Statistically, there’s (almost) certainly a correlation between chandeliers and successful diplomacy. I might not be able to prove it, but over the years, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has conducted its high-level business in high-ceilinged rooms, chandeliers all a-glitter above the men in suits. So the upcoming London Conference on Cyberspace is a very differentRead… Read more »
Occasionally, I’m asked to do presentations and discuss what the Foreign Office does, digitally speaking. The fact I never get asked twice by the same people is something I prefer to gloss over. What I try and get across in these explanations of strategy is that if we’re trying to communicate, we have to takeRead… Read more »
The Foreign Officehas been around for a long time, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. Organisations that have survived for over 200 years (and there aren’t many of them) tend to create their own culture and language. In our case, those linguistic habits seem, to me at any rate, to be mostly initials and acronyms. I’veRead… Read more »
It’s not often that Joey Barton crops up in international diplomacy. For those who don’t know him, he’s a premiership footballer, currently with Newcastle United (though not for much longer). Talented, but bogged down with ‘anger management issues’, he’s in dispute with his employers for tweeting about internal issues. Transfer-listed and made to train onRead… Read more »
Talk of government departments as ‘brands’ makes many civil servants uneasy. If they wanted that sort of talk, they’d go to Hoxton, not Whitehall. Yet when the concept of, for example, the FCO as a brand comes under some threat, then there’s a different kind of uneasiness. That uneasiness includes me – earlier this week,Read… Read more »
The regular reader of these chunterings will have noticed a pattern. How you decipher that pattern is up to you. Where I see the ‘dissemination of relevant content through all available channels to established audiences across the digital sphere’, you might see ‘obsessive bandwagon jumping, ticking off social media trying to look trendy’. Either way,Read… Read more »
I’ve burbled on this point before, but more and more, the point of what the Foreign and Commonwealth Office tries and do in digital (or what we ought to be trying to do) is to concentrate not so much on creating a destination website, but to work on setting up the mechanics to deliver ourRead… Read more »
One of the joys of sudden web trends is the speed at which the too-cool-for-school types start to affect disdain and boredom for something that’s been popular for all of a week or so.Take Quora.com– a US-based site which styles itself as ‘a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized byRead… Read more »
Digital diplomacy is a two-way street – once an organisation like the Foreign Office is publishing news, comment, and policy information on the internet , then it needs to learn how to listen and respond too.At ministerial level, this is a problem of opportunity and timetabling more than anything. Opportunities for participation on television andRead… Read more »
You’ll have noticed the drift towards freeing up the information of the UK’s Foreign Office for others to use – the feeds, the API, the social media, and so on. Getting our travel advice especially into the sites, widgets, pages, applications that others are using is hugely important. We have to take this stuff toRead… Read more »