By Julian Dierkes

Since Santa lives in Canada, why not a wishlist for Canadian Digital Diplomats? Until the Liberals have a chance to actually get around to developing some longer-term strategic priorities and tell us about them, I certainly feel at liberty to present wishlists as if they are a real possibility.

In this case, this is a Digital Diplomacy wishlist that presupposes that the Liberals see the light and agree with my argument for an embrace of Twiplomacy. If that commitment were to come, here I’m imagining what sort of social media platform, tools and software would aid diplomats in embracing their inner online communicator.

First, remember that my wishlist here does not aim at Public Relations and the somewhat crude cultural diplomacy of leveraging the popularity of Drake and polar bears for some kind of halo-effect on Canadian diplomatic activities. That kind of soft power exertion is focused on eyeballs and lots of them. My kind of direct digital diplomacy abandons the notion of foreign policy-making as an activity that government engages in in private/secret and then announces its decision to an appreciative public. Instead, foreign policy is crowd-sourced through interactions with stakeholders.

Secondly, I remain platform agnostic. Different genres, from microblogs, through social network posts, to blog posts, and fully developed policy papers, offer different opportunities for engagement. Tech that supports digital diplomats should also offer cross-platform application.

Now…

Hardware

Smartphones

If only we could rescue Blackberry by having Canadian diplomats carry around devices that are the envy of the world… Sadly, Canadian diplomats are carrying devices that are making it very difficult for them to be digitally engaged. This is doubly harmful because many diplomats are currently squeezing their digital engagement into the cracks of daily professional activities, waiting for meeting to start, riding taxis, meal times. That is something that should also change, but that’s another topic…

Unless someone really wants to dedicate themselves to giving Blackberry a platform to rescue itself (complete with many of the features below), it will have to be some other hardware. For the perpetually security conscious, a container full of Blackphones? Now that would strike me as some serious hipster leapfrogging, so yes!

For this academic focused on Canada-Mongolia relations, the only other alternative is the XPhone, a Mongolia-designed, Chinese-manufactured Android phone.

√ Blackphone

√ XPhone

Desktops

Canadian diplomats often complain about outdate desktops and software and the cumbersome nature of procurement as well as a lack of ability to customize. I suspect that these complaints would be echoed by employees in almost all large bureaucracies, esp. in the not-for-profit sector.

Features?

Obviously all the elements of a connected smartphone, camera, fast network, camera, etc.

What are other possible hardware features of particular use to diplomats? Nominations? Any clever way of temporarily disabling notifications, rings, etc.

Software

I currently rely on a mix of WordPress, Twitter (app and website), Facebook (app and website) and Hootsuite for my digital activities. That’s fine, i.e. I don’t need those apps unified in some way. But here are some features that are essential.

Scheduling

This is currently the main reason for me to use Hootsuite along with the ability to run multiple accounts. For my tweets @jdierkes, most of my audience resides in Mongolia. As I know from various analytics tools, my followers are most active in the early morning and late afternoon (Vancouver time, making this the late night and morning in Mongolia). In order for my tweets to be heard and have an impact, those are the preferred times to tweet, so scheduling becomes essential, because sometimes I think of something to tweet outside of those times. I find blogging to be less time-sensitive as many readers arrive on their own schedule through searches, and others are lured in by tweets which I schedule. By definition and almost inevitably, diplomats deal in time zones, so scheduling is necessary.

Measuring Engagement

If only we could measure the impact of tweets and other digital communications in a more straightforward fashion…

Here’s my idea for an extension to something like Hootsuite, some kind of annotation for posting, and for interactions with an audience.

The audience for DirectDiplo blog posts and tweets is numerically still relatively small (but you’re just the right people to be reading this!), so most of the engagement I would like to measure is going to be of a qualitative rather than quantitative nature, I would guess. With a larger following (maybe next month?), it would be nice to be able to attach targets of reach and engagement to a tweet. So, for example, for an account with 10,000 followers, you could prepare a post for a particular time of day and targeting some segmented audience. Then formulate a goal, i.e. 1,000 impressions for the Tweet, or 25 likes for the FB post, or something like that. Formulating such goals would allow the manager of the account to be strategic about posts to maximize certain outcomes.

What about more qualitative information then? This is where a closer look at engagement could be useful. Let’s say I tweet about this post and Stéphane Dion re-tweets. That would be pretty meaningful as a measure of impact of a tweet (Please, (Foreign) Minister, RT!) and it is something I would highlight in reporting on impact.

Currently, my option is to record events like that in some kind of narrative for my academic annual report. But, what if I could mark that RT using some kind of extension, connect the RTer (in this case Min. Dion) to an address book and annotate that entry with some kind of characteristic like “high-value Twitter communicator”). Now think of the knowledge-management and big data potential resulting from something like that in an organization like UBC (in my case) or Global Affairs Canada.

Imagine there was a shared address book/contact management across Global Affairs (I find it somewhat shocking that that doesn’t exist). If DigiDipl A tagged a contact as “high-value Twitter communicator”, and this contact then liked a post by DigiDipl B, that tag could be incorporated into reporting in a much more meaningful way then a mere number, even though DigiDipl B might not have recognized the name/handle for this high-value communicator. Obviously, this is what various apps and platforms do with preferences, but it could be a great addition to measuring and – more importantly achieving – engagement goals. Rely on your colleagues to crowdsource more meaningful engagements and gain a knowledge management system in the process? Sounds like a winner, doesn’t it?

If DigiDipl C is assigned the accounts on a mission that has been relatively inactive, she might set a goal of 2 engagements with meaningful contacts for a month. Or DigiDipl D who is managing accounts for a mission in a country with very social media active NGOs, he might aim for 20 such engagements in a month.

A link to an online engagement that leads to an in-person conversation? Terrific, that’s easily accommodated both by an enterprise-level contact management, as well as by the tagging of communications that would be integrated with this.

You could go on spinning this imaginary engagement measurement, social media communications, address book software tale. Clearly, a huge project, but what about a limited implementation focused on some region to begin with?

Engagement Platform

Another area of innovation where a client like Global Affairs might be an attractive partner to private-sector firms is in the construction of an online platform for meaningful engagement about policy.

Such a platform would have to have capabilities to post, moderate, poll, feed into social media, etc. Ideas for such a platform probably also deserve their own post, so I’ll save those for another time.