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.

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.”