Looking at my Twitter feed this morning @edipatstate has retweeted a link from @usembassyta – the US Embassy in Tel Aviv to a video of Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg responding to questions from Facebook users. Aha I thought – this is the PD push to manage the fallout from Obama’s speech on Thursday. Steinberg has been in Israel the for the last couple of days and this is the second video that the Embassy has posted.
But what strikes me is the lack of interest that either of these video has triggered. The first of these has had 20 views (21 including my view of it) and the other has had 25. Neither has had any comments. In looking at English language Israeli news websites over the years I’ve always been impressed by the speed with which stories attract comments so given the reaction to Obama’s speech particularly on the Israeli right the absence of feedback is surprising.
Now it might be that the Embassy is running other media related activities but we come back to the problem of how Embassies can actually generate traffic to their social media platforms.
Public Diplomacy, Networks and Influence 