because they're not used to ambassadors doing it. But there's been an underlying interest which has carried on. Part of the challenge for me is to ensure that the material on the blog is relevant, of interest, and sometimes slightly counter intuitive. So we've mixed it up quite a lot from having for example Sir Alex Ferguson and David Miliband on there to having videos of Bill Rammell talking about climate change and the effect that's likely to have in Vietnam.

Other tools

To get the full value out of my blog I need to ensure that it's promoted through more traditional outlets such as press conferences, contact with the press, articles etc. I think there will come a point where increasingly digital diplomacy is becoming traditional diplomacy. We have to move with the times and make the most of the tools that we've got at our disposal.

Posted at 01:46 10 July 2009 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[3]

G2G, a social experiment, and why I like Yammer

I might have been part of a ethnomethodological study last week. I was part of a panel at the Gov2Gov event at Canada House, talking with a flock of geeks about how social media is changing society, government and international relations.

It was a good event with lots of interesting people in the room, well organised and run by Dominic Campbell, Lovisa Williams, and Chris Heuer.

It was the hashtag (#g2g) that made me feel a bit like I was part of an experiment. Participants were encouraged to use the hashtag to talk about the event online before, after, and particularly during the event, and the live tweets were projected onto a huge screen in the room during the discussions.

But from where I was sitting, I couldn't see the live coverage. So as I spoke I was aware that some of the audience were providing live commentary to the web, and some were following the commentary as it was projected behind me, rather than my wise words as I spoke.

Now I reckon that speaking to a room full of people can be difficult enough. But people being amusing and clever in real time - literally behind your back - could make a man paranoid.

Reading them now, the tweets from the event make unremarkable reading. But the experience made me think about the difference between what people say, and what people say on the social web.

There's no doubt that some tools can embolden the author. That's almost certainly true of Twitter, particularly if the author posts anonymously (or without it being clearly apparent who the author is).

It's also made me think about when digital can augment physical engagement (by queuing questions, rebroadcasting, or offering an alternative opinion in this case), when it is just a fun sideshow, and when the choice of digital tools could alienate a wider audience.

For the record, I am not active on Twitter. I decided that the always-on, 10-opinions-a-day nature of Twitter suits my objectives and my personality less well than other tools. I think the macro blog suits me better than the micro.

I do realise that we may already have passed the point at which Twitter is an essential business (as well as personal) tool. I might already be missing out on conversations that aren't taking place anywhere else. But for the moment I use search.twitter more than I use www.twitter. I'm a Twitter lurker. I keep my micro-thoughts to myself.

Having said that, I do like to micro-blog. We're using Yammer in the Foreign Office, and I'm loving it. Private micro-blogging tools like Yammer seem to me to be a perfect tool for medium sized (and distributed) networks like Digital Diplomacy Group. Email is no good for informal knowledge sharing; Yammer seems to solve a problem we didn't realise we had.

One of the things I like about Yammer, is that it is all clearly attributed. So it fits with the Foreign Office model for digital engagement, in which we always try to be open and transparent, and explicitly clear about who is talking.

Attribution is often less clear on Twitter. People don't always say who they are (and sometimes they appear to, but aren't). That's why I'm more excited about John Duncan's use of Twitter - which is clearly attributed and seems to be providing useful opportunities for real engagement - than I am by our corporate channels, which we largely use to broadcast (even though I know that a corporate Twitter channel is unlikely to heckle me as I speak).

Posted at 12:49 30 June 2009 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[1]

An interview with a real digital diplomat

If our digital diplomacy project is to really succeed, we need to demonstrate that diplomats and policy officials can use the tools of digital engagement to help deliver foreign policy objectives. 

We won't have succeeded if all we achieve is the clever integration of the latest social media tools into nice looking web content.

That's why I often cite John Duncan as our best example of digital diplomacy in action. John is the UK Ambassador for Multilateral Arms Control and Disarmament, and he uses digital engagement tools to help him do his job. He blogs (and microblogs) about his work, and he is an active social media consumer.

John has been in London this week, to take part in an Arms Trade Treaty event. I took the opportunity to ask him about his experiences as a digital diplomat. Here's the video:

Transcript: 

Stephen Hale: I am here in King Charles Street with John Duncan. He has agreed to talk to me about being a digital diplomat. John is an an ambassador. He does a serious job. But he writes a blog. He updates his Twitter followers using his iPhone, and I want to find out why.

Caption: What do you do? 

John Duncan:  I'm the UK Ambassador for Multilateral Arms Control and Disarmament, based in Geneva. But it's roving ambassador role so I work right across the world from Dublin to Wellington to New York. And so I've used digital diplomacy as an addition to what we do in a traditional sense and found it to be a real multiplier.

Caption: Does this replace traditional diplomacy?

JD: Well I think that there are things that we would do normally. I'll give you an example. In multilateral diplomacy there's a lot of coffee shop diplomacy, where people will go and ask: "what's the UK position?" and they want it quietly, not in the public speeches that may last 10 or 20 minutes, they want a quick snapshot. And what I've used the blog for is to actually have that conversation virtually. So people have become used to going to the blog to find out what is a snapshot of the UK view in the way that we might have a coffee shop conversation. So it's replacing something that we actually do, and I probably have less coffee shop conversations as a result, but I think that's quite productive.

Caption: Do diplomats read blogs?

JD: I think now people are much more familiar with this sort of technology. It's true that there are some traditionalists who would still prefer to have that coffee shop conversation. But I don't think it replaces the working lunch longer conversation. It's a very quick snapshot: what is the UK thinking on this particular issue?

Caption: Who reads your blog?

JD: Well it's always difficult to get a feel for that. It's interesting that it's being used as a public information tool by people rather than for comments. There are the cognoscenti who come in and ask very detailed and complex questions. But most of the readers I'm aware of are colleagues, both in the Foreign Office but also in multilateral communities. I'm aware that many delegations from Iran to Ireland are reading it regularly. And if I get something wrong they will pick it up and say "you didn't get that right" so they are using it as a public information tool.

Caption: Do you read other blogs?

JD: Well I certainly read the comments, although I said there aren't that many - its much more a push factor rather than a pull factor. And yes I do read other blogs and I've used Twitter as a way of finding through into people who are saying interesting things on the issues that I'm following professionally.

Caption: Is Twitter appropriate for diplomacy?

JD: Well it's a very new tool and I think it's finding it's own way. There are people who seem to spend their time explaining what they're doing like "I'm stuck in a lift". I'm not sure that's a particularly useful use of the medium. What I've used it for is as a marketing tool for the blog and it's been spectacularly effective in terms of going into the press. I've had press interviews as a direct result of that, I've had media comment which is quoting Twitter, worldwide. So as a media tool and a marketing tool for the blog, then yes I think it is effective.

Caption: How do you find the time?

JD: Well I think we all have moments of the day when we have down time. It can be when you're in the car or on the train. Or even when I'm in my meetings or listening to speeches - of course many of these are written and I can read a speech in 5 minutes and it probably takes 20 to speak. And then what am I doing? Well I can use that time. I can go on to my laptop or the iPhone and find out what other people are saying and also comment on the issues that interest us. So I'm using the down time more productively than I could do otherwise.

Caption: How can we help others do this?

JD: Well I think we have presumed competence as ambassadors, but I think that we do need to get some training on this. I'm quite prepared to take risks and explore this with the digital diplomacy team. But I'm very conscious that it's easy to make mistakes, particularly easy to make mistakes if one is using Twitter because it's much shorter and snappier. And you have to preserve that authority of an ambassador, you can't undermine it. So I think some training on mistakes and things to do and how to actually use this new medium in a productive way, I think that's the best thing the Foreign Office can do.

Posted at 13:09 17 June 2009 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[1]