By Julian Dierkes

It’s been some time that I’ve written here. That was largely due to a research leave spent away from UBC and Canada that had me focused on other topics.

But, it’s time to cast an eye on Canadian digital diplomacy again.

In November, students in my graduate course on “Communicating Policy” will be asked to collectively put together a snapshot of Global Affairs Canada activities on Facebook and Twitter. This follow on a similar census we did two years ago (summarized for OpenCanada.org).

The last time we conducted this survey, the Trudeau government had just taken office and had come in with a lot of seeming change in attitude, particularly when it comes to communication with the public and transparency. Diplomacy seemed to be a particular target for some changes as it was quickly announced that Canadian diplomats would be “unleashed” to do their job, including speaking to foreign and domestic audiences and stakeholders.

What we found in November 2015 was a Canadian digital diplomacy that was addressing a total of 2.5 million followers with a heavy concentration of followers in a few centrally-managed accounts. Among embassy accounts there were a number of stand-outs with particular strength in Asia, but we also identified some missed opportunities. These opportunities included the fact that communications traffic was almost entirely one-way, i.e. that diplomats did not actually seem to engage stakeholders via digital channels, and that much of this traffic was somewhat fluffy in nature, sometimes quite literally with posts of furry creatures, small and large.

Some Expectations:

Overall Volume Up

There is no doubt that the overall volume of communications from Global Affairs Canada is on the rise. In the 2017 survey I thus expect to see an increase in the number of accounts, in the overall number of communications, and in the communications/account/day or week. However, I also don’t have a sense that there has been a seachange over the past two years that would suggest that the situation now looks vastly different. So, I’m expecting an incremental increase in volume.

No Significant Increase in Two-Way Engagement

Unfortunately, apart from some specialized projects, I am not expecting to see a significant increase in the amount of two-way traffic, i.e. responses to tweets or comments, or solicitation of input on policy-planning. Overall, while there is more communication, my impression of digital diplomacy activities from Global Affairs Canada is that they are pretty firmly stuck in a broadcast mode, rather than building on audiences to solicit input in building a more robust and yes, more engaged, foreign policy.

Campaigns Dominating Communications

With a focus on the broadcast qualities of social media has come the development of “campaigns” that build much more on marketing experiences than on a vision of a more stakeholder-engaged foreign policy which has been the ultimate promise of re-imagining diplomacy as a digital and direct diplomacy. Such campaigns will be apparent in the preponderance of coordinated content across multiple accounts and multiple jurisdictions. Hashtags will be noticeable for being harbingers of policy focus areas and will signal such campaigns across different media.

In the last survey it was already difficult to capture the nature of content, however, so this will largely have to be impressionistic again, rather than relying on a  formal data analysis.

Fewer Photo-Op Posts

Early on in the Trudeau government there was an explosion of photo op posts across all accounts. These were often of the kind, “Amb XYZ had a wonderful meeting with Representative MNO” with a photo showing a smiling Canadian official shaking the hand of some counterpart. These posts were especially common for minister but also trickled “down the ranks”. It seemed like many people, including officials themselves, grew tired of those posts quite quickly, in part because they became an obligation for all events, even ones that perhaps didn’t go so well, but also because they actually communicated very little of substance. While such posts still seem relatively common for political purposes, I expect to see much less of them across the board.

Also Hoping for Surprises

As always in the collection of empirical data, I am not looking to be proven right (i.e. for the expectations above to hold), but will be delighted by surprises that inspire further thinking and analysis. Let’s hope there are some such surprises.