6th February 2017 Skopje, North Macedonia
Like all British Ambassadors, I was encouraged (slight diplomatic euphemism) by the Foreign & Commonwealth Office to get active on Twitter when I came to Skopje. TBH, as twitterati say, I had anyway been thinking of jumping in to the frenzied waters of social media. So I readily bought the FCO’s argument that it was […]
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16th September 2016 Kolkata, India
It is a cracking first line for a novel: The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.* As a thought – that the past is somewhere different – the line sounds very appealing. The past is distant from us and we can’t access it immediately. But the idea is nonsense, of course, […]
9th June 2016 London, UK
As the Foreign Office’s Social Media Manager I spend much of my time distilling the intentionally nuanced and traditionally multilayered world of diplomacy into something engaging and consumable. Case in point: The Foreign Office’s (FCO) annual flagship Human Rights and Democracy Report comprises around 50 pages of expert analysis of the issues the world and […]
26th February 2016 London, England
It is pretty rare these days for a British Ambassador or equivalent not to engage in social media – something that sets us apart from the vast majority of other countries’ emissaries (with notable exceptions). But at a time when diplomacy has progressively less to do with government to government (G2G) interaction and more to […]
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29th September 2015
Digital Diplomacy is a key part of our work in the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office. We are encouraged to use social media and become closer to our audiences, to engage with and listen to them – it helps us reach a much wider range of stakeholders than through traditional methods of diplomacy. I started […]
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2nd September 2014 London, UK
Dr Richard Smith reveals an exciting new Twitter project by the FCO Historians In 1914 Sir Francis Bertie held the plum posting in the British Diplomatic Service—the ambassadorship to Paris. Not only did it carry a yearly salary of £11,500 (the Foreign Secretary was paid just £5,000) but the Ambassador also got to live at […]
29th August 2014 London, UK
Maps of the online landscape can provide fascinating insights into how they are connected and how they interact. In my last blog I looked at a few of our Ambassadors’ accounts and found some of the communities that existed amongst their followers. This blog looks at the way maps of the online conversation can help […]
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15th August 2014 London, UK
On the first floor of the Foreign Office main building, civil servants used to pull down maps from a burr walnut cabinet to pore over them and discuss the latest news from our embassies. Whilst the original maps have long ago been shipped off to The National Archives, the Foreign Office’s love of a good […]
28th May 2014
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office and our global diplomatic network lead the way in the development of digital diplomacy (or “Twiplomacy” as it is sometimes called: Twitter + Diplomacy). Some people, retired diplomats amongst them, have been critical of “tweeting ambassadors”. Yet our experience has been a positive one. Whether we like it or not, we […]
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17th April 2014 Washington DC, USA
I’ve been getting into Twitter in the last couple of weeks. I know I’m only five years later than everyone else, but I’m loving the new insights and the quirkiness of it all. Two things were “trending” on my Twitter timeline recently that, seemingly unrelated, made me reflect on the incentives shaping donor effectiveness. The […]
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