Having just read the twitter guide from the UK Government, I’m reminded of how frustrated teenagers feel when their parents adopt something they feel is their domain.
So twitter has been embraced by the establishment stretching an explanation of how to use twitter to 20 pages (!); is this not a little irritating? (..no less than 2 and no more than 10 tweets per day..unless you’re re-tweeting..) Certainly, many commercial companies now incorporate micro blogging into their publicity and marketing campaigns, perhaps they also have produced reams of guidelines for their staff on ‘how to use’, but surely common sense takes over with Sun Microsystems simple but effective approach of ‘don’t do anything stupid’?
But that Twitter has been deconstructed so carefully for use by government departments suggests that it is now (finally) okay to tweet. Once the preserve of celebrities stuck in lifts, it’s now an acceptable tool of communication in the execution of ‘Public Diplomacy’; twitter has truly come of age! Although a survey on LinkedIn recently concluded that in the US, ‘advertisers believe much more highly in the importance of Twitter than the average consumer, of the 2,025 U.S. adults surveyed, 69% said they didn’t know enough about Twitter to comment on the service.’ Contrast this with Congress near obsession with it!
But surely when the UN Secretary General, the US President and organisations such as the UK Cabinet Office and the FCO ‘tweet’, Public Diplomacy 2.0 has definitely arrived. Yes, it’s a daft name for a micro blog and yes I still feel slightly awkward ‘tweeting’, (I wonder if Ban and Barak still do?) but like a lot of digital diplomacy, it’s very simple and highly effective. To have to engage in no more than 140 characters is a test in itself. Users are faced with the daily challenge of having to compress their thoughts into a tight sentence that both articulates their point but also reflects their character. Because, never forget that one of the unspoken rules of tweeting is to ‘be human’. How do you achieve that in Digital Diplomacy? The “twitterati”, that self appointed soul of this communications medium, fiercely oppose the notion of their medium being hijacked by the Corporate and ‘them’: the system. In their eyes, to de-humanise twitter is to turn it into another corporate toy or a public service information platform; something to avoided!
So how will the establishment cope, how can digital diplomacy be effective in so few words? Could it be the reach and speed of the message, and not so much the content itself? Is it the fact that it’s participating in the conversation, trying to fill that informational space that was once the preserve of the media? It may not be the right message – or even the one we want to hear – but at least it is participating and targeting a demographic of society that is furiously communicating on-line.
Whatever the results of the Government’s guidelines, it can’t be faulted for not trying at digital diplomacy. Be it a domestic or international audience, politics is about communications and all politics is local, it now happens to be 140 characters and on-line..!
Paul Gibbins is Albany’s Senior Project Manager.
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