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 »
http://www.jenniferschaus.com/uploads/9Tips_Foreign_JS_2011.doc.pdf Jennifer Schaus Jennifer Schaus & Associates Washington, DChttp://www.JenniferSchaus.com
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 »
Over the short life of my blog on the site of the UK’s Foreign Office, I’ve posted a number of times about the ways you can access our feeds , some more feeds and how Directgov’s Innovate team in the UK took up the challenge to build an API. The thought behind this remains consistentRead… Read more »
A while ago I proclaimed the arrival of the Foreign Office on Digg. And now Digg looks like it’s in deep trouble, announcing cuts in staff of 37% earlier this week, following 10% cuts earlier in the year. I’m always sympathetic to people suffering cuts, for obvious reasons, and it’s sad to see a majorRead… Read more »
I’ve said before on this blog (as the sole avid reader will remember) that the mantra for what the Foreign and Commonwealth Office is trying to do digitally is distribution, not destination. We’re not trying to create a network of must-visit websites – experience tells us that government websites tend not to work like that,Read… Read more »