Category: General Thoughts

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Ship Visit

We went for a ship visit to the USS Peleliu.  It is named after a World War II battle in the Pacific.  It is a kind of mini-aircraft carrier. Helicopters and Harrier Jets can land on the decks, as you can see in the picture above and below, and it supports Marine operations on shore.   You can see some pictures from the ship up and around this page.

This was the first time that I met Marines projecting power from ships.  This was the traditional Marine role, but in recent times they have been deployed in the deserts and mountains of Iraq and Afghanistan.  One of the Marine colonels commented that there are Marines in their second or third tours that have yet to do any real amphibious actions.  This would never happen a generation ago. Marines are supposed to be amphibious.

We were invited on board by the commander of the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, the one we were doing the exercise with.  We had a really good lunch.  I sat next to the Commodore.  I remember Commodore Perry, but I didn’t think they still had commodores and they don’t when it concerns the actual rank.  Fuller is a Navy Captain doing the job of the Commodore.  He coordinates the movements of the ships and forces from the three ships involved with the exercise.

Above is the hospital aboard the ship.

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Making Water

A good lesson is that you should never count on machines.  Luckily, it was only an exercise.   We were supposed to demonstrate how the Marines could make fresh water from sea water.  In the exercise, we were supposed to let the Minister of Health drink the water directly from the desalinization machine.  Of course, the machine didn’t work while she was there.   It evidently worked before and after.  The evidence was that we had a lot of fresh water made.  But there are always breakdowns and hiccups.

Some are just little/big things, like the tide going out farther than the intake pipes can reach.  Other things are systemic, like filters getting clogged.   The better plan is to have the water ready to go, already produced. The machine can be in the background and if it makes water at the time of the visit, we can go down there and watch it.  But the show should never depend on it working at the exact time period.

This also goes, BTW, for web-based presentations.  I have seen it dozens of times.  The person tries to load something up and all we get are those hour glasses that show something is loading, or else it has to buffer so many times that nobody can stand to watch it.  

There is an old saying that one should not watch laws or sausages being made. It is probably good advice not to watch most things being made unless you are especially interested in the process rather than the result.  Most of the time, however, we really just want the finished project. It is tempting, but a little narcissistic, for the creator to want to show the work that went into his creation, but most people don’t care, at least not into the detail the artist himself wants to inflict on his audience.

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Exercising Marines

HAST – The first two letter stand for humanitarian assistance.  I am not sure what the others are for, but if you just use it as a noun, it means a Marine operation that provides local populations with thinks like food, water and basic medical care.

HAST was part of the exercise, but before the Marines could start doing good, they had to land their equipment.   The hovercraft you see in the picture is called a LCAC.  It skims across the surface of the water and then can also skim across the surface of the beach.  It is much more reliable than those landing craft we remember from John Wayne movies.  You know, the kind that are shaped like long boxes and open in the front.

The problem is that the landing craft have to go back and forth to the ships to bring in the materials and that just takes a lot of time and is very dependent on the state of the sea.

One of the keys to relief is clean water. The Marines has a combination filter/desalinization machine that can make fresh water from sea water or clean water from polluted water. We went down to the landing beach to see this thing in action. Unfortunately, sea conditions slowed delivery and it was not ready to do. Maybe tomorrow.

I am playing the DCM (Deputy Chief of Mission) during this exercise. While the exercise is for the Marines and I am just a prop, I am learning some useful things by playing the role. I would like to be more helpful to the Marines, but since this is supposed to be a learning experience for them and a test of their abilities, I have to been less forthcoming. I suppose that makes it more realistic.  In real life I would indeed know more and try to be more helpful. On the other hand, in real life there would be a lot more uncertainty. In the exercise I know or have a very good idea of what the future will be. I could be “helpful” and reveal some things, but that would mess up the whole thing, ruin the game. So I have to let it happen, knowing that around the corner something will happen to ruin their well-laid plans. Of course is the real world most plans don’t work; I just don’t know in advance. It is much better that they learn the lessons here than when they are playing for keeps.

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Smell of Memory

The helicopters landed today delivering the Marines for our exercise.  The noise, dust and smell of fuel are unpleasant, but they reminded me of those things in Iraq.  Smell is hard-wired into memory in a way other things are not.  Iraq sucked most of the time, but there were some interesting experiences and lots of great people.   After time has passed, things seem better.   It is much easier to see the joy in something retrospectively than prospectively.  

I can put myself back in that mind set, if I try hard.  I remember when I looked forward to a year of heat, exhaust, dust, boredom and danger.  It was not very inviting.   I remember my friend Reid Smith comparing our predicament to a prison sentence.  “We can’t leave & what got us here seemed like a good idea at the time,” he said.  

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Deadly Serious Games

I have never met a young man who doesn’t enjoy shooter games; at least once they have seen one.  But video games are more than just fun.  You can learn a lot from games.  Games implicitly embed various assumptions and incentive particular actions and behaviors.

The Marines are taking advantage of the possibilities of gaming to help young Marines understand real-life combat situations. I think it will end up saving lives, as Marines will more effectively fight the bad guys and be better able to protect civilians in combat zones.

In this video simulation, Marines get to play both sides.  First they drive a simulated convoy through a dangerous part of Afghanistan.  Next they play the role of the insurgents and compete against their colleagues.  They can respond much more effectively when they see the situation through the eyes of the insurgents. 


We next went into a mock up of a village.  It was like a museum or a scansen. There were actors who played the roles of Afghan civilians and insurgents.  It was a very realistic. They even piped in the smells. I have never been to Afghanistan but I recognized some of them from walking around in Iraqi villages. The most obvious difference I notice was lack of live animals. They had stuffed chickens and goats, but in real life they are running around and getting in the way. I think that probably makes a difference if you are really walking the streets, especially if you are talking about trying to pay attention to subtle movements and sounds around you.

The goal of these simulations is to make sure Marines can encounter these sights and sounds before they see them in the real-life dangerous situations. They even have an RPG simulation, where the rocket passes over your head and slams into a wall. It scared the crap out of me, even though I know it was going to happen. The shock and the smell is something you cannot properly imagine no matter how many times someone tells you about it. Of course, I can only imagine what it is like when it is a real explosive that could hurt or kill you.

I got to do the simulation handling the 50 caliber machine gun on the gun turret. I have been under the gunner on many occasions but it was different seeing it from the top perspective.   Suffice to say that I would not have done a very good job in the real world. I couldn’t keep track of all the things happening around me and I was especially bad about having a 360 degree perspective.   Even in the safety of the simulation, I developed a kind of tunnel vision.   I was also very clumsy on the reloading.  I suppose with practice I would get better, but I don’t think I could ever develop the alacrity of the Marines I knew.

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Public Diplomacy Persuasion

Another FSI lecture is below.   I am doing this one on Monday.   The PowerPoint is available below. It has a lot of the same themes as the last one, but is significantly different.

Media_landscape_FSI_April_12Download

Everything is always becoming something else

Πάντα ῥεῖ  – everything flows. That is what the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus said more than two and half millennia ago and he was right. But the fact that he said it around 500 BC indicates that the concept has been around and talked about for a long time. Yet it seems to be a concept that each generation discovers for itself and then thinks that it is the most afflicted – ever – by change.

We always have and always will live in a dynamic environment.  What is more, our attempts to understand and act within it alter it, so that we never really face the same challenges twice.  (Heraclitus also said that you can never step twice into the same river – and he was right about that too.)  There is no finish line; there is no stable end goal.  Success means sustainable change.
So I don’t think my reference to Heraclitus is as obscure as it might seem in the context of something as dynamic as public diplomacy and the media. Our job as public affairs professions is to understand the ebbs and flows of events, to take advantage when things are flowing in the right direction, help direct them when we can and know when to get out of the way of the big waves.

Portfolio or Toolbox Strategy (for an uncertain world)

No technique or media tool will work in all situations.  That is why we need to deploy the whole panoply of tools and techniques and know which combinations are best.  This is more an art than a science.  The key is flexibility. Don’t get too enamored with anything in particular or develop strategies around one platform. You don’t want a Twitter strategy.  You want a strategy that may use Twitter as one of the tools. Carpenters don’t have “hammer strategies.”   They have building strategies that may involve hammers as one of the many tools in the box.

There is no such thing as a global brand or a one-size fits all

Even a ubiquitous & simple product like Coca-Cola tastes different and is marketed differently around the world.  The reason they teach us all these things and all these languages at FSI and the reason you make the big-bucks as public diplomacy professionals around the world is that you are supposed to understand the local cultures and environments and apply a nuanced and appropriate persuasion strategy.  I would add that almost all the effective public diplomacy (as opposed to public affairs, which happens mostly in Washington, BTW) work occurs at posts overseas.  Washington programs should be in business to support the field in this respect.   This is something we sometimes forget.
We are not allowed to change our “product,” i.e. the United States and its policies, but we can choose which aspect to emphasize, what analogies to make, what frames to deploy, what relationships to cultivate and when and where to do these things.

The human equation: bridging the last three feet

Edward R. Murrow, the greatest director of USIA or public diplomacy, observed that our communication technologies could span the world, but the real persuasion took place in the last three feet – human contact. He lived in the days before Internet. IMO, internet can (although less easily than people think) create or at least sustain the kinds of engaged relationships Murrow was talking about, but we still have to build those relationships. There is a cognitive limit to human engagement. You can only keep in real contact with a couple hundred people, although new technologies may expand that number, it does not reach into the millions or even the tens of thousands.  That is why you have to set priorities.  You just cannot love everyone equally and any strategy designed to reach everybody will satisfy nobody.

There is no garden w/o a gardener.   

You cannot outsource or compartmentalize your brains or your engagement.  The person doing the public diplomacy must be involved with the public diplomacy decisions.  There just is no way around this.  If we don’t get involved, we cannot make good decisions.  Too often, we just try to shunt off the PD function.  We hire consultants.   Many consultants are good, but a consultant is often like the guy who borrows your watch and then charges to tell you what time it is. If we outsource our decisions, we essentially outsource our intelligence. Then THEY know what we need to know.  It is a lot like hiring a guy to look after your spouse.  Even if it seems to make her happier, maybe that is your role. BTW – be very wary of pseudo-experts who claim to “speak for” large groups of people or have some kind of inside knowledge that cannot be replicated or properly explained.   If they cannot explain it to you even in broad strokes, they probably don’t understand it themselves and often they are just hucksters protecting their phony baloney jobs.   We have too many such people hanging around us not to trip over them occasionally.

So let me sum up before I move to the next part.  Technologies are new; human relations are old.  Our “new” methods return to an earlier age when communication was engaged, individualized, personal, two-way and interactive.  And for public diplomacy the lessons of anthropology (people) trump technology (machines.) How does public diplomacy really work?

Forget about mass marketing & advertising analogies. We are not selling something as simple as a can of soda and we do not have the resources to engage mass markets. We are not trying to build awareness (who is not aware of the U.S.?) and content DOES matter.Public diplomacy is a mass networking proposition, where we build key relationships with opinion leaders and use leverage to allow/encourage others to reach out, who in turn reach out …  We cannot reach THE common man (because he doesn’t exist) and we should be careful not to mistake A common man for THE common man.

There are thousands of books and experts who will point to the example of the obscure person who did something great.  They are right; but it is really easy to pick Bill Gates out of the crowd AFTER he has been wildly successful.   Then it is easy to explain why he succeeded.  Of course millions of others did similar things and did not become the richest man in the world.   They call this survivor bias.  In many ways it is like a lottery.  We can be sure that SOMEBODY will win, but we cannot tell who before the drawing.  So we have to play the odds and we cannot treat everybody who buys a lottery ticket like a potential millionaire. 

Humans are social creatures who make decisions in contexts of their culture & relationships We make a big mistake if we treat people as members of undifferentiated masses.  Human societies are lumpy. There are relationships that matter more and some that matter less.  And (as per Heraclitus) they are in a constant state of flux. People make most of their important decisions in context or in consultation with people they trust.  Later they might go the some media sources for confirmation or details. Probably the biggest decision you have ever made was buying a home.  Did you just read some literature and make an offer? Or did you ask around and talk to people you trusted?  How about the car you own?   We like to explain our behavior rationally, but relationally will provide more reliable assessments.

Information is almost free and a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention

We now must find or create social context for our message to get attention.   I always laugh (at least to myself) when I hear someone say that “we got the message out” or “We reached a million people”.  I am going to start calling this the barking dog strategy, because like the dogs, we just shout “I’m here; I’m here; I’m here.  It doesn’t matter what you say; it is what they hear that counts.   If your message does not say the right things, if it doesn’t fit into their cultural and socials contexts and if it is not delivered in an appropriate way, it doesn’t get through.   I will reiterate that the reason you get those big-bucks is to understand the right time, place and context of the communication.   The new technologies have not made this easier.

Understand – Everything has rules and patterns

I mentioned Heraclitus.  Let’s go a bit farther east and think of Lao Tzu.   He talked about the need to understand the “Tao”, the patterns and logic in all things.  Understanding these things could make the most difficult tasks fluid and easy.   There is usually easier and harder ways to do things.  Sometimes you CREATE more resistance and make less progress by pushing too hard.   So try to understand before you try to persuade.  If people have been doing things for a long time, there is a reason.  Figure out what that is and persuasion becomes much easier.   And always look for the links and relationships.  People may not be aware of what drives their own behavior, but it is often linked to social acceptance. And a person’s outlook often changes more based on the perceived future than on the present reality. 

Let me digress with a fish story from my time in Iraq.   During the late unpleasantness, Coalition forces had to ban fishing on the Euphrates River for a time, to prevent insurgents from using it as a highway.   But fishermen didn’t return after the ban was lifted, even though the fish were plentiful and bigger given the no-fishing respite.   We thought of helping them buy new boats, nets, sonar etc. But the reason that they weren’t fishing was much simpler – no ice.  The ice factory had shut down and in this hot climate if you cannot put the fish on ice, you cannot move them very far or sell them. We helped the ice house back into operation and the fishing started again.  

ENGAGE – influencing your community but also being part of it and willing to be influenced 

This story shows the importance of engagement.  You also have to get out – physically – and meet people where they are.

Inform & Interpret – turn information into useful knowledge

Engaging is fun and essential, but if we are not giving the taxpayer value for their money if we don’t inform and persuade.   Since information is almost free, what do I mean by inform?  This means turning raw information into useful knowledge and narratives.   Even simple facts must be put into contexts.  What if you didn’t have any dresser drawers or hangers in your closet?  What if you didn’t have any bookshelves or cabinets and all you stuff was just lying on the floor.  It would be hard to find things and many things would not be useful.  Turning information into knowledge is like putting things in some order.  In the public diplomacy realm, that usually means framing and narratives.   People understand stories and until they have a story that makes sense, information just sits there, useless as the shirt you cannot find under the pile of dirty clothes.  Analytical history, BTW, as opposed to antiquarianism or chronicles is depends almost entirely on framing. The historian must choose what to put in and what to leave out and that makes the story.

So if we are talking about actual persuasion, it probably won’t help just to make information available. Providing information was a key to our success in the Cold War because accurate information was in very short supply. Today in all but the dwindling coterie dictatorships in the world’s most benighted places, information is already available.  It is how that information is put together – the contexts, relationships and the narratives – that counts.

As persuaders we need to acknowledge what we know, what salesmen and marketers have long understood and what even science is beginning to explain. We are not in the information business. Information and facts are part of our raw material, but our business involves persuasion that is less like a library and more like a negotiation paradigm and rational decision making is not enough to achieve success. I mentioned framing, but I should say a little more.  The frame is how you characterize information or events.   If you want to be pejorative, you can sometimes call it spin, but there is no way you can understand complex reality w/o some kind of frame. Most of our frames are unconscious, but that doesn’t mean they are not powerful or pervasive.  Think of the ubiquitous sports frame.   Describing something like American football, (i.e. centrally planned, stop and start with specialized plays and players) versus football other places (i.e. fluid, fast breaking with the players less specialized) makes a big difference to how it will be perceived. Or think of how we try to frame our presidents.  We want our candidate to be in the frame with Lincoln and Washington, Warren G. Harding and Rutherford B Hayes, not so much.

Build a community & be part of a community

 Figure out what you can contribute and do it.  Remember people make decisions in the contexts of their relationships.  Also make sure that you get something back. 

The basis of almost all human relationships is reciprocity. All human societies believe in reciprocity. It has survival value. You want to be able to give to your fellow man and expect that he will do the same when you are in need. When that breaks down, so does civil society. It is probably a good idea to be SEEN to get something in return anyway, since if you don’t others will impute an ulterior motive anyway.

I know that this sounds crassly materialistic, but the reciprocity need not be material. You might help a person in the “pay it forward” mode, assuming that when he gets the opportunity he will help somebody else. The reciprocity might just be gratitude. But when a recipient is left w/o some way to reciprocate, a good person feels disrespected.  At first they are happy to get something for nothings, but they soon learn to despise their benefactor.  And maybe they should, since his “generosity” is taking their human dignity.

A simple rule in persuasion is that it is often better to receive than to give.  Let the other parties feel that they have discharged their social obligations, maybe even that THEY are the generous ones. You notice that the most popular individuals are rarely those who need or want nothing from others, even if they are very generous. And one of the most valuable gifts you can receive is advice and knowledge.  Let others share their culture and experience.

Just a few more short points …

Inclusive & Exclusive 

Communities are inclusive for members and exclusive for others. You attract nobody if you appeal to everybody. You have to earn membership in any community worth joining. 

Personal – or at least personalized  

Editors and marketers have tried for years to homogenize for the mass market. That’s how we got soft white Wonder bread and Budweiser beer.  Niche markets – and social media is a series of niche markets – require personality.  We do a poor job of segmenting our market in public diplomacy.  This is something I will work on when I get to Brazil and I suggest you think about when you get to your posts.

Reiterate

Success is continuous learning – an iterative   process- not a plan – and a never ending journey.  As I wrote up top, we never get to the end. We have to learn from our failures and our successes and move on. The best we can do is make our own ending worth of the start.   

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Notes on Social Media & Public Diplomacy

A more mature understanding of the social media

It is no surprise that our early forays into the media felt a bit like returning to high school.   Much of the social media was for and by teenagers and catered to their motivations and predilections.   We followed through that door, looking for that ever elusive youth market and we were about as successful as adults always are when they try to “hang around” with teenagers and young adults.

This is one of the impressions I got from participating in an open discussion about how we (State) use social media in Washington and at posts at the tail end of the FSI course on using the social media.  In addition to teaching techniques this course was also designed to assimilate experience from those who actually work with the social media on a regular basis in real world public diplomacy, making, as course organizer Bruce Kleiner characterizes it, a “why-to” as well as a “how-to” course. 

Bruce ran what amounted to an informal expert practitioner focus group and since Bruce and I had worked together to design this module, I got to be there to take part and take notes.
The good news is that everybody is now using a wide variety of social media methods and platforms in public diplomacy.  We no longer have to do the sales job.  And we are maturing.  You can see the changes month-by-month.  Not much more than a year ago, it was enough to be on the media. 

At first we looked to the social media for numbers.  In many ways adopting the teenage paradigm of popularity, we measured our own worth and that of our programs by how many people put their names on lists, called themselves our friends or said they approved of our comments. We learned how to build audiences and found that it was easy.   But we don’t have the audiences we want and we don’t really have the audiences that want what we provide.

Several people complained that they were pressured to create and populate Facebook or Twitter realms w/o specification about the kinds of audiences they were supposed to get.   The result was massive, unsegmented groups of fans or friends, with little commonalities of interests.  We indiscriminately push our messages to these groups and call it a success if we reach a million people. But  we are now exiting this stage of development.

The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on

It seemed fairly unanimous that audiences and content count.   The social media can get people’s attention, but we have to hold it once we got it.  This is harder.  I compared some of the social media to barking dogs.  The bark says “I’m here; I’m here; I’m here.”  Our audiences are acknowledging our presence and now asking what is it we want to say?   If the content that follows is insufficient or not well targeted, we will be about as effective and maybe as annoying as a barking dog.

This transition will not be easy.  We have developed general social media audiences but we want to pass messages about specific topics.  It is unlikely that any particular people will be interested in all or even most of our topics and few people will sift through all of what we send to find the nuggets of gold. 

Segment the audience and sell to the segments

Skilled marketers know that marketing is not selling.  It requires understanding your customers, your products and your potential products and putting these things together.  It is easy to take marketing analogies too far, but this one fits public diplomacy well.

The first imperative is to segment our audiences.   This may mean trimming them to smaller and more interested proportions.   A community that allows everybody in quickly becomes a mob, where important ideas and messages are lost in a sea of inanity. This actually fairly describes much of the social media.  If we want to make this medium useful, we have to tend to our audience segments.

Of course addressing a market segment implies that you have some product particularly appropriate for that audience.   This means content and often very specific content.   An individual interested in climate change, for example, will not long remain satisfied with simple information aimed at a general audience.   This will apply to any subject we can think of and it will happen even if we are trying to talk to experts.  An informed layman will quickly move beyond the general information and demand more.   If they don’t find it with us, they will move elsewhere.   Information is easy to find on the web.

Social media exacerbates a classic sales temptation.  An aggressive salesman can sell products his organization cannot reasonably produce or deliver.   A good salesman ensures that customers get what they want and his organization can produce and deliver what he promises.   This is often the difference between short and long term success.  

Another temptation is to use the social media as a conduit to unload our products into the market.   I asked how many people would actually read the various speeches or watch the videos we send out.  The response was not overwhelming.   If we, who are more interested in such things than a most people, will not be interested in these things, why do we think others will want them?   We have an important role to play for sources or archiving.    Most people will not read through a whole speech by the Secretary of State or the President, but many people want to have it available as reference.   They essentially mine out the nuggets of information they want.   Filling this need is a web 1.0 function or even just an archiving task.   We might use social media to remind audiences that these things are available, but regularly sending out texts is probably a waste of time and may even morph into the barking dog mode of annoyance.

Culture matters

It was clear from the discussion that people at our posts have many similar problems and successes with social media.  It was equally clear that there are substantial differences in what is possible or desirable based on local cultures, environments and priorities.   There is no such thing as a global product and we need our people on the ground to tailor and modulate our messages.   BTW – it is also very important to have up-to-date information from people on the ground.  Conditions change rapidly and what worked last year may be a disastrous failure this year.   There is no substitute for local expertise.  Social media can leap borders, but it still has to appeal to local people when it arrives.

Answering criticism

Another audience question concerned responding to criticism.   Sometimes we just have to repeat the same answers over and over because there is nothing else to say. This may not be satisfying to us or others but it is the way it has to be.  We agreed that we should welcome legitimate criticism and answer it truthfully and forthrightly.   There is a danger, however, of getting too deeply involved.  We don’t know how many people are really involved in an online discussion and/or if it may reach a wider audience.   We also don’t know the level of commitment.    For example, there might be only a couple individuals criticizing us.  Maybe they have thousands of friends “involved” but these people don’t really care.  Remember the difference between involvement and commitment can be seen in a ham and eggs breakfast.  The chicken is involved; the pig is committed.

We can never be as efficient or nimble as a private firm

We talked a little about the differences between what we (USG) can do versus what private firms, or even smaller governments can do.  Much private effort in the social media is to simply build awareness or name recognition.  Unlike most private firms, the USG has no need to build awareness of itself.  Everybody knows who we are.   We also must recognize that people may see even our innocent effort as menacing.   I told the story about my recent experience with Amazon.com.  I checked out a few books on ancient Greek literature a few days ago. Now Amazon.com is sending me updates on books in ancient Greek.  Their machine has noticed and categorized me. I don’t find this offensive and it may help me find things I might want.   Now imagine that you are a citizen of a country where America is not universally liked.  You learn that we have the kind of information on you that Amazon.com has on me.  Are you happy about that?   What if you find out that the U.S. Government wants to “help” educate your kid?  We have to recognize that we are not a normal organization and that our embrace is not always welcome.   That means that we can almost never just copy what others are doing successfully and we will never be as efficient or nimble as private firms because we cannot let ourselves be so.

Somebody has to do it

There was mention of the problems of staffing.  Social media duties tend to get tacked onto the workload.  Since most posts are already working with reduced staffs and already “doing more with less,” this can be a strain.  There are no easy solutions to the staffing problem.   All of them involve priorities.  We agreed that posts need to identify who will be doing the new work and how much time it will take.  Then they have to ask and answer the question whether the new duties are important enough to displace old ones, and if so what.   Of course, social media will sometimes automatically displace older duties.   The need to copy, collate and distribute is vastly decreased because of the social media, for example.   As with most management decisions, it might be better to reengineer and/or eliminate whole sets of tasks rather than tinker around the edges.  

A flatter hierarchy might be very helpful, since a great deal of time is spent getting clearances and making fairly meaningless cosmetic changes to documents.   The old saying that you shouldn’t spend a dollar to make a dime decision goes for wasting time too. 

The medium is not the message

Finally, we have to recognize that the advent of social media may be less immediately revolutionary than we initially thought.   Most people still get their information through traditional media, especially television and radio.  When President Obama spoke in Cairo, for example, it was hailed as a social media success but almost everybody who saw the speech, saw it on television.   Even people who saw it later on Internet saw it essentially through the television lens, just delivered differently.  And following up on social media has not proven as successful as the original excitement would have implied.  You still have to have something to say and you still have to maintain relationships.   Social media will become increasingly important as components in the toolbox of public diplomacy, but it will never be a standalone technique.   Social media can support programs, but it never can be the program itself.  The medium is not the message.  

BTW – I gave the keynote to this course.  The PowerPoint is available below.

Social_Media_FSI_April_5-1Download
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Short Cuts

Being able to cut through Fort Meyer has greatly improved my biking to work experience. I had almost forgotten that I have this blog to thank for this. One of my colleagues at State Department send me an email telling me that Fort Meyer was open again after reading this post.

Above is an interesting sign of the stimulus. It struck me as funny for a few of reasons, first because it is the Hoover Building. Hoover’s reputation on economic recovery is not that good. Second this renovation started a long time ago. Chrissy used to work in that building and they were already renovating it when she was working there back in 2007/8. Third, this building was one of the first big government buildings in Washington. It was the biggest office building in the world when it was completed in 1932. 

Above is new bigger home that replaced a little ones. This kind of “tear down” or “in filling” is still happening, as you can see, but has slowed down a lot because of the recession. People buy the smaller houses, like the one at the right, tear them down and rebuilt bigger, newer ones, like the one on the left, on the lot. This one is not as big as some and it seems to fit in well with the neighborhood. Sometimes people build huge houses that essentially cover the entire lot, often literally shading out their neighbors. 

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Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Flattery

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, its lack much be a sincere form of rebuke and our hypertensive desire not to be seen to be intolerant of “judging” makes it one of the few measures we can actually use to understand what people really think.  The capacity to copy traits you think are good or useful and let the negative ones die out is one of the primary benefits of diversity.   It is the essence of adaption and the lubricant of innovation.  It is how all successful people and groups have prospered in practice, but it has never been very popular in theory.

It seems a little mean, especially since it will tend to fall hardest on the least successful individuals and groups in society, since they are almost by definition doing the things that don’t work as well. Nobody wants to copy what losers are doing. And it gets entangled with ideas of cultural values and ethnicity.

What is culture?  Basically, a culture is a set of habits and traditions that were useful at least some times in the past.  Whether they remain useful is a question we have to ask constantly. There is nothing sacred about any particular cultural traits and while we should be very careful when changing long-established practices and relations – like ecology, they often have connections and purposes that are not immediately apparent – change them we must.

American culture is extraordinarily good at this. In the 1980s, we went through a revolution in business management, where we copied, adapted and developed many organizational principles from Japan.  Emphasize those words adapted & developed.  It was not just a copy; it was something better suited to our needs. Or consider the changes in the American diet, at least the one we know we are supposed to eat. My father would not recognize many of the things we commonly consume. We have imitated and developed.

Yet it is a common theme that Americans do not learn from others and try to force others to be more like them. One reason for this is that we adapt & develop with so much ease that it often goes unnoticed, even by us.  Another is a kind of bias against American ideas.  When we adopt something, it seems to become “American” and others might resist it for that reason, often while imitating it, BTW – the sincerest form of flattery – because it works. But I think a lot of it has to do with the other side of that flattery equation. The lack of imitation is a kind of rebuke and there are lots of things we don’t imitate and don’t want to imitate.

But too often we are too hypocritical, i.e. politically correct, to be open. Instead we praise, but don’t take any concrete steps to learn or adopt. 

In my observation, the more people effusively praise something, the less they actually respect it* and if you have to have a special sponsored celebration you can be pretty much sure that nobody will be imitating whatever/whoever you are celebrating (i.e. they don’t really want it).   Think about it from the point of view of what we really want. When we were trying to learn about Japanese quality control methods a couple decades ago, we didn’t have to sponsor special months for it. Everybody wanted it. People & firms paid their own money and spent their own time trying to learn about it because they really thought is was something they wanted.

The cynical saying that you should either be sincere or fake sincerity only works in the short term and only for transactions that involve mostly words. If you loudly praise the food I serve, but won’t eat it, I know you don’t really like it.  After a while, I will resent the insincere praise.

We should respect all humans because they are human, but there are some types of respect that cannot be given or demanded; they must be earned. You earn this kind of respect by what you do over a period of time.  It means doing something worthy of emulation or creating something worthy of imitation. Respect is a kind of mutual society. You can only get it and only give it if you are doing the right things. 

This is the harder part. There are some people whose respect you don’t want and some whose respect you can’t get. When you are not getting the respect you think you deserve, it usually is your own fault, but sometimes it really is their fault. 

* Here I am talking about traits, habits and culture. Of course, we may legitimately praise heroes or great events, but even that can go overboard.

BTW – the picture is a metal tree in the sculpture garden near the Capitol Mall. I hate it. Who needs an imitation tree when there are plenty of real trees. I wonder how much they paid for it.

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Computer Revolution #4 (and counting)

I am doing my FSI talk again on Monday.   It is very similar to the one I did in February, but there are some additions and changes.   The new PowerPoint is below.  I was thinking through the slides and about the impact of new media this time.  Below are a few ideas.  I don’t know if I will use them in the very short presentation, but maybe if somebody asks.

Social_Media_FSI_April_5Download

This is the forth computer revolution that I have personally experienced

The first was when I was still too young to have much of an understanding.   This was the one where computers were going to take over the world.  Science fiction movies had computers just usurping the thinking of humans.   There were “evil” computers like Hal on “2001: a Space Odyssey” (funny, 2001 came and went w/o that Jupiter mission) but mostly they were just better than we mere humans.  The irony is that the actual computing power was so low in those days that we just laugh at the perceived threat.

I was part of the next revolution, proud and excited.  This was when young people (like me at the time) were going to use computers to change the world and displace all the accumulated wisdom of the ages with our raw young intelligence bolstered by computer power. The problem was that we really didn’t know how to do anything.  The computers just helped us do nothing much faster than before and leveraged our mistakes.  I recall a saying on the wall the University of Minnesota, where I got my MBA. It said,

“to err is human, but if you really want to mess up you need computer support.”

The other MBA epitaph was, “Often wrong but never in doubt.” Harness that to the power of computers and see what you come up with.   The third revolution was the dot.com boom of the late 1990s.  This is the one we have to pay close attention to because it has lessons for today.  The idea of the dot.com is that you didn’t really need any content or products. The race was for attention – eye balls.  People set up web sites supposedly selling all sorts of things, but all they really cared about was exposure.  Money poured in to investments in dot.com. It wasn’t until around March of 2000 that people noticed that the emperor had no clothes. The demise of the dot.com pulled the market down with it and also much of the economy.  The NASDAQ still hasn’t fully recovered. Some firms like Amazon.com came out winners. The difference was their organizational skills and the fact that they delivered real products.

We have our own special dot.com cautionary tale. We (the USG, State, USIA) messed up big-time in the 1990s in relation to public affairs, or at least the concept did.  Many were taken in by the promise of the Internet and there were those who thought we didn’t need a real presence on the ground in other countries. We could do it all from Washington.  During the 1990s, we closed posts, shut down most of our libraries (made them into Information Resource Centers), eliminated many of our centers overseas and generally let our public affairs capacity atrophy. A simple but telling statistic is that there were only about half as many public diplomacy officers in 2000 as there had been in 1990.  After the attacks of 9/11, we really didn’t have the people on the ground or the experience needed to communicate with world publics. The website “air war” was a bust. You can reach millions of people, but you are just wasting your time if they aren’t paying attention or your message doesn’t appeal.

BTW – Rebuilding American diplomatic capacity began soon after 9/11. Colin Powell spearheaded a diplomatic readiness initiative to help compensate for the damage done during the 1990s Results are starting to show but rebuilding networks will take a while longer. U.S. diplomacy has a very peculiar age structure because of the nineties neglect. There are many new employees (>10 years experience) and many old employees (20 > years experience), but not many in the middle.  This will be a challenge in the next five years, as much of the experience will go out the door through retirements. (Career diplomats can retire after 20 years.) It will be a good time to look for a job in the Foreign Service, but our government will be paying for mistakes of the 1990s for the next ten years. You cannot turn these things on and off like a light bulb. Think of public affairs like a forest. Things take time.  The trees you plant today determine the forest years from now and you cannot expect to walk in the shade of your trees that you didn’t plant 15 years ago. Some things just take time.

Now here we are in revolution #4. I don’t know how this story will end.   My earnest hope is that we will remember that we are always and everywhere talking to people.   People are funny.  They don’t always do what you think they will.   You still have to understand them before you can expect them to understand you.   In this latest age of new media, reaching out with the newest tools is necessary, but not sufficient to achieve our goals