Management and the British Council

Public diplomacy sits between communications, politics and organization.  I think that the organizational dimension is essential in explaining why PD activities turn out the way that they do rather than following the dictates of strategy or the prescriptions of effective  communication.

With this in mind this morning’s offering is a pointer towards a couple of papers on the management and organization of the British Council.  I’ve written before about the emphasis on plans, management and strategies in British Government.  In a 1995 paper J.M. Lee discussed the impact of ‘the new public management’ on the BC. Lee’s point is that the Council’s move towards a more  ‘strategic’ language about it’s activities was driven not by an analysis of the changing international environment but by the changing culture of British government.  The result of this was a concern with value for money, efficiency and explicit management strategies.  The BC had to be able to present itself in a way that gave it credibility with its funders.  Although there a language of strategy it is organizational strategy not public diplomacy strategy.  The new managerial model  creates an incentive to ‘follow the money’ even if this pulls in a different direction to an externally oriented PD strategy.  I think that this tension between strategy as a tool of organizational management and as a way of influencing the external world is still not fully recognized in UK government.

The second paper by Venters and Wood looks at the BC’s efforts to deploy information technology to build a networked organization in which ‘communities of practice’ shared good practice across the globe.  To put it more simply how could it get it’s country directors to talk to each other? The basic answer is that they couldn’t.  In the pre internet era the country director had a link back to the central British Council but didn’t talk to other countries.  The new more businesslike  BC sought to shrink the centre of the organization, empower the country offices and encourage horizontal linkages.  Venter and Wood find that as centre shrank it became less useful to the Country Directors who used their improved access to IT to a)google for the information that they needed instead of asking the centre and b) develop  ‘communities of expertise’ with people outside the organization.

In thinking about effective PD one issue to keep in mind are the incentives that actually operate for organizations and the people within them.

Lee, J.M. (1995) ‘The Reorganization of the British Council: Management Improvisation and Policy Uncertainty’, Public Administration, 73: 339-55.

Venters, W., and B. Wood (2007) ‘Degenerative Structures that Inhibit the Emergence of Communities of Practive: A Case Study of Knowledge Management in the British Council’, Information Systems Journal, 17: 349-68.

Internet Freedom is Not About Regime Change

Via the USC twitter feed this link to a video interview with Alec J. Ross of the  State Department which contains this exchange

RFE/RL: Iran accuses the U.S. of providing soft help to activists to bring down the Iranian regime. Is regime change in repressive countries such as Iran, which are considered hostile to the U.S., one of the unstated goals of the U.S.’s Internet-freedom push?

Ross: Absolutely not. Internet freedom is about helping people exercise their universal rights: the freedom of expression, the freedom of assembly, the freedom of the press. It is not a regime-change agenda.

If you look at the video he seems to having difficulty restraining himself from bursting out laughing.  Also you can’t see his hands so I bet his fingers are crossed.

Of course there is a slight possibility he really believes what he says.  That would be really worrying.

21st Century Statecraft and Information Imperialism

I teach international communications and one concept that tends to loom large in the minds of students is cultural imperialism.  From a teacher’s point of view this is both an opportunity and a challenge.  It’s an opportunity because it gives a big body of literature that students are interested in that demonstrates the problems caused by imprecise concept formation and questionable evidence.  It’s a challenge for the same reason; cultural imperialism and its variants mean different things to different people  as well as being a term of political abuse.   If you can get through the topic so that students grasp the debates they will have learned quite a lot about the importance of precision and clarity in academic writing.

It’s always struck me that much of the writing about cultural imperialism is profoundly state centric. It is about the defence of the nation-state against foreign influences.  The problem is that it ignores the fact that the national project is usually one big exercise in imposing a particular culture on everyone within a territory.

This is a long introduction to this link.  At Meta-Activism Mary Joyce has a very interesting post discussing criticisms of US net freedom and democracy support programmes as from a cultural imperialism perspective.  This isn’t a viewpoint that has been widely taken and it provides a valuable perspective.

I think that this reminds us of two very important points.  Firstly, from the perspective of the twitterverse US information policies are unquestionably benign other people may not see things in the same way.  Secondly, sovereignty is an important part of the contemporary international system and the rise of the BRICS is only going to reinforce Westphalian norms.  This means that political and ethical questions raised by information intervention and public diplomacy are going to intensify not disappear.  The politics of these issues are more complex than they might appear from the Googleplex.

Public Diplomacy and the Evolution of the UK Government on the Web

The British government is currently experimenting with a single government website Alpha.gov. Part of the team developing Alpha.gov is Jimmy Leach head of digital diplomacy at the FCO and yesterday he posted some ideas about how Alpha.gov should work for users outside the UK. It’s worth looking at this because its quite a different idea of what the official web presence is about. In the PD community we think about ICTS as means of communication and engagement while in e-government the concern is with service delivery.

The new website is intended to organize all government services in a single space so the user can find them easily. Rather finding things on FCO.gov.uk you would go to gov.uk/fco. It is also organized around the top 100 things that people search for on government web sites which covers 90% of what people look for – so you can easily find out how to pay your car tax or dispose of a dead animal. In the original concept there’s an explicit emphasis on making government web presence work more like that of a commercial service provider including syndicating content and using APIs ‘to go where the users are’. The bulk of UK government activity is actually service delivery but does this work externally? Organizations that do the bulk of their business in their domestic market tend to try to apply the same model to foreign markets and fail to recognize the differences that exist. To put it more bluntly is there a danger of imposing a model derived from the UK domestic situation where it doesn’t fit?

The idea is that an user outside the UK would be automatically be located by their IP address and presented with a page optimized for their country. This page would be semi-automatically generated using tagged content from across government in accordance with the editorial priorities based on objectives for that country. The post suggests that editorial control should be exercised by the Department with the major responsibility for that country possibly UKTI or DFID rather than the FCO (I wonder what @williamjhague thinks about that?)

The FCO has been quite successful in meeting its service delivery targets (eg consular activities) but much less so in meeting its foreign policy goals. The Alpha.Gov model will probably improve external service delivery which will improve perceptions of the UK. The issue would be whether this reworking of the digital presence impacts on core policy activities and  associated engagement activities.

The issue I see in Jimmy’s post is the question of editorial control in the context of the overall management of 1) the overall communications activit aimed at the country  and 2) the relationship with that country.  The fact that Alpha.gov is a cross government resource seems to create plenty of opportunity for different departments to deliver cross cutting messages. Alpha.gov may enable cross government content management but I can see plenty of opportunity to work at cross purposes. Because the technology enables coordination this doesn’t mean that it will happen.

At a more academic level the Alpha.gov evolution marks another aspect of the long running process by which MFAs are having to compete with other departments.

Most of the readers of this blog are outside the UK? Any thoughts?

21st Century Statecraft at Work

The Zimbabwe government is reported to be mounting a crackdown on social media

The acting foreign minister is quoted as saying

The Internet and things like Twitter and Facebook are being used to destroy…We from the older generation do not know anything about these things. They are used for regime change and to make our youths revolt against their leaders

Sounds like he’s been reading up on 21st century statecraft.

PD2.0: How Much Effort Do You Need?

Via Cat Tully’s blog I came across some discussion on the Socialbakers social media measurement site about corporate use of Facebook.  They argue that posting too much can undermine user engagement just as much as too little.  Looking at brands versus media companies thei view is that brands should post 5-10 times a week while media companies should aim for a multiple of this – somewhere up to a maximum of 100.  It woudl then follow that MFAs/Embassies should clarify what the objective of their FB presence.

In a later post they take up the issue of when does managing a Facebook page become a full time job.  Although posting 5-10 posts a week wouldn’t require anything like this they you also need to look at the number of fans and the level of interaction required.  Increasing numbers of fans means more comments and a greater requirement to respond.  Socialbakers point to cases where companies have a team of three people to manage their Facebook presence.  This comes back to the issue of how much resource social media requires if it is to attain its full potential.  The problem is one of relationship management- building a set of social media relationships requires constant attention.  The issue then becomes one of trading off the contribution of a particular level of FB engagement versus other public diplomacy activities.

More on Web Video as Public Diplomacy Tool

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.

US Cyberspace Policy in Historical Perspective

The US has just issued its strategy for cyberspace.

The question that occurred to me is how does this relate to the history of US international communications policy? In Telecommunications and Empire Jill Hills sees US communications policy as a push for a global system of liberalized rules. While the idea of ‘free flow’ that emerged in the 1940s had an explicitly political, freedom of the press aspect it was also rooted in the interests of US telecommunications companies in their struggle to gain access to the British imperial markets. The US push for a single global communications market ran up against the norms of sovereignty and was undercut by the resistance to opening the US market.  The result has been a system of communications regulation that combines international rules with national regulatory systems.  The internet has been an exception to this framework a sui generis mix of largely private sector actors.  On a quick reading of the strategy one gets the sense that the policy is converging towards other areas of international communications policy.  The rise of security and law and enforcement concerns means greater importance is attached to interstate cooperation.

Hills, J. (2007) Telecommunications and empire. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Anglo-American Youtube Diplomacy: Work in Progress

Thanks to the wonders of Twitter I keep finding links to new MFA videos clicking on them and wondering  what the point is…

Partly my reaction is driven by the view that web video is an incredibly inefficient way of communication mostly you could describe the content in a paragraph that could be read in a fraction of the time that it takes to watch the video.  Also public diplomacy researchers are not the key audience for PD video so what I think is not that important.

Anyway here are a couple of examples that I found in the inbox in the last few hours.  First Up the US-European Media Hub in Brussels.  Its Facebook page describes it thus

The U.S.- European Media Hub connects journalists in and around Europe with access to U.S. policymakers and perspectives. The Hub is part of the International Media Engagement Office of the U.S. Department of State.

Their Youtube channel is here.    This has a lot of very serious talking head  videos about issues such as the role of the American Chambers of Commerce – some of which have accumulated as much as 45 views in a month.   This triggers a few thoughts.

1. Who are you trying to communicate with?  The people that are interested in some of these issues are not going to learn anything from these videos and there’s nothing to draw in people who aren’t interested.
2. How much does it cost to produce this material?  It maybe that it’s so cheap that the opportunity cost of production is so low that you might as well make them as not..but if there is a resource implication is this the best use of resources?
3. The usual constraint of web activity applies how do you attract attention? I happen to follow the US Embassy in London on Twitter and so got the link but what if you don’t.

Over at the Foreign Office they are busy with their Olympics Campaign and Jimmy Leach the head of Digital Engagement tweeted a link to this Celebrating Britain video yesterday if you looked at the Olympics PD plan you will see some of the themes about connection coming out – also see the words that flash on the screen – ideas that you are supposed to take away.

Three  thoughts about this one.

1) Firstly, the video could be shorter and sharper (it’s actually a compilation of other films) – it’s not as if we don’t make lots of pop videos.

2) it faces the usual problem of UK branding, the tension between well established perceptions of the UK as a conservative country with a long history and the desire of government to make it look modern, cosmopolitan, connected, creative and high tech.

3) This is very much outward facing communication – one of the rules of nation branding is that you need to get buy in from the population and  its probably best that this doesn’t get too many views from the UK so that the comments don’t fill up with sarcastic comments.

The FCO produces quite a lot videos of various types -  their channel is here

Report on Australian E-diplomacy

I’ve just got around to reading the report that the Lowy Institute put out last November on e-diplomacy at the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT). The basic thrust is that DFAT has fallen behind other MFAs; the report benchmarks against the UK Foreign Office,  the US State Department and the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and Internationl Trade. Public Diplomcy is only part of the story, there is some interesting discussion of the use of social media platforms for internal communication and interaction with partner organizations.

The Lowy Institute also put out a more comprehensive report on Australia’s Diplomatic Deficit in March 2009.