Picking up the Gauntlet Thrown by Minister Baird
[Diplomats] have traditionally been good at working with people behind closed doors. Now we are applying those skills to the very public arena of the digital world.
“In the last few months, our missions have made a lot of progress on social media. All outgoing heads of mission are getting training in it. Our services are evolving to meet the needs of a digital generation… This form of direct diplomacy is something we need to build on.
(Read in French, in Spanish) On March 27, Canada’s Foreign Minister confirmed once and for all that the internet is a primary platform for our country’s foreign policy. In a speech inaugurating the John G. Diefenbaker building beside our foreign ministry headquarters, he provided the most detailed vision yet of what this government is trying to accomplish in the world, and how it aims to do so. Social media featured very prominently in the “how.”
This is now the third public statement he has made declaring that the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development is going digital. Along the way, the public response has been positive but marked by a distinct streak of skepticism.
After the Minister’s last statement on the subject in Silicon Valley on February 7, for example, respected University of Ottawa professor Roland Paris acknowledged that “Baird deserves credit for finally acknowledging that a genuine embrace of digital diplomacy is necessary.” But Paris added that to make it successful means “allowing diplomats to communicate in the relatively informal and rapid style of these media.” Hinting he was not convinced this is likely to happen, he concluded that “Baird’s avowed willingness to let Canadian diplomats take chances and make mistakes will need to be demonstrated, not just stated.”[1]
Let me speak here as a Canadian diplomat myself. I agree the government needs to take a risk to embrace the full power of social media. After all, it is always harder to be coherent when speaking in hundreds or thousands of voices rather than one.
But to make this work, we diplomats need to take risks as well. Expressing ourselves in public, on the record, in real time to all possible audiences at once – these do not come naturally to public servants.
This blog represents my effort to take that essential first step. Our Minister has laid the gauntlet by calling on us to “move fast, try new things and not be afraid to make mistakes”. I want to help other diplomats pick it up by showing how we can use the tools to improve the work we do. What better way than to use the internet itself to show how it can be used?
My hope is that many of colleagues will join me in embracing these new tools. Some already have and done great work establishing Canada’s presence online. Others are still reticent. Having proselytized the use of social media from within our foreign ministry for close to three years now, I’ve come across three prominent objections.
So for those of you that still hesitate, let me address these three concerns here.
1) I don’t have the knowledge or skills required to use social media
This is the easiest to deal with. Using Facebook and Twitter is not exactly rocket science. Much of social media can be learned by simply doing. In order to help strategize, line up resources, find your voice and measure your performance there are training courses that take no more than a day or two.
2) I don’t have the time to use social media in addition to all my other responsibilities
The unstated corollary of this objection is that communications is not a priority relative to other tasks. This goes to one’s view of what a diplomat’s basic function in life is. For those based at headquarters I might agree; the principal tasks at home are the formulation of policy, providing assistance to Canadian companies, the administration of a worldwide network, and support to ministers.
But for diplomats posted abroad, particularly ambassadors, your task is to promote, explain and convince other countries of the merits of your policies. You may spend a lot of time developing networks, seeking information, trying to understand local cultures and knowing who’s who. But the purpose of mastering the local context is to promote your national interests more effectively. If you are not communicating, you’re simply not your job.
Do social media have to be part of your communications effort? Well, they probably are for each of the politicians, journalists, investors and business partners you’ll be dealing with. If they can’t afford to ignore the treasure trove of information and forego the opportunity to convince others that social media represent, how can you?
3) I will be punished if I say something online that displeases the powers that be
A colleague of mine once expressed the dilemma tweeting civil servants face in particularly stark terms. “Social media extolls the role of the individual” he said “but when we represent a government we are NOT individuals – our job is to promote the views of the government we represent.”
I couldn’t disagree more. Yes, public servants do have a responsibility to execute the platform our elected leaders have selected – these are what we call our “democratic values” in the Public Service Code of Values and Ethics. But I believe that we promote the government’s views most effectively when we speak in our own voice. The skill a public servant is to bring all that he or she offers as an individual to advancing the collective agenda the citizens of Canada have selected through our political system.
Balancing our individual personalities and our collective responsibilities need not be difficult. When choosing what to say online in our professional capacities, we must bear in mind what the government thinks and what it wants to achieve, and then make sure that we do not contradict that. Within those parameters, there is an awful lot that we can say and how we say it.
A State Department official once boiled it down to four simple rules they follow in U.S. digital diplomacy:
- Don’t be untrue
- Don’t be boring
- Don’t embarrass yourself
- Don’t embarrass the government
I am entirely confident that diplomats can follow these four rules. Now that the Canadian government has clearly indicated it welcomes, even expects its diplomats to use social media in advancing our collective interests, we have no excuse not to try.
John Baird Opens the Door to Direct Diplomacy
“Using social media and insights from big-data analytics, we can engage in direct diplomacy, not just elite diplomacy.” – John Baird
(Read in french, in spanish) With his February 7, 2014, visit to Silicon Valley, John Baird opened the door to a new domain for Canadian foreign policy. After his tour of the headquarters of internet giants Google and Twitter, he called on Canadian diplomats to use the internet as a principal tool for advancing our foreign policy objectives.
This was not his first time he had spoken about the use of the internet as a tool for foreign policy. At a Google Big Tent event in Ottawa in May 2013 he had hailed a recent online dialogue hosted by the University of Toronto in which “up to 360,000 people were able to learn and watch… it’s an amazing opportunity to speak to a crowd of that size. I don’t think we can say where Direct Diplomacy will go from here, only that the sky’s the limit.”
The significance of the Minister’s February 2014 statement, however, is that he now considers such internet-based approaches to be central to Canadian foreign policy. In calling for these efforts to be expanded across the world, he acknowledges the change required for the working culture of the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development: “diplomacy may never live up to the Silicon Valley mantra of “move fast and break things” for various reasons. But in the environment of instant communication and social media, we do have to move faster and not be afraid to try new things or to make mistakes”
Elaborating on the Minister’s words, an official then highlighted two key messages: First,every diplomatic mission will ultimately be responsible for its own social media accounts, not run through the gauntlet of endless approvals at headquarters. This is key to giving diplomats the room they need to express themselves and it represents a real shift in a government that has traditionally placed great emphasis on coherence.
Second, the official underlined that when the Minister said he expects mistakes along the way, he means it. It is the price of doing business when diplomats are involved in something evolving as quickly as the internet. This “basically is a message to all of our diplomats, a word of encouragement to be innovative, even if it means there are risks.”
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