Stephen Hale

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]

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]