Category: Media

‘I’m not a big Twitter person.’
 
Carleton University Professor David Carment expressed a less-than-enthusiastic reaction to the Canadian government’s efforts at digital diplomacy during a segment for Radio International Canada. He echoes a general worry that complex discussions, such as matters of state, cannot translate into the more colloquial 140 characters of a tweet.
 
This worry is often shared by corporations and CEOs — that a tweet doesn’t carry the gravity or seriousness required in high-stakes, complicated situations. Moreover, they are afraid of the immediacy of responses. Often, you don’t have the time to allow for tweets to go through a ladder of approvals to reply and be active online.
 
But if bureaucratic agencies and world leaders are using social media to engage audiences on everything from security issues to an international refugee crisis, it’s safe to say the worriers are underestimating the platform.
 

What is digital diplomacy?

In its simplest form, it’s how governments use social media to engage in foreign relations with both state officials and everyday citizens. This is done with varying levels of success, but the intention is to embrace an open format and create another dialogue for diplomatic issues. However, without the formal boundaries and borders of traditional diplomacy, this dialogue often bleeds into other forms of dialogue that include civil society activism, policy development, and general public affairs communication with audiences both foreign and domestic.
 
Six years ago, Canada was considered a digital diplomacy laggard. We have since dedicated resources and time to exploring how our government can expand its social media presence. This includes an investment in the Digital Public Square at the Munk School of Global Affairs, an initiative that focuses on open online spaces for citizens living under repressive governments. The project started in 2013 by facilitating a dialogue between Iranian citizens and the Iranian diaspora in Canada, expanding beyond the traditional concepts of foreign ministries. In 2014, Canada was recognized in Twiplomacy, an annual global study of world leaders and governments’ Twitter activity, for having dedicated accounts for most of the country’s missions and embassies. The study also measures the online influence of global leaders by aggregating their tweets, retweets, and interactions on Twitter.
 
The challenge with digital diplomacy, and digital public affairs, isn’t that Twitter or other forms of social media lack sophistication. Anyone who has ever given a presentation knows that the difficult part isn’t the presentation itself; it’s the Q and A that follows. You need to be able to speak on your issue and also be prepared for the ways in which your issue can spread and create new topics and lines of dialogue.
 

The government gets it and you can too:

It’s not just getting your content on social media, how you do it matters just as much. The Internet is an open forum, and response, tone and nuance are all paramount in what should be approached as an ongoing conversation. That the conversation often involves memes or vines doesn’t make it any less effective — often the opposite — and anyone who thinks it unsophisticated does so at their peril. Take, for example, the Canadian NATO delegation’s quick ‘geography’ lesson for Russia.

Geography can be tough. Here’s a guide for Russian soldiers who keep getting lost & ‘accidentally’ entering #Ukraine pic.twitter.com/RF3H4IXGSp

— Canada at NATO 🇨🇦 (@CanadaNATO) August 27, 2014

The difficulty then is in actually embracing the open forum and creating content for participatory platforms. It’s understanding that you’re there to talk with people and not at them. To use it, you can’t think of yourself as bigger than the medium – dense jargon and opaque or vague descriptions don’t play well with others. It can be easy to forget that serious issues don’t necessarily require anything more than straight-forward conversations.
 
So if you’re not a ‘big Twitter person,’ perhaps it’s less about Twitter and more about your approach: it’s hard to be successful on social media without being, in fact, social.
 
Title photo: “tweet” by mozzercork

Does November 9th, 2015 ring a bell?

If you’re of a certain era, you may remember it as the 26th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was on November 9th, 1989 that East Germany announced that all of its citizens could visit West Germany and West Berlin. It was an historic day, with iconic images of East Germans climbing onto the wall to celebrate with West Germans on the other side. It was a week many Canadians spent glued to their televisions. And for the better part of the next two decades, TV remained our go-to source for the day’s news.

Perhaps it was only fitting then that on November 9th, 2015, we learned that Canada’s top TV providers had already lost seven times more customers in 2015 than in 2014. How we consume news, and where we get it, has changed profoundly in the last two decades, and especially in the last five years. Gone are the days when you had to be on television to get your message out to the masses.

If the Berlin Wall fell today, more people would hear about it on Twitter or through their Facebook feed than by watching it on the evening broadcast.

Less than half of Canadians still rely on TV to get their news and the big cable providers lost at least 153,000 subscribers in 2015. More than ever, the industry is threatened by so-called ‘cord-nevers,’ the growing segment of the population that has never subscribed to television. It seems traditional television is going the way of print and radio.

This is an important detail when you’re in the business of shifting public opinion. Typically, we need to get our message out to a specific segment of the population: heavy news users. These people tend to be an active segment of the population and are often the ones we need to get onside. And according to Canada’s Media Technology Monitor (MTM), heavy news users are more likely than others to read news online. In fact, Canadians are more addicted to the Internet than their global counterparts.

In a world where Canadians spend more and more time on their desktop and mobile devices consuming news, we know where we need to be to do our jobs well. That’s why we’re working feverishly to expand our digital offering. To shape opinion, you need a digital strategy.

Do you have one?