Stephen Hale

An event: bringing digital diplomacy home

We hosted a digital diplomacy event in King Charles Street today: an invited audience, a panel of digital diplomats including John Duncan, Mark Kent, Philip Barclay, Allex Ellis, David Warren and me, and Rory Cellan Jones chairing.

Others have already written about it elsewhere - and you can watch clips on our Bringing Foreign Policy Home rolling record - so I won't describe it here.

I really like the idea of running physical events for digital champions and bloggers. Bloggers often welcome the opportunity to move from the virtual to the physical. And of course, if you invite a load of bloggers to an event, you do so in the knowledge that they are likely to blog about it soon afterwards. So the event doesn't really feel over when people leave the room.

One of the lessons we've learned during the last 2 years, is that digital engagement has to happen in almost-real-time if it's going to have any impact. But it's a lesson I really didn't need to share today. If our guests were allowed to bring mobile devices into the Foreign Office building, I'm sure the event would have been covered in actual-real-time. As it was, Rory posted an audio blog as soon as he got his phone back, and tweets and blogs appeared soon after.

I hope the people there got something out of it. Personally it was just great for me to see so many of our global bloggers in the same place, sharing their contrasting experiences. But I'm also aware that we've by no means mastered digital diplomacy, and we need to listen to and learn from others. So it was good to hear what people outside the Foreign Office network make of what we're trying to do.

Some other reflections:

• Rory Cellan Jones
• Tony Curzon Price
• Simon Dickson
• Ian Brown
• John Duncan

Posted at 23:33 25 March 2009 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[0]

Why would a diplomat blog - some theory and the future

Back to blogs, and why diplomats should use them.

A large part of what we do offline in the Foreign Office is engage and influence audiences in support of UK foreign policy goals.  Diplomacy is not just about states talking to states. And often the issues we work on (like climate change or counter terrorism) can't be solved by 1 state talking to another.

The internet provides us with the means to engage and influence audiences all around the world. And blogs are 1 tool that diplomats can use to talk informally with their target audience about specific foreign policy issues.

The culture of blogging helps us to talk about our work in new ways. We don't want to use blogs to make policy announcements or deliver official messages (we have other online places to do that). But blogs do allow us to:

• open up issues for wider discussion when we don't necessarily have all the answers
• add depth, context and a personal angle to the issues we're working on
• engage in conversations that we know are taking place elsewhere on the web
  

So that's the theory.

I think that our blogs are delivering some of the above now. But here are some of the things we'll be prioritising in the next few months to use our blogs better:

1. Encourage a wider range of voices on our blogs. Because we want to use blogs to talk about our work in different ways, and with different styles and tones of voice.

2. More niche blogs, with well defined objectives, linked to specific projects or campaigns. Because the web is about niches, and it's within niches that blogs can have real value. We want our bloggers to reach their particular target audiences (rather than to generate general-interest traffic).

3. Blogs that are integrated into active online debates. Because we're more likely to engage in a way that is useful to us on issues that people are already talking about online.

4. More blogs in languages other than English. Because if we want to influence local audiences, it makes sense to do it in the language they speak.

The other thing we need to do of course, is learn from others. So I'd be interested to hear what you think, particularly if you think there should be a 5th or 6th priority that we've missed.

Posted at 14:58 19 November 2008 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[4]