Strategic or Scary? Public Diplomacy Commission Cut

December 26, 2011 by

Cross-cutting a treeAfter Tripoli fell to anti-Gaddafi forces last August, I remembered a particularly clairvoyant blog post/radio interview I ran across a couple of months earlier. The blog post/radio interview gave a spot on analysis of how information could be used to empower Libyans to take back their own country.

When I went back to the blog to find out if its author had any new predictions, I found out the Mountain Runner blog was on hiatus because its author had recently become executive director of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy (ACPD). I was relieved to learn somebody was at the helm who understood social media’s power to create communications swarms and was presumably on top of implications for foreign publics’ support of U.S. culture, values, policies, and interests.

To my shock and surprise, however, I ran across a tweet and blog post just before Christmas indicating the ACPD was being abolished after 63 years of service. Apparently, due to efforts to balance the federal budget, the ACPD was not reauthorized by Congress and ceased operations on Dec. 16, 2011. So what happened to its visionary executive director? Matt Armstrong was laid off just a little over a week before Christmas.

Ho ho ho!!!

If Congress’s actions really are guided by budget-cutting zeal versus a strategic reorganization of U.S. public diplomacy and strategic communications initiatives (as far as I can find out, the new Integrated Strategic Counterterrorism Communications Initiative has nothing to do with this), we’re in trouble as a country. Today, more than ever people unfriendly to U.S. culture, values, policies, and interests have the potential to take control of the political dialogue across geographic boundaries. All they need is passion, Internet or mobile connectivity, and social media savvy to spread their messages and potentially fuel mass collaboration in instigating change (or wreaking havoc as the case may be).

I, for one, would sleep a lot better knowing Congress had a team advising it on making sure U.S. Government activities that intend to understand, inform, and influence foreign publics break free of conventional wisdom, recognize discontinuity, and react to change.  Until we discover some sort of grand strategy behind Congress’s move, however, we’re left to find comfort in the fact the U.S. Department of State is abandoning its Cold War mindset only now.

Do you think cutting the ACPD was a good cost-cutting measure? Please feel free to challenge my analysis in the comments section.

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Did No Social Media Policy Lead to Racist Remarks?

December 12, 2011 by

West Indian Day Parade 2011A dozen or more New York City Police Department (NYPD) officers could get dooced for posting offensive comments on Facebook calling West Indian Day parade-goers in Brooklyn “savages,” “filth,” and “animals.” (Dooced, in case you don’t know, means fired from one’s job as a result of one’s actions on the Internet.)

The New York Times reported last week at least 20 comments maligning parade-goers on a “No More West Indian Day Detail” Facebook page were from NYPD officers. The page, dedicated to the unpleasantness of working during the annual event, disappeared from public view just days after a defence lawyer for a man arrested during the parade found it, but not before the attorney saved all the data.

Almost as disturbing as the hateful speech officers allegedly used is the fact the NYPD may not have an official social media policy. New York Radio Station WNYC 93.9 FM reported Paul Browne, spokesman for the NYPD, could not confirm one existed.

Huh!

You could understand that if we were talking about some rural community but the NYPD? Come on!

While it may be obvious to some that you shouldn’t post anything anywhere online you wouldn’t want your grandmother, boss, or religious leader to read, it isn’t obvious to everyone. Besides spelling out proper employee conduct, a social media policy is a must for empowering your employees to excel in social media on behalf of your institution.

Kim Stephens, writer of the idisaster 2.0 blog, wrote an extremely informative post I could not begin to improve upon on the 36 Items to include in Government Social Media policies. My advice to the NYPD (and any other government entity) is to check out her post and develop one!

 

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Video Clip of the Month: Teenager’s Snipe Goes Viral

December 2, 2011 by

A teenager’s snarky, potty-mouthed tweet about Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback contains important Web 2.0 lessons for us all:

  1. Anything you write on social media, no matter how small your audience, has the potential to go viral.
  2. Trying to control your message behind the scenes is not only futile, it could backfire in a big way.

Check out the CNN video below, my pick for December 2011 video clip of the month, on the latest most-famous tweet in the United States. To recap, Emma Sullivan, an 18-year-old high school student, sent a tweet to her friends (she had around 60 Twitter followers at the time) talking trash about meeting Brownback at a school-sponsored Kansas Youth in Government trip to Topeka.  Her tweet indicated she gave Brownback a piece of her mind, but she actually was just in the audience and didn’t personally meet him. An over zealous aide to Brownback, however, spotted the tweet and had Sullivan’s principal contacted to order Sullivan to write the governor an apology.

Then Sullivan’s older sister called the press, Brownback ended up apologizing to Emma for the “over-reaction” of his staff, and the principal dropped the whole thing. Now Sullivan has almost 16,000 Twitter followers, and Brownback has gone from an object of fun for a few teens to a case study in poor Web 2.0 communications practices.

Brownback’s staff members should never have tried to intimidate an online critic (remember free speech), especially over a tweet virtually no one saw. They could easily have ignored the tweet or engaged with Sullivan on Twitter, acknowledging her right to complain, asking for clarity on her position, and assessing what they could do to make her feel better about her experience. As I wrote in September, engaging with online critics can be an opportunity to build goodwill.

Brownback had a golden opportunity to show he is a class act. Instead, he garnered national derision and comparisons to the beyond-paranoid autocratic rulers of Thailand. He learned the hard way Web 2.0 means, as the ironically geographically relevant saying goes, we are not in Kansas anymore.

Enjoy the CNN video below!

Your turn? What do you think Brownback’s staff should have done?

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Thanksgiving Message: Gratitude, Love & Blue Keys

November 24, 2011 by

“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend.”
—Melody Beattie

Even in tough times like these, we all can count our blessings on Thanksgiving. We can be thankful for our family, the accident of our birth in a nation with abundant food and water, and a roof over our head. We also can be thankful we are not one of the millions of people around the world (nearly 44 million in 2010) forced to flee their homes as a result of armed conflict, generalized violence, or human rights violations.

What can these vulnerable people be thankful for?

You!

Yes, a minuscule portion of the taxes you and citizens of other donor countries pay supports the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which protects, houses, feeds, educates, and opens the door to a new life for refugees and people who have been displaced within their own countries. But for just $5 (less than what you might pay for lunch), you can also join the Blue Key Campaign and show your support for the world’s most vulnerable people and the UNHCR staffers who work tirelessly to safeguard their rights and well-being.

For your $5 donation, you get a Blue Key pin or pendant symbolizing our power to help them open the door to a new home and a new future.

I joined the Blue Key Campaign after learning more about it from my friend Shonali Burke who is leading an effort to organize bloggers on behalf of USA for UNHCR (a U.S.-based 501(c)(3) that raises awareness and funds for the Geneva-based UNHCR). She’s asking bloggers to write posts like this one, wear their Blue Key to show their support, spread the word on Facebook and Twitter (using the #bluekey hashtag), and ask everyone they know in the United States to get their own Blue Key for $5.

Getting back to the subject of Thanksgiving…

When the pastor of our church asked my 4-year-old daughter last Sunday what she is thankful for, she answered, “my dog.” She later explained she is thankful loving people rescued him, so we could have him to love. (You can see our dog, a former stray we obtained from Beagle Rescue of Southern Maryland, in the photo above sporting two Blue Keys.)

You can only imagine the depth of gratitude another 4-year-old child would feel for the loving people who helped rescue her mommy or daddy, so she could have them to love.

Just $5 is such a trivial price to pay to open the door to a new life. So spread the gratitude. Share the love. Get your key right away, and ask those at your Thanksgiving table to do the same!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Your turn! Do you have any special Thanksgiving stories or thoughts about the Blue Key Campaign?

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AP vs. Social Media: For Whom the Pepper Spray Tolls

November 19, 2011 by

Chilling video images surfaced online today showing a campus police officer at the University of California, Davis, calmly pepper spraying the faces of Occupy Wall Street protesters seated quietly in a line with their arms interlocked. The images, captured with cellphones by several onlookers, quickly spread virally across the Internet.

As unsettling as the video images are, the keyword for me in the news event is onlookers plural.

It reminded me of the ridiculous reprimand the Associated Press (AP) gave its staffers earlier this week for sending out breaking news over their Twitter accounts instead of saving it for the company’s traditional wire-service subscribers—even though the news in question was the arrest of AP staffers at the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York.

“In relation to AP staff being taken into custody at the Occupy Wall Street story, we’ve had a breakdown in staff sticking to policies around social media and everyone needs to get with their folks now to tell them to knock it off. We have had staff tweet – BEFORE THE MATERIAL WAS ON THE WIRE – that staff were arrested.”

With multiple people at major news events equipped with cell phones and Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube accounts, the AP faces a losing battle sitting on news until a full story can be written and published on its regular wire.  A “wire first, tweet later” policy is just asking for citizen journalists to scoop the AP, making it a channel for stale news.

I haven’t seen any reports of Associated Press staffers covering the events at UC Davis. If they did, they would have been better served by the advice of the Interchange Project:

“There is nothing wrong with breaking news on Twitter and then sending out additional tweets with links to more info in the future. This doesn’t have to be an either-or proposition. Break the news on Twitter, write a short wire post and then send out another tweet with more info. Simple.”

Simple if you have dealt with reality and are willing to disseminate quickly on social media the best content you and citizen journalists produce.

Not so simple if you forgot breaking news to the public is job one.

Your turn? Do you think people will turn to the AP for news on major events if its stories are stale compared to the tweets, photos, Facebook updates, and videos citizen journalists post to social media? Is sitting on news in hopes of a scoop hours down the line in the best interests of the AP’s audience, the public? 

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