Digital diplomacy in the Middle East and North Africa

I’ve been the Digital Communications Manager for the Middle East and North Africa for the last 21 months and today is my last day. I wanted to reflect on our many digital diplomacy successes from the region and share some of my personal highlights.

I joined the team at the height of the Arab Spring in July 2011 – the governments of Tunisia and Egypt had already fallen and Gaddafi was overthrown in Libya a month later. The crisis in Syria is still on going and next week, the UK is co-chairing the Friends of Yemen meeting at the FCO in London where we hope to make progress on political transition.

Many people say that social media played a role in communications that aided the Arab Spring revolutions. As one Egyptian activist put so well: “we used Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate and YouTube to tell the world.”

The Arab Spring really did put the spotlight on the Middle East and made the rest of the world take a fresh look at the region. This has given us the opportunity to better connect with people in the Middle East through our digital channels and share information about UK foreign policy. For example, seven of our Ambassadors in the Middle East are on Twitter, as is our Arabic spokesperson and most recently FCO Minister for the Middle East, Alistair Burt.

Innovative ideas

We’ve tried to take it one step further in the Middle East and act as digital trailblazers for our other posts across the world.

My highlights have included: Our Embassy in Beirut took part in the FCO’s first ever Google+ hangout on the impact of Syrian refugees on Lebanon; Tel Aviv covered the annual Life Sciences Council via a live blog on their website; Kuwait documented the Emir’s State Visit to the UK on their Instagram channel; Dubai created our 7 questions for 7 Ambassadors campaign in Arabic to attract more people from the region to our websites and social media channels; and we worked with Al Jazeera Talk to promote the London Cyber Conference. This is to name but a few.

We’ve also produced a stream of blogs from our diplomats in the region talking about their work, hosted social media Q&A’s and networking events to meet online communities and influential bloggers. I’ve organised successful live Twitter Q&A’s with our Minister for the Middle East, Alistair Burt on Syria and the Arms Trade Treaty and we’re planning lots more.

We’ve also had to deal with our fair share of crises including in Iran, Gaza and most recently in Algeria. We’ve now integrated social media into our crisis communications and the team’s social media monitoring crisis reports are highly regarded in the FCO.

Iran

Much of my work has been focussed on co-managing our Farsi digital engagement team, working closely with the Iran policy team. We meet every week to discuss new ideas and upcoming events and then how we might capitalise on these through our UK for Iranians Farsi/English digital channels.

We launched our new website ‘UK for Iranians’ this time last year to reach out to Iranians, explaining, discussing and engaging with them on UK policy. Since then, we’ve grown from strength to strength including our coverage in pictures of the Olympics which attracted our largest ever audience, our ‘prezis’ against the death penalty in Iran, Facebook Q&A on the nuclear sanctions issue and our Farsi videos addressing a variety of topics from the cultural to the political.

I think it’s fair to say that the Iran team have been a model of how to do effective digital communications with distinct policy objectives in mind.

Digital conferences

I’ve been lucky enough to have been involved in two digital conferences – in Morocco and Lebanon where we’ve brought together our digital officers in the region to reflect on our campaigns and look for new opportunities. It’s been an excellent forum for sharing ideas and best practice across the network, demonstrating digital evaluation tools for our campaigns and taking part in crisis simulation exercises.

My highlight was the Embassy-organised tweet up with a group of young professionals who were keen to talk about how the FCO uses its digital channels and it gave us a chance to engage directly with young Lebanese opinion formers.

There’s so much more I wanted to include but lastly, I should add that I had little experience of digital communications when I arrived (I came from a FCO policy background) but I took this job because ultimately I wanted to challenge myself and learn a new skill. One which I now know will become increasingly important as the FCO moves further towards digital comms.

So overall how have I approached it?

My mantra to any policy team I’ve worked with over the last year and a half is when thinking of doing effective digital communications, you need to start with your policy objective i.e. what are you trying to achieve. Then think about how digital comms can help you deliver it.

If you are a Civil Servant, you can apply for Pippa’s job via the Civil Service Jobs website.