Tag: media

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Rumors, Conspiracy Stories & Disinformation

My colleague and friend Todd Leventhal has written a paper about conspiracy theories and disinformation, which I include at this link.  I recommend you read it.   Todd is one of the foremost experts in this field and unlike many who study it only academically; Todd has been in the trenches. 

I first became aware of Todd in the 1980s when I was assigned to Brazil.  Those were still Cold War years and despite – maybe because of – glasnost the KGB was particularly active in spreading lies and planting stories in media worldwide. I  had to address lots of Soviet disinformation in the my local media.  Todd’s information helped me smack down at least some of the silliness.  

Especially troubling and pervasive was the story cooked up by the by KGB that the U.S. had created the AIDS virus as a bioweapon. The story still resurfaces from time-to-time.   It was fairly easy to debunk, since there were so many inconsistencies in the time-lines and the biology involved, but most of those who pass along conspiracy theories are not very bright or they are malicious, so that facts have less impact on them than you might imagine.  Nevertheless debunking these things early and often limits their spread.  It is like pulling weeds in a garden. It is not much fun and you are never done, but you have to do it.

Read the paper.  Todd discusses why and how rumor spreads.   Of course, false information often proliferates in the same ways that accurate information does and we have to be self-aware enough to understand that much of what we believe at any one time is not accurate.  So just thinking about these things in the way Todd does is a useful therapy for the hubris that we self-designated smart guys (wise guys?) often suffer.  It is also useful to recall that false information often seems to make more sense than truth, since the lies can be modified to make a more coherent narrative.

There is a consistent human tendency to believe that big results must have had big causes. When a great leader is killed by a lone-gunman, we almost instinctively inflate the assassin to the size of his target.  This kind of mental matching is usually unwarranted and it is not harmless, since it elevates little villains to iconic status and helps make political violence more successful.

Anyway, I will pass along to Todd any comments you want to make.   It is worth reading his paper.

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Talking to the Dead

I am listening to a great “Teaching Company” series on Western Literature.   (BTW – you never have to pay full price for these things.  They always go on sale.)  Western literature traditions are a little out of style these days, which is a shame because the great literature really does speak to us across the centuries.   A good education has to include some knowledge of the classics and nothing can become a classic until it has been well-known enough for a long enough time to influence thought and literature in a broad sense.   In other words, no matter how great something written a couple of years ago may be, it cannot have the power of older literature.   Maybe it is a future classic, but it is not a classic yet.

Literature extends influence beyond the grave

The guy giving the lectures explained that literature is a way of talking to the dead and getting an intergenerational perspective.  I was thinking about that as I drove down to the farm last weekend.   I was listening to “Infotopia,” by Cass Sunstein.   He was talking about markets, in the broad sense to include markets for attitudes and ideas and how they aggregate the opinions and attitudes of many minds.  Literature is like that.    He mentioned that the great economist Fredrick Hayek had contended that traditions are a type of market too and you have to be careful changing established relationships, since they are essentially long-term distilled experience, a record of how people adjusted and adapted to problems over the years.   Edmund Burke made a similar observation about morality.   I did too.  When I wrote my note Found in Translation I didn’t directly recall my literature professors or Hayek or Burke, but don’t doubt that is where the ideas originated.   One of the benefits of a liberal education is that you learn all these things and if they sink in early enough and deep enough you come to think of them as your own.   There not any really new ideas; just restatements of and new compilations. 

Reformulations

The funny thing is that those w/o the “useless” liberal education often believe they thought them up for the first time.   And they often get away with it.  Many best-selling authors and highly paid speakers recycle old stuff.  I suppose they sometimes do it consciously, other times not.    You tend to get the classics in the watered down version.  I remember reading the science fiction “Foundation Trilogy” by Isaac Asimov.  I recognized it back then as a allegory of the fall of the Roman Empire.  What I didn’t get at the time was how closely the second foundation tracked with Boethius on the consolation of philosophy. Asimov was an educated man, so I think he did it on purpose.   Generations of Sci-Fi fans have essentially read Boethius.    

BTW – I first came met Boethius way back in 1975. You can go through college w/o ever coming into contact with him at all, since he has largely “fallen out of the cannon.”  I got to know him when studying Chaucer.  Boethius was a much bigger deal in the Middle Ages than he has been more recently and if you study the philosophy surrounding Chaucer’s writings, you run into Boethius. I mostly forgot about him for the last … oh thirty years. I was reminded of the details of his death by the audio program.  It was dreadful, but I guess it helped secure his position as a martyr.  After he fell afoul of the Ostrogoth King Theodoric and was executed by having wet leather straps wrapped around his head. The straps contracted as they dried and crushed his brain. It must have been very unpleasant and it is an example of man’s inhumanity to man. What kind of guy even thinks of that?  I mean really, was there a bunch of guys sitting around thinking of novel uses for wet leather straps and ones gets the eureka moment?   Well, hey, we can use these leather straps to wrap this guy’s head.

Old literature and new persuasion

I am thinking of “new” media and the arts of public diplomacy persuasion in my last couple of posts, since I am doing the FSI course on that subject, but I think this fits right in.   Consider the persistence of influence of great literature and how it is so useful to have a compete repertoire of literary images, motifs and metaphors.   After all, not only are they time-tested but they also lurk in the subconscious of our culture waiting to be revealed.  It is a good lesson in this ostensibly fast-changing world that some things move slowly but have profound influence and create sustainable structure and technologies of the mind.

And the delivery mechanism is very much new media. I get these lectures over the Internet and download them onto my I-pod.  This I-pod is smaller than a matchbox, yet can probably hold a full college curriculum of courses and lectures, along with supplementary texts. Sweet.  But how does that delivery method change how the classics are received and how about who receives them?  An old guy like me is unlikely to get them from a college professor standing in front of him.  The whole relationship to knowledge is changing.  That is new media.

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Re-defining the Human Space

My colleague Bill May made a good point during our recent talk at FSI about Edward R. Murrow’s fabled last three feet when he explained that his kids have virtual friends that they have never met in person and may never meet in person.  But they are still friends.  They still influence each other.  They have entered Edward R. Murrow’s three feet range but they have done so electronically.   

Putting the human space in context

Let’s update Murrow and maybe put his statement in context.   Of course, the social media didn’t exist in his time as it does today, so he was talking only about broadcast media when he said electronic media.  He was right back then and he is right today – if we talk about broadcasting.   

The three feet idea refers not to physical presence but to human engagement.   Engagement w/o physical presence was nearly impossible in Edward R. Murrow’s time; it has become easy to do today.  So we should modify the three-foot-theorem, but not abandon it.   And Murrow’s admonition about overestimating the reach of electronic media still applies.

You can’t have a two-way relationship with a million friends …

The key is engagement and engagement still requires human interaction.   I have previously written about the Dunbar number, which postulates that individual human beings cannot maintain meaningful contact with more than something like 150-250 people.  There just is not enough time in the day and we don’t have the cognitive power to do more.   Even if you could keep millions of relationships straight, the recipients might object.   Most people like to think that their friends care about them.   How much can a guy with a million friends care about any one of them?   There has to be some kind of sorting.

… but maybe machines can

There is a qualification, however. People are increasingly comfortable interfacing with machines and artificial intelligence.  For example, I feel I have a relationship with something like Amazon.com, even though I am certain that no human at Amazon.com knows my name or cares about me as a person. Amazon.com has a very good algorithm which figures out what I like by comparing my previous purchases to those of others. Google does a similar thing with search.   

Kids love their teddy-bears

They are just making comparisons and projections based on the past behavior and revealed preferences, but it sure seems like human intelligence. And just like the kid who personifies his teddy-bear, I have to admit that I have personified Amazon.com, Charles Schwab, the Nature Conservancy and many of the other organizations that play these kinds of personalization games with me. I like to think that there are humans behind all this, but I don’t think there are.   Or more correctly, the humans are also part of this personalization machine.  If I call an actual person at Charles Schwab, they are very friendly and they know a lot about me – BECAUSE of the relationship we both have with the algorithm.  This is not real human contact.

Does human interaction have to be with humans?

The implications are both comforting and frightening and public affairs professionals have to pick up both ends of this stick.  Some “human” transactions can indeed be put on autopilot and the interactions may actually improve.   I prefer to do my banking, travel arrangements and much of my shopping online and would rather interact with a computer database than with a person.   But that goes only for things I already understand. I still trust humans more when I am making unfamiliar decisions.  We need both.

The test of artificial intelligence is how long it takes before you know that there is not another human on the other side of your conversation.  As technology improves, it takes us longer to know and we care less when we find out.  The machine has an advantage over us: it never forgets.  That means it can recognize long-term trends and patterns we might miss in ourselves and others. They say that a good friend is someone who sometimes knows you better than you know yourself. Welcome to the new world.

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Second Draft of History

If journalism is the first draft of history, some of the stuff that appears on the new media is like notes jotted on the back of a napkin.   How can anybody make sense of this cacophony of contradiction?   You can’t, actually.  Events don’t make sense until they are put into a narrative.   It is true that journalists usually get the first shot at constructing the narrative, but their perspective is limited because they don’t know how the story will end.    They usually don’t even have all the current parts and don’t understand the interrelationships.   But you have to start someplace.

The first ones to get the story out often have an advantage in shaping narratives because once you have heard a story with facts arranged in particular ways it is hard to see it any other way.   And sometimes the facts can be influenced by an information cascade, where each subsequent person is influenced  with the one before until everybody thinks everybody else agrees on a formulation that might not be true in detail and sometimes not even true in general.   That is why pressure groups and politicians are so enthusiastic about getting their talking points accepted early.

But it doesn’t end there.   Subsequent events often change the interpretation of earlier ones.   Time may be linear, where causes must precede effects, but memory is not and so perception is not and history is not.   Beyond that, truth matters and investigations and comparisons help find more truth (although I don’t think we ever arrive at THE truth, we can get closer if we work at it.)

So what is the second draft of history?  It traditionally consisted of memoirs & the results of academic seminars.  Henry Kissinger’s “White House Years” or the various Bob Woodward books are other examples.  I think what we are seeing more and more today are television documentaries setting at least the intermediate narratives.   Programs like PBS Frontline are the obvious example, but lately more pervasive are the kinds of things you see on “History Channel” or “The Military Channel.”  These are often appreciated by specialists of those really interested in the facts in question, so they have greater staying power than things aimed at more general audiences.

I have been watching what I think is a rewrite of the Iraq war narrative.   The “first draft” featured U.S. troops suffering confused in a confusing environment in a war they couldn’t win.   The truer narrative that I see coming out in specialty publications and some military documentary programs is that the Iraq experience was difficult but ultimately successful counter insurgency campaign.  It doesn’t discount or overlook the mistakes, but accounts for them in context.  My guess is that MOST people still believe the old narrative, but most people really don’t care that much.  The people who really care enough to find out are the ones that understand the revised one and ultimately, that revised narrative is the one that will stick after the ephemera is passed.

So in the end it is not only numbers or precedence that counts but also intensity of interest or maybe demonstrated accuracy and consistency with other contemporary and subsequent events. When we want to find out about past events, few of us go to old newspapers. We look for near contemporary analysis and this second draft of history becomes what we (a little loosely) call primary sources. And those sources shape the narrative … usually.

Around 1274 BC the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II fought a battle with the Hittites at Kadesh, which is in what is now Syria.  The Egyptians wrote the history and Ramses left an impressive monument to his victory.   It is the earliest example we know of an attempt to set a narrative.   Most historians don’t believe Ramses, but archeological evidence is inconclusive.   The Egyptians subsequently pulled back from the region.   So even more than 3000 years after the event, the precise narrative is still in dispute. The bottom line is that no matter who won that day, the Hittites got to keep the region.   Of course, you don’t find many Hittites around anymore.  There are still Egyptians, but they have little in common with the Ramses variety.  Astonishingly, some of us still care.

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Swine Flue

“If you see 10 troubles coming toward you, you can be sure nine will run into the ditch before they reach you,” so said Calvin Coolidge and he was right. He could also have added that politicians will work the people into hysteria about those nine, take credit for vanquishing them, be distracted enough not to properly address the real one and then blame the tenth (the one that actually arrives) on somebody else.

It seems the swine flu may be the mildest pandemic ever and likely fewer people will die this year than in a normal flu season. We could credit the fast and effective action by the authorities, but there wasn’t much of that. The vaccine is only now becoming generally available. 

Please let me be clear that I am not saying that our efforts to fight the flu were misplaced. I got my own flu shot a couple days ago. It is only that we had a fairly routine problem which the authorities made sound like the return of the Black Death.  Unfortunately, this has become a common communication method.

According to the media, stoked by politicians and special interests, almost everything is an existential crisis.  When you look back, the disasters not only did not destroy civilization as we knew it, but are not important enough to be reported a few months later. On to the next “hair on fire” crisis. This is not a coincidence.

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A Learning Organization and the New Media

IIP is consulting with FSI to produce a course on new and social media. I am doing the keynote plus and intro. Below is what I plan to say.  Here is a link to the PowerPoint presentation on social media:

Social_Media_FSI_Feb_11Download

Not a “how-to” course

You will learn to use new/social media more effectively in this course, but this is not a “how-to” training. The beauty of the new/social media is that it is fairly easy to learn how to use. The challenge is how to use it in the context of effective public diplomacy and the new/social media’s ease of use and very ubiquity complicate the challenge. We are tempted to just start driving down the road, but it is a good idea to look at the roadmap first to figure out where we want to be and how best to get there

For our next trick

We used to ask “what are the parts of the new media?” We identified Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and others and figured out how to use them. Some of us got very good at sending out tweets and finding friends on Facebook. It is very impressive to reach thousands of people with the push of a key, but what are you accomplishing? When we first got into the new media, just getting there was hard and it was accomplishment enough. But we have moved beyond that. If we used to ask about the parts of the new media, the question now is, “what is the new/social media part of?” You will not learn a “Twitter strategy.”

Public diplomacy professionals should no more have a Twitter strategy than a carpenter should have a “hammer strategy.” Like the carpenter, we want a toolbox filled with the best equipment available and we have a building strategy that uses the appropriate tool or combination of tools to get the job done.

The human equation

This is the place where I genuflect toward public diplomacy’s patron – Edward R Murrow – who said that our technologies can bridge thousands of miles, but that persuasion takes place in the last three feet, i.e. the human space. We are always talking to humans and must consider human behavior, preferences and limitations and there are many that affect us. They will differ in various cultures and in various times. We also have to understand that our own actions may fundamentally change the challenges we face.

It is a kind of public diplomacy game theory. The very fact that we are acting changes the environment where we do our things.

A learning organization

This is why we need you and this is why I need you to participate in the talks. There really are no experts in this field, or put differently the actual practitioners, i.e. YOU are the experts. Unfortunately, none of you, none of us, has the complete picture. But we all have some pieces.

How this course is designed to be a little different

We want to pick up some of those pieces. We want to help make State more of a learning organization. Individuals learn, but in order to become a learning organization we have to harvest and synthesis the knowledge of our individual members. Tomorrow Bill May and I will lead a discussion session. I am sure many of you have been in “open discussions” where you know they have a particular goal where you will reach the received wisdom. Less devious trainers sometimes even have the final conclusions written on the flip chart, to be revealed when the group reaches the correct gate at the city of knowledge.

We will try to guide the discussion but we REALLY do not have a goal in mind; more correctly our real goal is to facilitate the learning among all of us. AND we anticipate changing our approach and procedures on the basis of what we learn. If you take this course again, it will be different. And I will write up a synthesis of the results and post it on InfoCentral’s wiki platform. All of you will get the URL and all of you can continue to comment and contribute.

The picture at top, BTW, is Memorial Bridge over the Potomac.

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Freedom is Just Another Word for Nothing Much to Do

It is like the man who has been locked up for a long time.   Suddenly the door swings open and after years of dreaming about it, he is free.   But he really doesn’t know where to go or what to do.  The social media has done that to us in public affairs.   We always said that we would be on easy street if we could just reach people, if we could just overcome the filters of editors and government controls.  To a great extent we now can, but there is less than we had imagined.

A poor workman blames his tools

I am disappointed in the social media in spite or – or maybe because of – our success.   We (State, IIP etc) have succeeded in reaching out directly to millions of people through the new media but the results have been astonishingly banal.   A poor workman blames his tools.   The fault lies not in the social media tools we are using but in our own lack of imagination in using them, coupled with unrealistic expectations.   Social media is what it is.  We can use it well or poorly, but we cannot change its fundamental nature.   So what are some of the things we might try to do differently?  Or maybe, what are the misconceptions that are keeping us from doing as well as we could?   To use the 1990s B-school jargon, how can we shift our paradigms?

Our reach exceeds our grasp

Our minds still inhabit the old world of mass one-way media.   Despite all the protestations to the contrary, we still think in terms of television, where one announcer reaches millions of people and it makes a difference.   We CAN still reach millions with new media, but so can lots of other people.  The power of television was not that it could reach millions.  Its power centered on its capacity to dominate the attention of millions of people.   

The wealth of options creates a poverty of attention. That means that “reach” is not what it used to be. Those who just want to reach more people don’t understand the realities of social media. Reaching a million people is easy. Grasping them and holding their attention, that is hard.      

It is like yelling “hey” at somebody.   He looks in your direction.   If you say nothing or just say “hey” again, all you will end up doing is annoying him.   Social media is very good at saying “hey” (we tend to call it building awareness) but the follow up is often not there.

You find your keys in the last place you look, because after that you stop looking

Reaching audiences and “Building awareness” w/o follow-up is usually worse than nothing because it allows you to stop at that.   There is a good chance you can fool people with the good numbers.  It sounds very impressive to say that your message reached a million people and you may be encouraged to think that your work is done.   All you need to is repeat this success tomorrow and the next day and you are on easy street. The most devious way to hide something from someone is to make him think he found it already. Let him go happily and ignorantly on his way.   We fool ourselves when we settle for reach. 

Less is more?

Of course the opposite end of this bull crap continuum is the contention that you didn’t reach more than a couple people, but that they were really important.   This may be true, but it almost never is.   You can test it by asking for names.   If your expensive program reached only a dozen people, you better know who they are and be able to give a creditable reason why they are so important.   

I will admit it.  I have fallen back on both these subterfuges on occasion; of course well in the past.  Sometimes I have even done it on purpose.   It is possible that your boss just doesn’t understand what you are trying to do, so you do something that you know will generate a big crowd to make him happy so that he will be happy and you can get on with your important work.   Other times, you just mess up. It is easier to claim that you got the small number of key players than these were the only guys you could round up down at the train station.

Now that I am sometimes in a position to be the boss on these sorts of things, I know enough to ask the proper questions.  Sometimes I am polite enough not to, although I usually follow up with an “amusing anecdote” so they know not to try it again.  

Getting it right more important than just getting it

My disappointment with the social media has just made me more enthusiastic about getting it right. We really will need to change some of the ways we do business.   We really do have to think about a new “community manager” role for online communities.  This person has to be like a diplomat in many ways.  That means that he/she need more than technological skills or the ability to “reach out”.  He/she also need some substantive knowledge.   If you are going to participate in a science community, you better know something about science.

We also have to get more into the human-interface.  Real social media requires real social engagement.   We cannot be social media broadcasters and we have to resist attempts to expand our social media community reach beyond what we can reasonably handle.

Many Distinct Niches Better than a Big Blob

Being overly broad is also not usually desirable or successful in building a community.   You are better off working with many niche communities made up by people really interested and committed to a topic than trying to reach a big general audience.   A niche audience allows each individual to get what he/she is looking for.   As the community develops, members begin to feel a sense of belonging.  They value the community and protect it.  A community like this will usually be self policing, since individual members will have the expertise and perceive the interest to discipline bad actors and correct bad information.

Knowing your audience is important but identifying topics rather than audiences is the key to success.   Naturally topics have to be interesting to somebody but audiences will form around topics.   Identifying audiences and then trying to find topics to attract them not only nearly impossible to do, it is also borderline silly.   It means that you abdicate leadership and allow your priorities to be set by what you think you can easily sell.   Presumably we have some of our own priorities and some of them must be advocated whether they are popular or not.

Wisdom of crowds

I still haven’t figured this out and I am pretty sure I never will.  But I do understand some parts of the puzzle and in true social media fashion I will rely on the hive intelligence.  I think most of what we need to know is already known or can be found by somebody in the State Department.   We just have to find each other and go from a bunch of learning individuals to a learning organization.   Social media can help figure out social media.   It is fitting.

The gate is open wide and we can see the far horizons but none of us knows where to go.  However, all together we might pick the right direction.

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IIP engages new audiences with social media

Below is a draft of an article we submitted for “State Magazine.”  Regualar readers will recognize some of the themes I monotonously return to in this blog.  The text clearly has that bureaucratic feel necessary when writing for any in-house publication, and I did resisted the urge to put in some of my snarky comments, but it highlights some of the good work my colleagues are doing so I think it is worth posting and worth reading.    Below that is an article I wrote for the “Foreign Service Journal” way back in 2001.  Some of the cliche terms were just starting to be used back then.  In the intervening eight years, some things have changed but the basics remain the same.  We still have not really succeeded and we will never be finished, but there is some progress.

 IIP engages new audiences with social media

By John Matel and William May

Social media is, above all, social.  The increasing popularity of Facebook, Twitter, Short Message Service and podcasts gives public diplomacy practitioners unprecedented direct access to publics, opens doors to new overseas audiences and gives us the chance to engage people around the world in new ways.  It is a opportunity and a challenge to pick the right tools.

The Department has more than 130 official Facebook pages, more than a dozen feeds on the Flickr photo-sharing Web site, nearly 40 Twitter accounts and a growing list of blogs.  The Bureau of International Information Programs is taking the lead in employing these tools for international engagement, using cutting-edge technologies to reach people, remembering always that the medium ‑ the technology ‑ is not the message. We try to match the technology to the audience and the message.

At IIP we have found that using social media effectively often requires risk taking, creativity and a willingness to be on the cutting edge of these technologies.  Fortunately, the Department’s leadership is firmly committed to seeking out and implementing these new approaches that expand our ability to engage in exchanges with foreign publics. As Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Judith McHale said recently, “[In] the right circumstances, the use of new media could be smart power at its best, as when employed in dialogue with wired constituencies.”

Global Outreach

An important aspect of the new technologies is the ability and the need to be where the customers are.  IIP’s Digital Outreach Team connects with online users in Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Chinese, inserting the U.S. government’s voice into conversations on prominent blogs and forums and engaging an often skeptical audience on their own ground.  The Iranian government has labeled the team “dangerous and subversive” for its online discussions of the need for greater openness, the economic costs of Iran’s hardliner attitude and Iran’s pursuit of nuclear capability. In fact, the team has engaged in a back-and-forth online dialogue in Persian with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s media advisor.  IIP’s blogging team gives Iranians an unfiltered look at a U.S. perspective on issues such as their nuclear programs and human rights.

“The blogging team’s willingness to address hard issues in an open and transparent way mitigates rancor and helps get our messages heard, copied and amplified,” said IIP Coordinator Jeremy Curtin.

IIP is also developing powerful new media tools for digital diplomats to allow them virtual personal contact with people worldwide.  The bureau has turned Adobe Connect business conferencing software into a multimedia-platform outreach tool that allows U.S. diplomats to cheaply and easily engage with publics via the Internet over high- and low-speed networks.  Dubbed “Co.Nx” (http://co-nx.state.gov), this tool integrates video, audio and print into a flexible platform that can carry the Secretary of State’s Town Hall meetings in Brussels to thousands of participants in Europe or, at slower speeds, transmit small interactive programs in Africa and Afghanistan.

New Meets Traditional 

Working closely with the White House new media team, IIP developed the first worldwide mobile Short Message Service-based event, which was used to engage audiences around the world to discuss the President’s speeches in Cairo and Ghana.  In Africa, where mobile phones are common but few have access to the Internet, the White House and IIP married Short Message Service with traditional radio broadcasts.  People across Africa and the world texted more than 17,000 questions and 50,000 instant messages to the White House in three languages.  President Obama produced a podcast that answered some of the Africans’ questions, and public diplomacy officers in Africa then took the podcast to radio stations, which broadcast it locally.

In another social media effort, IIP launched the “Democracy Video Challenge,” which attracted more than 900 video entries on YouTube (State Magazine tk.).  A second round of the contest began in September.

IIP’s Office of Innovative Engagement, in collaboration with eDiplomacy, has launched the Social Media Hub (http://www.intelink.gov/communities/state/smp/), which contains user manuals for Facebook, Twitter and blogging. It also has best practices, an “Ask the Expert” section and news about training opportunities.  This gives the posts overseas the encouragement and information they need to work effectively with new media.  It also provides a platform to share their experiences with Washington and with each other so that the innovation, imagination, intelligence and specific knowledge of our colleagues around the world can be shared and engaged. 
By using these new social media tools along with more traditional media and outreach, IIP is enhancing its ability to tailor and target public diplomacy messages to specific audiences.   Even as it explores the frontiers of new media, IIP is keeping an eye firmly fixed on the fundamental social aspect of public diplomacy.  At the end of the day, the bureau is still in the business of relating to and engaging with people. 

The new technologies simply make doing that easier – and better.

John Matel is director of the IIP Office of Policy, and William May is director of the IIP Office of Innovative Engagement.

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Below is the article I wrote in 2001.

Speaking Out
Public Affairs: Out of the Information Business
By John Matel

It is hard to recall a time before we could read today’s American newspapers anywhere in the world online, or watch coverage of breaking events on CNN or a host of other TV and Internet news channels. Yet until recently, it was enough for information officers to provide — well, information. Sometimes we provided the latest news, or at least news that local media had not yet seen. Press attachés frequently thought of themselves as a species of journalist, faithfully furnishing unbiased, or at least evenhanded, information and official statements to host-country media. Overseas opinion-makers were often regular readers of our products and the local media treated them as supplementary news services.

What a change! Media organizations and the State Department’s own Internet sites now give our former clients 24-hour access to timely and accurate information. They bypass local public affairs officers, who cannot compete with Washington and should not try. Yet if public affairs sections can no longer be “honest information brokers,” they can be effective policy advocates by using the Internet as a public diplomacy tool. Or to put it another way: The Internet will not replace public affairs, but it will revolutionize its practice.

Strategic vs. Tactical

Despite its ubiquitous quality, the Internet has not lived up to its potential as a public affairs tool. A key reason is confusion over strategic versus tactical use of the new methods. Washington Web sites and most mission sites are almost entirely strategic in that they provide content to support general goals and messages, are directed to a wide, self-selected audience, and are independent of specific public affairs campaigns. They are excellent information sources that compare favorably with those of large private enterprises.

A breakdown results when strategic Web efforts are inappropriately applied to tactical situations. An effective tactical Internet campaign must be forward-looking, support specific programs, be interactively targeted to particular audiences and time-sensitive. It also requires active, sustained support by other public affairs activities; in other words, it is a fully integrated part of a larger public affairs campaign that no longer just informs but advocates a point of view. In many respects, Internet, e-mail and user-friendly electronic databases fulfill the promise of the old USIS Distribution Records System: identifying and reaching the relatively small number of key opinion leaders and transmitters who shape the larger society’s attitudes. This is a necessary but not sufficient aspect of public affairs. To be effective, information must also stick with the consumer.

Making Information Stick

The biggest problem with information delivered via the Internet is that it is not “sticky.” Recipients either cannot recall the message or fail to integrate it into their outlook or behavior. The solution is not limited to making our information more exciting or relevant; what usually makes the real difference are the context of the message and the perceived character and credibility of the messenger. In other words, recipients must trust the source and know what to do with the information they receive.

Beaming data to Palm Pilots works for stock prices and sports scores because recipients are waiting for the information and know how to use it. They have context. The kind of information we disseminate as diplomats is more complicated than factual reporting, however, for we seek to influence, not merely inform. Public affairs events, personal meetings and media relations provide the glue, the context that renders message content relevant and makes it stick in the consciousness of opinion-makers. Without human and programmatic context, electronic resources are like encyclopedias. Without electronic resources, conversely, most programming falls seriously short of providing content. They need to be used together. Consider the following:

In a traditional scenario, we meet a contact at an event, promise to provide more information and maybe even remember to send it. By the time it arrives, however, the contact may have lost interest. We created an opening, but were unable to follow up with content. By contrast, the Internet can provide complete and timely information, but not required context. Thus, a contact browsing a State Department Web page might carefully read a piece of information and make a mental note of it, but quickly lose the “mental notepad” because he or she also read 50 other pages the same day.

Now imagine a combined strategy. The public affairs section organizes an event, with its own Web page offering links to information. Key contacts get e-mail invitations with links to the event page. They can browse the page and get a comprehensive idea of what they want to learn. As a result, we meet a fully primed contact at the event, and can concentrate on specific parts of the presentation. We can then follow up with more information provided by our Area Information Resource Center in an e-mail with Web page links later that day. Now the information sticks with the contact because of the additional context of the event and the personal attention. In fact, he or she may well share it with colleagues and friends, and perhaps refer them to the Web page or forward an e-mail. That is success.

Reaching the Right People

Obviously, the combined strategy is best. Beyond that, skillful use of databases and e-mail will maintain relations as long as the contact remains important. With these tools, we can fine-tune our efforts and maintain meaningful contact with a greater number of truly engaged people (opinion leaders) across a wider spectrum of issues, instead of dispersing our resources on a mass audience, most of whom are indifferent to the message or unable to act on it.

Without technology (or several personal assistants), an average person can maintain regular personal contact with 150 to 200 people during any particular period. This maximum is set by the limits in the number of hours in a day and human memory capacity. Working harder or longer will not significantly increase this number, but technology can, by creating the possibility of mass personalization. Targeted e-mail with Internet links can be very precise in creating contact opportunities, since databases are memory enhancers. Thus, using technologically enhanced methods, one officer can maintain meaningful targeted contact with thousands of individuals. Notice that I am not advocating that this contact work be completely automated, however. In the high-tech world, personal attention is actually even more important.

Toward A New Paradigm

Those who think that technology will make overseas officers irrelevant are as misguided as those who believe they can ignore technology. Information technology will never replace public affairs officers. On the contrary, technology increases the value of human interaction while providing tools that liberate public affairs both from the tedium of being a mere conduit for information and the exciting, but uncreative, experience of having journalists clamoring for the latest breaking news. Because the Internet has made information a free commodity, we no longer score points for providing it. We add value only by customizing information and making it recipient-specific.

Ironically, “hard” technology puts a premium on “soft” skills by devaluing rote, programmed procedures and making the product itself (raw information) less important than the channel of delivery (relationships) and customization (personalization). Also, by eliminating the external discipline of the urgent, the new technology necessitates more creative and self-motivated behavior. Making it all work together successfully requires a new paradigm for public affairs, one that blends our traditional communication and people skills with new communication and people skills.

Technology changes the terms of engagement, but our relationships are with people, just as they always have been, not with their computers or fax machines. Effective communication with people is still the only real business we are in.

Why have we applied these methods only sporadically to our public affairs? One reason is simple newness. Only recently has such communication become possible with a significant number of recipients. Everyone must get used to using the new system. But a more pernicious impediment to effective synergy of electronic communications with public affairs has been the structure of the State Department. New technologies mean different ways of doing business and challenge us to be flexible in everything from job descriptions to traditional perks. They cannot just be strapped on old management structures. The department’s hierarchical, sequential culture, where one step must be cleared up the chain before the next one can begin, is not well-suited to a new world where several problems must be solved simultaneously and hierarchy sometimes ignored. (Who should sing tenor in the choir? The ones who can, not necessarily the senior members.) Bosses are uncomfortable when they lack the requisite knowledge to clear the work of their expert subordinates and are therefore reluctant to trust decisions they make in response to uncertain circumstances. The commitment of State’s new management team to addressing this problem is encouraging, but convincing those who prospered under the old system is a tough challenge.

Nevertheless, it is a challenge that must be met. If an integrated approach is not applied, the department’s public affairs efforts will soon be ignored and irrelevant. If the State Department can’t explain and advocate American interests abroad in a timely and effective way, the task will pass to those better suited for the job or not get properly done at all. These are unacceptable alternatives. To succeed we must release the talent and energy we already have. Let’s do it.

John Matel, an FSO since 1984, has served in Porto Alegre, Oslo, Krakow and Washington. He is currently information officer in Warsaw.

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New Media’s Reach Exceeds Its Grasp

Measuring success in public affairs is hard because we don’t control all, or even most of the key factors. Beyond that, we are essentially trying to measure a cascading set of conditional probabilities, each more fuzzy than the one before.  First we are trying to measure attitudes that nobody really understands.   Then we are asking where those attitudes come from.  After that we want to know the strength of the conviction and how attitude make practical differences.   Do they change behaviors or outcomes?    Complicating analysis is that effects may be significantly separated from the causes in both time and space and you have to account for the effects of temporary circumstances and random chance. 

You begin to see the problem?  All we really need to care about is what people do, but to explain that adequately, we have to consider all the things mentioned above.    

Does the Rooster Make the Sun Rise?

It only gets worse. Public affairs can be a little like peeing in the Pacific Ocean saying it caused the rising tide and practitioners, me included, can sometimes strut like roosters taking credit for the sunrise.  In other words, we are not sure how the attitudes affected behavior, nor are we sure where those attitudes came from or the strength of conviction.  On top of that we are trying to figure out how our small input created a big output.  

Not that we are always merely mendacious when taking credit, BTW.  Public affairs is indeed all about leverage.   Very small input can often create monumental outputs using leverage of the public affairs environment as it pulls in outside resources.   Even this good thing, however, is just another problem for measurement.  The equation would look like this. 

Our input + lots of other resources we don’t control + luck + time = output, which MAY grow into a useful outgrowth.   We cannot control most of the factors in this equation and often cannot even know what they are, so instead we measure the reach (not the effectiveness) of OUR own inputs. Let me illustrate with one of my usual examples, not surprisingly an oak tree 

Mighty Oaks From Tiny Acorns Grow – But a Bushel of Acorns is Not an Oak Forest

If I plant an acorn, it may grow into a mighty oak.  How much credit do I deserve?  Maybe a squirrel would have planted an acorn if I didn’t.  Maybe one would just grow by itself.  Besides that,  I didn’t make the acorn.  I didn’t create the soil.   I cannot control the rain nor can I anticipate every destructive storm nor control all the bugs.  The oak tree will grow according to its form and DNA.   I cannot demand that it become a pine tree. In fact there is little I can do expect remove obstacles to it becoming the best it can be.   But if you come back 100 years later, maybe some kid will say, “My grandfather planted that tree.” 

In public affairs we are not dealing with acorns.  Our analogous measure is reach.   We can get a reasonably good measure of the number of people who COULD have received our message.   It doesn’t mean they DID receive our message or that they paid any attention.   So reach is a problematic measure. 

Don’t Count the Same Guys too Many Times

A look at Facebook shows examples of opportunity, challenge & problems associated with this kind of measurement. You might have a thousand friends or a big rock star might have a million fans.  But how much are they getting the messages?  We also habitually overestimate the connections.  If you have 100 Facebook friends and each of them has 100 friends, you do not have 100 x 100 or 10,000 friends because the sets overlap.  If your friends are also each other’s friends you may have only 100 in total. Overlap is usually not 100% and the real number is probably more than just 100, but it is far less than 10,000.   

Reach is not a very useful measure, but we like it because it is a relatively easy number to find or estimate AND it tends to be the largest number we are can get, especially if we engage in some willful ignorance about human attention spans and math 101 concepts of overlapping sets, as above.    

Reach Exceeds Grasp

And reach is relatively easy to astro-turf, especially in the new media.  There is an interesting article talking about how you can BUY Facebook friends and fans for as little as $.076 and $.085 respectively.  What reach!  If you have big bucks you can reach the all the world in theory.  Who can you blame if your reach exceeds your grasp, if you have a million fans who cannot remember your name or hear your message? 

Hey, the numbers are good, even if they probably overlap and may represent meaningless relationships.  We might become a little suspicious if our extrapolated fan bases (i.e. our estimate of our own fans to the exponent of their fans & friends) exceeded the total population of the earth, but achieving that might take a couple of months anyway.   

I am not saying we should not rejoice at successful numbers, but let’s not try to fool others and let’s not fool ourselves.  Reach provides ONLY the opportunity to engage and engagement provides only the opportunity to communicate and communication provides only to opportunity to make a difference.  You need to start with the acorns, but that doesn’t mean you automatically have a grove of big oak trees.

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Practical + Theoretical = Useful New Stuff?

I would like to bring together people for a conference including those who “do” public diplomacy using the new techniques and technologies such as augmented reality, social networking, text mining & mobile together along with those who develop and study those things in order to discuss practical applications.  

We need to discuss which technologies can be best used to deliver public diplomacy messages and that we and the larger public affairs community can use.  Integral to addressing these issues are our organizational and mission imperatives, which directly affect the extent of use and acceptance of new methods.  Not every new technology is useful for our work and not every useful technology can be used by us.

Subject clusters, along with notional times

8:30 – 9:00

Registration & seating

9 – 9:30

Introduction – new technologies and the new public diplomacy.    A discussion of what has worked so far and what is in the works for the next six months and beyond.

9:30-11:45 (with 15 minute break in middle)

The next big ideas – I envision a panel with an expert on each of these things giving a 15 minute explanation.  Following is a discussion among the panelists with questions from the floor.   We would ask what are the next big ideas and whether or not they are useful in public diplomacy. 

·         Augmented realty – what is it?  What does it do?  How might augmented reality augment public diplomacy?

·         Gaming platforms/virtual realities – what are they?  What is our public diplomacy experience in their use so far?   What are some future applications?  Will “holideck” functions come to dominate online collaboration?

·         Social networking systems – what are they?  What is our public diplomacy experience in their use so far?   What are some future applications?

·         “Old” new techniques (blogging, webpages, outreach) — what are they?  What is our public diplomacy experience in their use so far?   What are some future applications?

11:45-12:45

Content – how much do messages matter?  Can a content neutral or content free social network long endure?   Is such a network worth cultivating?   How can it be used to further public diplomacy goals?  Where will content come from in a post-MSM world (this one is for the journalist and journalism professors)?  Can user-generated content replace professionally crafted material? 

12:45- 1:30

Lunch

1:30-3:30

Putting it together – Panel session format as above

·         Integration/technological models – can one model encompass all/most forms of new technologies?   Can we understand the new technologies w/o an overall model or framework?  How can we determine the appropriate mix to use in various situations?

·         Integration/anthropological models – how do new techniques fit into and alter existing human networks & relationships, both inside and outside organizations?  

·         Integration/information management – can wikis function as information conduits and knowledge generators?  How will dispersed decision making change power structures and priority setting?   Can a series of tactical decisions become strategy?

3:30-5:00

Where do we go from here?  What is the future of public diplomacy?  Does public diplomacy need to be run by, or mostly run by, governments?  Can public diplomacy function successfully as only one voice among many?