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Simona Prete

Head of Communications, British Embassy to the Holy See

Part of Digital Diplomacy

11th November 2015 London, UK

When digital meets the real world

A tweetup is where people who are in contact through Twitter meet in person and bring the conversation offline, an example of where the digital and real world come together.

Last year, our Embassy was included in the Foreign Office’s innovative project to create maps of Twitter followers. As a digital specialist, I was thrilled to visually locate @UKinHolySee followers, identify those who were particularly influential, and where online communities (and therefore a conversation) existed.

Overall, the map allowed us to better understand the various groups of followers and the online influencers. A large light-purple cluster was showing that an important part of our audience was based in the UK.

But how to use the visual data in practice? A year on, Nigel Baker, British Ambassador to the Holy See and regular blogger, took up the challenge and ran a tweetup in London to engage with some of our most influential UK followers.

The topic chosen was: “Vatican communication under Pope Francis, and digital diplomacy”, and each participant brought to the table own views and perspectives as an Ambassador, a journalist, a professional communicator, a Catholic or a policy analyst.

This is where we can bring the digital world into our interpersonal relationships and diplomacy effort. The tweetup was not only a valuable discussion on a topic which is at the heart of Embassy’s work, but also a way to meet and engage personally with our Twitter followers, building connections beyond the 140 characters dimension.

Although not necessarily directly linked to the tweetup, the Embassy’s Twitter account passed 8,000 followers, and the overall engagement rate of those who had attended the tweetup raised significantly. We have also seen that the digital campaigns we ran after the tweetup attracted more attention. Photoquotes of the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta were our top media tweets this year, and that the hashtag created to mark the 5th anniversary of the Papal visit to the UK reached over 100,000 accounts.

Christian Turner, British High Commissioner to Kenya, recently blogged: “Twitter: To engage or not to engage”. Building digital into a real work environment: that is another reason to answer “yes!”

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