“It’s an honor to welcome the first american president that looks brazilian!! :)”

Those words of welcome, from Fred in Brasilia, joined about 30,000 more messages for President Obama as he made his first visit to Brazil this past March. To help celebrate the president’s visit, we helped the United States Embassy in Brasilia develop “Boas-vindas Presidente Obama”, a social media campaign to raise interest in the president’s visit.

A major objective of this program was to help Brazilians engage with the President’s visit beyond the handful of public events and the usual TV coverage. Brazil is a continent-sized nation with more than 190 million people, so the opportunities for Brazilians to actively participate were unfortunately limited. Social media provided a solution. ?The visit also provided an opportunity to increase mutual understanding and further dialogue with Brazilians on priority themes (such as education, the environment, clean energy, global partnerships, and other topics).

The concept was simple: create a campaign driven by social media where Brazilians could submit short welcome messages to President Obama. These were collected in two mediums: short text messages and 15 second videos recorded through the participant’s web cams. The text messages were gathered through a custom-built application we designed and developed within the State Department. On the video side, we turned to VideoGenie, a web start-up.

The welcome campaign micro-site.

Since the Brazilian social networking landscape is quite diverse, we utilized a wide variety of platforms to get the word out and to collect welcome messages. A key goal was to increase the size of US Embassy Brasilia’s communities on Facebook and Orkut pages. For Facebook we created an application housed within the fan page. This allowed us to integrate our Facebook efforts and direct Facebook advertising to both the fan page and application. Orkut doesn’t provide an application framework for their brand channel, so we created a microsite at www.obamabr.org. This also gave us added flexibility on the design and content that wasn’t feasible within Facebook.

We also integrated the various social sharing tools, primarily Facebook and Twitter buttons, to help encourage people to share the wider program, but also, importantly, the individual messages they recorded. This made it easier to track how many mentions we had on the various social networks.

The messages came in from all across Brazil, from small hamlets in the Amazon to the bustling metropolises of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. As Fred’s welcome suggests, Obama’s story resonates personally with many in Brazil’s diverse population of 190 million people. The program also demonstrated the warmth and hospitality of the Brazilian people. Indeed, many people invited Obama to their houses to join their families for dinner.

The welcome campaign Facebook application showing the live video feed of a press conference.

The Tech

My role was primarily as the design and development lead, with the help of our developer Jeff Hunter. I also provided strategy advice based on the past presidential trips I’ve supported.

In a single hectic week we developed and soft-launched the application, microsite, and a backend system to moderate the incoming messages. Throughout the next two weeks leading up to the visit we continually made improvements and added features, with a particular emphasis on bringing more people to the embassy’s Facebook page.

The site was coded in PHP using the brilliant PHP-framework CodeIgniter. Without a doubt we could not have launched as quickly as we did without the aid of this framework. When we started to get significant press coverage and traffic spiked, the built-in caching functionality of CodeIgniter was a server-saver.

A few stats

The fan base of the embassy page increased from about 2,300 to 21,800 at the end of the program, an increase of about 19,500. This increase was partly driven by Facebook advertising, but much of the growth was due to the welcome message campaign.

More than 32,000 welcome messages were received from dozens of cities and towns across Brazil. Of the collected messages, about 500 were videos, with the remainder text only. Following the visit, about 1,500 reactions to the visit were also collected. The Facebook application and microsite together received about 160,000 visits over the three weeks the program was live.

Daily totals of incoming messages from the 11th through the 23rd of March 2011.

The campaign also received significant media by prominent Brazilian outlets. Estadao, the second largest paper in Sao Paulo by subscribers, prominently featured an article about the campaign. The campaign was also featured by: Gizmodo Brazil, TV Globo’s G1 Political web site, R7 Noticias, and MacMagazine, and several others.

Also, I would be remiss if I did not thank the staff at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, and particularly the Information Resource Center. They really made this event happen. If you are interested in more events like this or to follow their work, I suggest checking out the Facebook pages for the U.S. Embassy Cairo and the Information Resource Center.

Faculty of Mass-Communications

Faculty of Economics and Political Science

Fortunately, I received a reminder of the importance of in-person public diplomacy earlier this week. As part of my trip across the Middle East, I gave many public presentations on how social media is used by the United States government in our public diplomacy efforts. I’d done this in the West Bank, Amman, and finally in Cairo.

Presentation to the Faculty of Media and Communication, Cairo University

This past Tuesday I spoke to the faculty and students of Cairo University’s Faculty of Mass-Communications and the Faculty of Economics and Political Science. Here is the presentation I used (PPTX). I can say, without a doubt, they asked some of the most challenging questions I’ve received about social media. Their interests were wide and varied. They asked about the risks that social media could detach us from our real-world lives, the use of these tools by the Egyptian government, the role of social media in the release of Iraq war documents on Wikileaks, and much more.

Opinions were also quite diverse. Several individuals asked pointed questions about U.S. government control of the media. As the recent mid-term elections and the ever-shifting popularity of American policies demonstrate, we operate in a very challenging media landscape in which we often have little power to control the message. As I noted in the discussion, if the U.S. government is so good at this, they wouldn’t need me!

A professor of the Faculty of Media and Communications

Conversely, the Wikileaks questions often focused on how the U.S. government is quite powerless to control even its own information. Unfortunately, since this isn’t an area I focus on I feel I wasn’t able to sufficiently address the questions. If you’re interested in the Wikileaks Iraq documents story the New York Times has a great special feature on the subject.

In addition to the challenging discussion, I was also very impressed with how Egyptians are using social media to improve their society. One project is using social media and online maps to combat sexual harassment. Another campaign uses these tools to help keep Alexandria clean, an effort that has gotten widespread media attention and compelled the local government to act. Others are using social media to create connections between ordinary Americans and Egyptians to correct stereotypes and improve relations.

The past three weeks have been a whirlwind of activity: events, interviews, chats over tea, seeing astonishing landscapes, experiencing remarkable history, and so much more. However, it is the friendships that were started that I find most important. And, naturally, we’ll be continuing these friendships over social media until my return!

The main square in Ramallah, on the boundary with Ramallah's sister city, El-Bireh.

Some days it feels like I have the best job in the world. This week I had one of those days. For the past several days I’ve been working with our Embassy in Tel Aviv and Consulate General in Jerusalem on their public diplomacy social media programs. This focuses mostly on sharing best practices from other missions, providing suggestions on enhancements, and helping to create a structured approach to their public engagement. This work has been great, fun, and very illuminating. I’m constantly amazed how much our missions are able to do with limited resources and even less time.

But that isn’t all that made the day so remarkable. What made the day so noteworthy was the opportunity to chat with Palestinian social media leaders. The Arabic Media Internet Network (AMIN) hosted an in-person session with bloggers and practitioners in the West Bank city of Ramallah and a second video conference with bloggers in Gaza.

Merely visiting Ramallah is worth noting on its own. This sounds strange to say, but it seems a very “normal” place. The perception you get of the West Bank is a desperate population riven and cut-off by strife. News images focus on thrown rocks and wire-topped walls. Instead there are bustling streets, car dealerships (including a gleaming Mercedes dealer), and new five-star hotels. The most incongruous feeling was the security detail we are required to have on official visits. It made me feel alien to the outside. I imagine the feeling is mutual when locals see our imposing truck hurtling by.

Discussing social media with Palestinian activists, professors, and students.

Image by U.S. Consulate General Jerusalem

As an outsider, this normality hides the precariousness of the current situation. I was told stories of humiliations at checkpoints, the daily hassles of stateless-citizens, and families and friends separated by ever-shifting lines. Jerusalem itself is a city of walls. They separate the old from the new, east from west, and a troubled past from an uncertain future.

Yet there are uplifting stories as well, of tireless videographers showing the real lives of Palestinian women, bloggers working to build bridges between separated people, businessmen creating new opportunities, journalists dedicated to openness and transparency, and photographers sharing the beauty of the landscape and her people. They are using new media to tell their stories, as only they can. While the sessions were billed as a chance to learn from the work we’re doing in the State Department, we have much to learn from them.

With luck I will be back in the near future. Until then, there’s always social media to keep us connected!

Recently I had the pleasure to participate in the Public Media Camp, an unconference focused on strengthening local and national public broadcasting. A good portion of the discussion focused on the disruptive and new opportunities being presented by Internet-based dissemination and social media.

Of Hubs and Spokes

While the focus on social media related well to my work in public diplomacy, the very structure of public media actually seems quite similar to the hub and spoke model of the central State Department in Washington and the various embassies, consulates and missions scattered around the world. As with public broadcasting, content is produced and disseminated in Washington and the very diverse missions overseas. Just as NPR or PBS in Washington balances the needs of their direct national audience with the needs of their affiliate stations, the State Department also has to support an international audience for its America.gov properties while meeting overseas mission needs.

Additionally, most public media outlets focus more on informing audiences and social change than increasing profits. Public diplomacy has similar goals: changing perceptions about the United States’ and its policies and creating a better environment for U.S. goals, such as democratization, improving religious freedoms and so on. Without profits as a baseline metric, both organizations aim for more intangible goals, such as those elucidated above. This makes measurement more challenging, with related knock-on effects.

Measuring Impact

Fortunately, public media and affiliated organizations are taking on a number of these challenges, most especially measurement. The Fledgling Fund, an NGO focused on helping social change projects get off the ground, has done quite a bit of work figuring out how to measure such an amorphous goal as creating social impact. Drawing from their experience, they’ve created a five-stage model which helps measure social impact of a program.

Here are the steps (scroll down for a diagram):

1. Media quality: Most basically, this stage asks if the subject is a quality piece of media? Are the characters strong and well defined? Is the story well-toned? Will it get press attention, resonate with viewers, generate online buzz and so on?
2. Raising public awareness: Where is the topic in the public consciousness? Some topics don’t need more more widespread attention, so media focused solely on raising awareness isn’t necessary. However, some topics are not well known, so a basic introduction or media focused on moving beyond the choir may be necessary.
3. Increased public engagement: There is the largest leap in the five stages, moving from awareness to engagement. Essentially, this is the leap from passive attention (viewing a film, reading a web site) to active engagement (promoting the film to friends, commenting on a web site). Reaching this state indicates a change in attitudes, beliefs and behaviors.
4. Stronger social movement: At this stage, people have moved from low level engagement to greater collective action. If the media engaged the choir, then they’ve become more creative or effective after engaging with your media. If the media reached new audiences, then they’ve joined existing organizations or created their own to reach the goals elucidated in your media.
5. Social change: This is the ultimate goal and, often, the most difficult to reach. At this stage the media has encouraged policy or legislative change, a tangible shift in the public dialog on the topic or influential changes in citizen or consumer behavior.

This model seems to suit public diplomacy media efforts well, though it would require some time spent on teasing out the specific measures, qualitative and quantitative, for each step. The Fledgling Fund has a good whitepaper on the model (PDF) that delves much deeper while also providing some useful real-world case studies.

There were a few more gems from the public media camp that I hope to write-up in the next week or so.

Visitors stream into the 1959 American National Exhibition. Moscow, USSR

Fifty years ago this month, on a muddy rain-soaked field in Moscow, a glittering pavilion quickly rose and a massive geodesic dome swiftly took shape. After only a few months of hectic construction the 1959 American National Exhibition opened to a curious Soviet public. The exhibit provided a unique window on American life to the millions of people who filed through the event over the next few weeks. The visitors saw examples of contemporary American life, from cars to homes to art. Young American guides, many barely out of college, led the curious Soviet public through both the general American story as well as their own deeply personal stories of life in the United States and, in many cases, how their immigrant families became American citizens.

Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev chats with a guide. Vice President Richard M. Nixon is at left.

Soon after opening the 1959 Exhibition hosted Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who toured the exhibits with then Vice President Richard Nixon. In what became a touchstone of the early Cold War, these cold warriors verbally sparred in the kitchen of the model American home. Both leaders argued for the merits of each country’s unique civil and economic models in front of an inquisitive crowd and, more importantly, rolling news cameras. The “Kitchen Debate” as it came to be known, informed the opinions of the two leaders and provided one of the most compelling unscripted moments of the long conflict.

Beyond the statecraft practiced in front of the cameras, public diplomacy was the chief goal of the Exhibition. The hope was greater understanding brought about by the cultural exchange would lessen tensions between the two great nations, turning enemies into, at least, adversaries. The personal stories of the guides were meant to show the diversity of the country while the various displays sought to highlight the strength of a capitalist economy.

Was the event a success?

Did the Exhibition influence Soviet perceptions of the United States, and, by extension help America reach its policy objectives? Answering these questions, and many others, was the goal of the Face-Off to Facebook conference held last week at George Washington University. Opinions varied among the conference participants, who ranged from Exhibition staff members to representatives of the Moscow public to various academics, but most concluded the event was a qualified success.

William Safire, formerly a Nixon staff member, and now a New York Times columnist, took pains to expose the “gold colored fog” through which we now see the Cold War. At the time, American’s were quite apprehensive of how the conflict was proceeding and there were real concerns that the US could lose the war. In this context, the expo was quite successful in giving the United States a voice in Moscow, particularly when the kitchen debate gave Nixon a unique chance to speak directly for America on Soviet state-controlled television.

Guides to America

A guide demonstrates an American style kitchen

Many of the speakers and panelists focused on the unique role of the American guides, helping educate visitors about the United States. Barely out of college, these young Russian-speaking men and women discussed a wide range of topics with Muscovites, from the personal to the political. Importantly, they were not given strict talking points, allowing them to speak freely about their own perspectives and opinions, even if they ran counter (and they often did) to established American policy. Indeed, this freedom to speak meant the guides were personally engaging and underscored for the Exhibition visitors America’s willingness to support a multitude of differing voices, something quite unique in Soviet Moscow.

A Russian Perspective

Intriguingly, the conference also included representatives speaking to the Russian perspective. Sergei Khrushchev, son of Premier Nikita Khrushchev, and now a professor at Brown University, spoke both from his personal perspective as a young boy attending the Exhibition and on reactions from other Russian attendees he interviewed. For him and his peers, it was the handouts (pamphlets, books, samples of American drinks and food) that were the most tangible and memorable aspects of the expo. The cars, model American home, and other displays were simply out-of-reach to the average Soviet citizen, and, they assumed, were out of reach to the average American citizen as well. As such, while these items were interesting, Professor Khrushchev argued they were also largely dismissed.

Professor Khrushchev also emphasized the importance of the guides on helping to reframe perspectives on the United States, again speaking to the importance of personal engagement to public diplomacy. For Clay Shirky, a professor from New York University, it was this “convening” function that was the key aspect of the Exhibition, a function long at the core of truly successful public diplomacy programs.

Visitors in the glass pavilion. The Exhibition featured a wide variety of American modern art, from paintings to sculptures.

Amusingly, the Exhibition also highlighted some areas of agreement amongst the Americans and Russians, most particularly a shared distaste of the modern art. Soviet journalists routinely questioned the artists’ sanity, while American Congressman merely accused them of being, ironically, “card carrying communists”.

In the end, the Exhibition was a remarkable achievement. Considering the vast logistical and political barriers that stood in its way, it is a feat that if even took place. The sheer scope was also a triumph: a vast complex of buildings seen by 2.7 million visitors. More critically, it helped inform Soviet perspectives on the United State while also providing a venue for the historically important debate between Khrushchev and Nixon.

However, as noted by George Feifer, a writer and former guide, whatever progress was made by the Exhibition and related summits, proved short-lived. All the steps forward came crashing down with Gary Powers’ ill-fated U2 flight in 1960. For Feifer, these two events stress the United States’ dangerous, and counter-productive, dependence on military power and the under-emphasis on productive, peaceful public diplomacy.

Later this week, I will post part 2, which looks at public diplomacy in the 21st Century and explores parallels between the 1959 Exhibition and modern PD.

Recently I attended the Politics Online Conference put on by George Washington University’s Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet. Although I was only able to sit in on a handful of sessions, there were a number of very useful gems on how you can use social media to further political campaign goals. I’ve focused on the lessons most useful for public diplomacy campaigns.

One of the major themes of the conference is the necessity to create authentic engagement when using social media. Without creating this authenticity, it is much more difficult to influence the intended audience since there is little personal connection with the message. Many lobbyists regularly emphasized that a handful of authentic, personal messages from constituents are more convincing than a mass quantity of relatively anonymous messages. Furthermore, genuine engagement between two parties (in this case politicians and constituents) can help create lasting communities and movements centered around specific causes, even if the engagement is conducted online.

Ideally this authenticity is created through direct personal engagement, a local focus and a tangible result. One example given was a campaign to influence legislation covering local food producers. To highlight the importance of these producers in local constituencies, a lobbyist organization used an online campaign to help local producers deliver care packages of non-perishable goods to their representatives. By using web-based technologies to make the constituent’s concerns tangible, the lobbyists were able to influence the final legislation to greater benefit local producers.

Many of the presenters also cautioned that campaigns can’t simply present themselves as grassroots and authentic, without actually engaging real people in the effort. Web users have gotten increasingly sophisticated and can often easily spot fake campaigns (otherwise known as “astroturfing”, a play on real “grassroots”). If a fake campaign is spotted, the repercussions can be serious and severely damage the credibility of the sponsoring organization.

A few other tips I found useful:

• If you can’t create your own parade, get in front of one. This was in response to a question asking if you didn’t have Obama, or a similarly motivational individual or cause, what can be done to get more attention to your campaign. One great suggestion was to track trends and get in front of ones that relate to your effort. This means it is important to track trends, such as through Twitter or Google, and see which ones are getting more attention. When adding related photos, Tweets, blog posts and so on, be sure to find out what tags are being used and label your content as such. For example, one of the sites I work on had put together a wealth of information on avian flu, pandemics, global health care and so on. While many of that was off the radar for many months, with the recent spread of H1N1, much of this content is now highly relevant to the global conversation on swine flu. As many have said before, “never waste a good crisis”.
• No media works in a vacuum. In basically every media market, no single form of media functions without at least some relation to other types. Newspapers influence TV and vise versa, while a scandal might break on Twitter or Facebook before making it to the nightly news broadcast. As such, you have to consider all dominant (and perhaps some not so dominant) media channels in your engagement programs. Ideally, all media campaigns should have integrated components across many forms of media, each tailored to the medium’s specific requirements. It is no longer possible to see a campaign as strictly a TV commercial, since that commercial may be recorded on a mobile phone, reposted on YouTube and then shared via Twitter. For that same reason, it is also important to monitor a wide variety of media for mentions, even if there isn’t any specific engagement taking place in them.
• Meeting in person is still – and always will be – the most influential type of engagement. It is far harder to be inauthentic, impersonal and non-transparent when meeting face to face. The sheer amount of information conveyed in the tone of a person’s voice, the way they present themselves and the messages they convey in the meeting makes personal connections far more moving than any other type of connection. As one presenter put it, “There is no substitute for a personal meeting with a member of congress.”

From Reader’s Digest, the challenges of Facebook Diplomacy.

Special thanks to Molly Moran (and her Mom) for sending this to me.

Photo by Yael Swerdlow

This post grew out of the recent Smith-Mundt Symposium, though since the conference was about a month ago, it is a bit late to the party. Several individuals have already written good summaries of the day’s discussion, so I direct you to those first.

That being said, there are a few points relating to the general conversation on Smith-Mundt and public diplomacy/strategic communications that are worth making (or reiterating).

First my general read-out of the event is that the issue remains quite contentious and with little overall agreement. Many argue the law should be kept, or even strengthened (and its remit expanded to the entire U.S. government) while others argue it should be completely repealed. A third group feel the argument is pointless since the law is out-dated and should be ignored, which can be done since, in the end, there are no “Smith-Mundt police” to arrest anyone for violating the law.

Smith-Mundt is a multi-faceted piece of legislation, dealing with the structure of public diplomacy, creating cultural exchanges, as well as the much argued ban on domestic distribution. Since the latter restriction has become the most contentious part of the act, I will focus my summary and comments here.

Position One: A Stronger Ban on Domestic Distribution

During the discussion, the first group pointed to several cases where the U.S. government attempted to “propagandize” the American public to argue for expanding the law. The two most prominent examples being the Department of Defense’s efforts to influence Iraq news coverage and the fictional reporter Karen Ryan who promoted government the Bush administration’s Medicare program.

Another camp that supports the continuation of Smith-Mundt are, interestingly, those working in the government on public diplomacy and strategic communication. For them, Smith-Mundt protects their from the over-zealous members of the public criticizing their products. For example, it allows the government to be self critical without being brought before Congress and accused of wasting tax-payer dollars on products that make the United States look bad. This is a consideration since the products produced by the U.S. government for public diplomacy are created with a foreign audience in mind and designed to their interests. So content tailored for an audience in Cuba may prove discordant to domestic Cuban-Americans. Having to please both a domestic and foreign audience, who may have widely divergent views of the United States and its values, is likely to result in material that resonates with neither audience.

Position Two: Abolishing the Ban on Domestic Distribution

For those who think Smith-Mundt should be abolished, there seem to be three main threads, two related to the lack of domestic oversight.

First, because there is no domestic distribution of these products, the work of these units in the government are pretty much invisible to the U.S. taxpayer. Unless you are in the intelligence business, you don’t want to be invisible to the hand that feeds you come budget time. Since there is no domestic awareness of these programs, there are no advocates for this type of work in Congress, so public diplomacy programs covered under Smith-Mundt are often marginalized and thusly poorly resourced.

The second side-effect of the lack of domestic oversight is you lose the expertise of the American public. This should not be understated, the U.S. is a diverse country with many first and second generation immigrants. These individuals have nuanced understanding of their originating country and culture. Having them contribute to information programs, either by commenting on existing products or suggesting new avenues of engagement, could make these efforts more relevant and resonant to focus populations.

The last argument for abolishing Smith-Mundt is that it restricts the ability of the U.S. government to engage the domestic population in public diplomacy programs. For example, many have pointed to public to public exchanges (either in person or online) as a key method for creating greater understanding between cultures. However, since helping to coordinate such efforts could include distributing government-funded information to domestic audiences, this activity could come under the perview of Smith-Mundt restrictions.

Position Three: Ignoring Smith-Mundt

The last group of commentators basically argue that Smith-Mundt is outdated and, since there is no history of enforcement, can safely be ignored. This contingent seems to be largely made up retired foreign service officers. In their work overseas, Smith-Mundt never came up and, as such, was soundly ignored.

Since there is little provision for enforcement, and no one has been prosecuted for running afoul of Smith-Mundt, those working in Washington can also safely ignore the act and go about their daily business.

My Take

The question of domestic distribution is a challenging one and I can appreciate the arguments on both sides. There certainly needs to be some restriction on domestic propaganda, as evidenced by the actions of the Department of Defense and the Bush administration’s fake reporter. However, in this increasingly transparent world, such a restriction should be largely unnecessary since dishonest efforts like these will almost certainly unmasked. Such programs make the government look underhanded and untrustworthy, thus doing more harm than good. Any agency that professes transparency while willfully trying to mislead the public (foreign or domestic) shouldn’t be communicating in the first place.

The question of oversight is, for me, more tricky. For every individual who’s unique cultural understanding can benefit information programs, there is another who will angrily disagree with a product, and quite willing to take this quarrel to their Congressperson. How to balance the positive and negative influences of domestic oversight is a key question without an easy answer. Much of it will come down to, first, education, explaining the methods and goals of public diplomacy, and, second, demonstrating the context in which an information campaign is being delivered.

In the end however, I feel Smith-Mundt does need to be revisited with new legislation for one key reason: information is global, in a way never envisioned by the original drafters of the act. Restricting the distribution of a book or movie was easy when it was intricately tied to a physical medium (a rivalrous good, to use an economist term). Now, something the government publishes on the web for a foreign audience, is available anywhere, easily recopied and quickly disseminated further. And that introduces significant ambiguity in those engaging in public diplomacy online. For example, could tailoring a website to rank higher in search rankings be considered domestic dissemination since all of the most popular engines have large numbers of American users?

Ultimately, I think the real goal here should be transparency. The main objective with the ban on domestic dissemination is to prevent the U.S. government from surreptitiously influencing the American public. If viewers, domestic and foreign, are fore-warned that the content they are viewing was created by the government, they can then make their own judgments as to its veracity. After all, when delivering information on United States’ policy, how is the work of public diplomats all that different from public affairs officials? Certainly public diplomacy and public affairs are two different activities, but, in the end, their goal is to inform, and thereby influence, public opinion.

Besides, to be a credible voice, the government needs to be honest and open. If something is produced by the government or with government money, it should be stated as such. Perhaps Smith-Mundt 2.0 should be one line: “Information programs funded by the government should be identified as such, and strive for honesty, objectivity and transparency.”

As Edward R Murrow, journalist and former director of the United States Information Agency once said, “To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; credible we must be truthful.”

His presentation, and the following discussion, focused on his personal experience as a blogger, including his engagement with counterpart bloggers in the Middle East, and on the general history and landscape of blogging in the Middle East.

A History of Blogging in the Middle East

In his presentation, Professor Lynch focused on three main phases of blogging in the Middle East:

1. Initially, many of the blogs in the Middle East were written in English and focused on the American audience. Some commentators called them “bridge” bloggers, in that they provided a bridge between the perspectives of the Middle Eastern authors and the American readers. However, as these bloggers became more popular in the United States, they began to tailor their message to very specific audiences, typically either quite conservative or liberal. The same commentators then began derisively referring to them as “mirror” bloggers, since they often reflected what their audiences wanted to hear about, re-enforcing existing biases.

2. The second phase, which reached its zenith around 2005, saw many activists become prominent bloggers who focused largely on internal social change. These blogs were written in local languages and dialects and the audience was typically domestic. Often these bloggers were local elites, many Western-educated, and were already established activists before turning to blogging as an outlet.

   These activists wrote about police brutality, restrictions on protest or speech, government corruption and other examples of domestic oppression. Their focus was internal and generally paid little attention to the United States.

   Unfortunately, as the prominence of these activists grew through their blogs they increasingly gained the attention of local authorities. Unsurprisingly, once noticed by the oppressive political state, it oppressed them. Many were thrown in jail, some were tortured and the nascent ferment of this movement was crushed.

   Despite their hope that their prominence, both domestic and international, would protect them from this oppression, telling, few (or none) of individuals or countries with sufficient influence came to their defense.

3. Lynch classifies the latest and current phase as the “public sphere enterprise”. Basically this means bloggers engaging in public discussion and argument, but without the expectation that such activity will result in big changes. The bloggers in this phase were always active, but were over-shadowed by the “bridge” and activist bloggers. They are a very small minority, often young elites, and typically talk only to each other. Their blogging won’t be overthrowing oppressive regimes any time soon.

   Nonetheless, the ideas they are creating and shaping may have significant ripples in the next 10 to 20 years as many of these individuals rise to positions of power. Importantly, blogging has created channels of communication between some divergent, but equally oppressed groups. In Egypt, for example, blogging has created connections between secular activists and members of the Muslim Brotherhood, to the point that each side will advocate for the other when the state bears down hard.

   As important as these connections and ideas are however, the great open, democratic ferment written about in the main stream media is now dormant in the Middle East, successfully cowed by oppressive governments. More and more bloggers are coming online though, so a resurgence may be in the making, sometime in the future.

Public Diplomacy 2.0 in the Middle East: What do to?

Faced with the current Middle East landscape, with oppressive regimes in ascendancy and free-thinking bloggers driven out or to the margins, how should the United States approach web-based public diplomacy?

Lynch highlighted five key lessons and methods that should guide American public diplomacy efforts in the Middle East.

First: Work on broad principals

Most importantly, the United States needs to work on broad principals, such as press freedom and personal rights. It is preferable and almost always better to have local voices pushing for change, which is much harder under oppressive regimes. Furthermore, by picking winners, the U.S. risks turning them into losers and making the situation worse. For example, it makes little sense for the U.S. to create a social network for Arabs since they will, if given the latitude, create their own, better, network, free from U.S. government restrictions.

Second: Don’t be blinded by the tech

It is important not to let the technology blind practitioners to the basics of public diplomacy. It is pointless to depend on blogs, Facebook or other technologies to lead a revolution. Along this line, the U.S. government shouldn’t create exaggerated expectations on what individual bloggers can do. Public diplomacy efforts shouldn’t place too much burden on these voices, especially when there is no way to protect them from an oppressive regime.

Third: Listen

The United States needs to get better at listening. Too much of public diplomacy has been about “winning” and not enough about “understanding”. Developing this capacity to listen and understand should look at the wide range of public opinion, not just the loudest or scariest. Of the material that gets translated and circulated among the highest offices in the U.S. government, a majority is often pulled from jihadist web forums. While important from a security perspective, this massively misrepresents Middle Eastern public opinion, leading to poor understanding and, ultimately, poor policy. Similarly, it is important to listen to a wide array of data points, from newspapers to television, not just blogs (though blogs can suggest what topics are resonating in the wider audience).

Fourth: Understand that “Google rules the world”

It is important to be on the web and, most especially, have material that ranks highly on Google. Professor Lynch gave the example of Al Hurra, the U.S. government-funded Middle East broadcast channel, who refuses to publish their transcripts online and rarely pushes their video to YouTube and other popular outlets. Al Jazeera, in stark contrast, publishes everything, text and video, in a wide variety of venues. The result: Al Jazeera’s content lives forever while Al Hurra’s dies immediately.

Fifth: Encourage open, honest exchange

Lastly, when the U.S. does engage, it needs to be open, transparent and credible. Lynch praised three Department of State public diplomacy programs as fulfilling this requirement: the Digital Outreach Team, which engages in discussions with bloggers in the Middle East, the Democracy Video Contest, an open video competition to complete the phrase “Democracy is…”, and Fulbright and other exchanges.

I want to thank Marc for allowing me to share his thoughts with the wider community and highly suggest you subscribe to his new blog hosted by ForeignPolicy.com.