 Good afternoon and welcome everyone. My name is Sarah Morris and I'm Policy Counsel for the Open Technology Institute here at the New America Foundation. Today's panel is the second of two social media weeks that the Open Technology Institute has hosted this week. We're very pleased today to welcome three panelists from the United States Department of State, Richard Buangen, Director of Digital Empowerment for the Bureau of Public Affairs, Hilary Brandt, Director of the Office of Innovative Engagement for the Bureau of International Information Programs, and Suzanne Fillian, Senior Advisor for Innovation in the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. The State Department gained notoriety under Secretary Clinton for leveraging new technologies in social media and applying them within the context of global diplomacy. Their reach on Facebook and Twitter alone encompasses tens of millions of people around the world and both creates a platform for mass communication with audience who may have been previously unreachable and enables lines of direct communication with communities abroad. Leveraging social media in this context is complex, however, as technology and the internet specifically are good at blurring lines, not only geographical lines but also political and social lines. And for example, when a situation like the current unrest in Syria happens, a variety of actors, activists, civil society, NGOs, foreign governments, and even passive but concerned observers in other countries are all seeking to leverage available technologies. Often they're doing so with various overlapping and at times competing interests and agendas. So I hope in our discussion today that we not only hear about the important work that the State Department is doing by using social media platforms and tools, but also that we have the opportunity to think and talk about some of the tough questions that arise because of new uses of technology in this networked world of blurred borders. And with that I'll turn to the panelists, but first a couple of housekeeping matters. The event today is live streamed both on our website and the social media week site. And we're using the hashtag pound public diplomacy, is that right, Susanne? What do you guys want to use? We were going to say SMWWDC, but that really sucks as a hashtag, so SMW, just to be simple about it? I don't know. It's a pound SMW. SMWPD. It's SMWPD. And that's a shout out to all the AU folks as well. Those watching on the web, it's SMWPD. So our panelists will speak for a few minutes each about their work. I'll begin with a couple of questions to get things rolling, and then we'll move to questions from the audience. Thank you. Hello, everybody. My name is Susanne. Sorry. John, are we live on the? Oh, okay. Oh, there you go. Hi, everyone. My name is Richard Buangen, and it's great to be here, especially with such a distinguished panel of experts and colleagues who I've worked very closely with the State Department. I just want to briefly talk about what my office does and as an extension of what really the State Department is doing in terms of social media, because there's so many people and players in social media in the Department of State, not just here in Washington, D.C., but at our embassies and consulates abroad, we really have a wide mandate for taking in social media. And it's just been this recent phenomenon that has really grown, and we've really embraced it, the power of technology, innovation, social media, to reach out to our audiences, not just here in the United States, but overseas, as an extension of our public diplomacy objectives. In the State Department, there is an umbrella of organizations, bureaus, if you will, that's called the Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Umbrella, and there's an undersecretary. And I work in the Bureau of Public Affairs, which is one of the components of that umbrella. And the Bureau of Public Affairs is really the traditional media arm of the State Department, if you will. So traditionally, we've been engaged, dealing with U.S. media. Our spokesperson is based in that Bureau. We have journalists that are actually housed in the State Department that work right down the hall where I work. And in the last couple of years, our mandate with reaching out to the media has evolved. And now that you have these technologies and social media, it's really become more interactive, and it's no longer just about reaching out to CNN and the New York Times. It's really reaching out to international media organizations as well, such as Al Jazeera and a lot of the international media organizations in Western Europe, Asia, and Middle East, as technology brings us closer. So that's really what the Bureau of Public Affairs has been dealing with as it's been growing and as it's been realizing that the distinction between international and domestic media has blurred a little bit. Now my office works, deals mostly with digital engagement, figuring out opportunities for the Secretary of State and for the Department's senior leadership to engage with people online. We manage our, the Public Affairs Bureau has several social media accounts, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, where we seek to create content that is both useful for online audiences and articulates foreign policy in a way that we traditionally do it with members of the media. And it's been a very interesting couple of years. Obviously, Secretary Clinton was a big champion of 21st century diplomacy and gave us a lot of leeway, how we use technology to reach out to people. And now with Secretary Kerry, who's also involved in social media, and he actually just delivered a major foreign policy speech at University of Virginia. And he wanted to have a digital component to that address. So we live tweeted the event, we had it live streamed on YouTube, so it really shows his commitment to utilizing the power of digital to continue his foreign policy work. For us, social media, the practice of social media comes in many different facets. Like I said before, we strive to create content that's useful for people and easily accessible to our online users and to our stakeholders who follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. That's the first thing. Being able to use social media as a means to open up diplomacy, and diplomacy traditionally has been very discreet and very quiet and silent. And to give people an inside look onto how diplomacy operates, that's also one of the objectives that we strive to create at the State Department as we open up diplomacy through social media. One of the challenges that my office deals with is how do you stay relevant online? The State Department as an organization has sort of a tradition of communicating with publics, communicating with the media, and how do you create content online that complements existing content already that you're seeing from thought leaders, discussion journalists that are online, and how do you not necessarily compete with them, but how do you add value? That's some of the things that we're trying to deal with. So I'm looking forward to a lot of your questions, but I'll stop there and hand it over to the rest of my colleagues. Thank you, Sarah, and thank you, Richard. My name is Hilary Brandt. I'm the Director of the Office of Innovative Engagement in the Bureau of International Information Programs, which is also a component of the public affairs and public diplomacy umbrella that Richard mentioned. I'm very excited to have this opportunity to speak with you this afternoon about how the State Department is leveraging digital tools to accomplish its mission, and particularly to reach foreign audiences overseas. Some of you may have attended a State Department presentation this time last year at Social Media Week. I think the big story in that year since the last Social Media Week is the increasing sophistication with which the State Department is using social media and digital tools. There was a time where it was remarkable that the State Department was using Facebook for past that. There was a time where it was remarkable that we had a lot of followers, and I think we're moving past that as well to more sophisticated measurements. We want to see that we're actually engaging with people online, that we're getting those quality conversations. So I think this is in keeping with industry's trends and measurements, that it's not just enough to have those fans or followers, but you have to be having the quality engagement as well with them. So in particular, my bureau, International Information Programs, or IIP, we run a number of social media properties aimed at overseas audiences. There are about 25 social media properties run by IIP here in Washington. They're on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and blogs as well. And in the name of reaching people where they are and engaging with them, they are also in a number of languages, English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, Persian, and Russian. And I think I got them all. Yes. So also, we engage with audiences on topics such as entrepreneurship and environmental conservation, democracy and civil society, topics that are priorities for the United States. We also engage with them on top-line messages from the Secretary, but engage with them in ways that they find accessible, meeting them where they are. I mentioned that we look very closely at our metrics. We do look at the number of followers. We have about 15 million across our social media properties, but we're also making greater efforts to look at the quality of the engagement, to examine those conversations and make sure that we stay on topic and we're having quality engagements. Along those lines, we do, within the department, we play a role in, particularly in my office, Office of Innovative Engagement, in gathering best practices for social media and managing this knowledge for the department. So we gather best practices, we write guides on how to best use social media in the State Department context, and we disseminate them through an internal website that we have called the Social Media Hub. We also, particularly in my office and IIP, work to support embassies overseas. So the Foreign Service Institute in Arlington does instruct State Department staff on best practices and social media, and my office is there to support them once they go out to the field to make sure that they, you know, when they get out there and they have a problem, there's somebody that they can email or call and get the answer on how to, you know, implement a campaign or how to get their Twitter handle verified, a whole range of questions. Also in my office, we maintain relationships with the social media companies and the tech companies. So we make sure that we stay in close contact with Facebook, Twitter, and Google, for instance, so that we can stay on top of latest trends in what they're developing. You know, Facebook is a pretty amazing piece of engineering. It changes every day practically. So we do have to stay in close contact with them to make sure that we're using it correctly and that we are using it to its fullest potential. Particularly with metrics, Facebook Insights is a new area that we're moving into and making sure that we're staying on top of that and being expert in that. Also just in terms of IIP supporting outreach overseas, we do create quite a bit of content. We have online webinars and written content. In particular, we also have videos that we distribute both in traditional media and in new media. So for instance, we have a series of ambassador videos that are the ambassadors, new ambassadors about to leave for their country and they have a chance to themselves, introduce themselves to their new country. And these videos can be deployed both on television and online. And I think it's been particularly interesting, the case of India, where we deployed a new ambassador video last spring and both online and on television, online first, so social media first strategy there, but also on television in 10 languages, 11 including English. And it reached a large audience, a potential audience of over 950 million if you count broadcast as well. So this is how, another way that IIP supports social media outreach overseas. And just really quickly looking ahead, I think in the coming months and year, you will see greater use of in-country social media by the State Department. So go to where people are. Again, engage them on their own terms. Maybe there's a country where, you know, Facebook is not the number one social media site. You should go and engage with the local population where they are. I know the embassy in Beijing has a, where Richard served, has a following of 2.5 million people on Weibo. They're in country social media, so that's a good example of the embassy going to where people are and engaging with them on their own terms. And I think with that, I'll wrap it up and hand it over to Suzanne. Okay, cool. Yeah. Thank you guys so much. And you guys, thank you all so much for coming to hang out with us today. You know, just as a sort of takeaway first, it was really important to us, I think as a team, I know there's several folks from various teams at the State Department here in the audience today as well to kind of represent the public diplomacy family. I was boring some awesome AU students in the back kind of telling this story, but I do want to make sure that you guys kind of see the three of us as representing, as Richard said at the top, three branches that are firmly under one umbrella. And so while we may have slightly different audiences and slightly different goals, at the end of the day, what we're trying to do is tell our foreign policy story and engage with citizens directly. And I think that's one of the key ways that social media allows us to move the conversation from, you know, government to government to really much more people to people. So you're getting three versions of the same family here. So my name is Suzanne Fillian. I work in the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and we are basically the gift basket, if you will, of the public diplomacy world. So what the hell do I mean? First, we do in-person exchanges. We organize about 50,000 of them a year. Can I see hands, who's done an exchange abroad? Who's done a year abroad, semester abroad? Did it rock? Keep your hand up if it rocked. Okay, so those are singular experiences and if anything, each one of you who raised your hands and even those of you who have just traveled are yourselves kind of mini ambassadors, right? We recognize that you go over, you have an incredible experience and hopefully you come back and you tell that story to your community, your friends, your family. It's such a powerful thing and I think that's a really awesome way that we try to sort of, you know, democratize our diplomatic engagement around the world by supporting in-person exchange. Another big sort of pillar that we support to, again, just foster more understanding about America is through the English language, both training for teachers of English language abroad as well as training for students who wish to learn English. Regardless of the politics and our bilateral or relationship with a certain country, the demand for English is so strong around the world. It's such an important one and that's an opportunity for us as a nation to really establish a connection in particular with young people, I'd say. So for example, through our micro scholarship access program, we reach more than 30,000 young people between the ages of 12 and 20 around the world. Those are in after school English language programs. The kids receive leadership training as well and at this point I think we have an alumni network of upwards of 90,000 individuals. So this is a relatively new program. It's only been around for about seven, eight years. Super popular with our embassies, as you can imagine and I think a really powerful way for America to kind of connect with young people around the world. The third pillar that we really work on in educational and cultural affairs, I mentioned we do 50,000 exchanges a year. So multiply that over decades. We have an alumni group, people who have participated in state department international exchanges of more than one million people. This is a group of absolute rock stars. So you've got heads of state, you've got women entrepreneurs, you've got young social media activists perhaps, but a real breadth of individuals who we have the pleasure of staying in contact with. It's really incumbent upon us to make sure we are a value add that we're providing them with resources so they keep coming back. And finally, I'd mentioned education advising and I know Kevin Barda from our team is here in the audience today. This is a means to really respond to so many students around the world, in other countries who wish to come here and study in a college or university here and take part in the American education system. That's again just a huge and awesome public diplomacy and really at the end of the day, national security opportunity to connect and build relationships with those young people, help them navigate that process, et cetera. So okay, that's the traditional what ECA does. What I just described is super high touch, pretty expensive, right? We're talking about international exchanges and those of you who have participated in these before know the dollar figure associated with that. I certainly do. I studied and I paid for it for a couple of years after I came back from studying abroad. And life changing, absolutely life changing and absolutely worth every penny of it. What we're interested in doing is responding to the demand that we hear around the world for more. And bottom line is we can't give everybody a full break, right? And so when you can't do that, we're increasingly looking around and seeing the digital platforms that are available for use to be able to scale that content in as substantive, meaningful and measurable as Hillary was saying, away as possible. So I just gonna touch on some briefly some ways we're doing so. Number one, you know, we think about exchanges. Now we're sort of focused on virtual exchanges. We're in the process right now of standing up a team at the US Department of State. It's gonna be small. We're gonna be focused though in the near term on connecting classrooms. So leveraging platforms such as Google Hangout and Watch2, Skype perhaps, to go ahead and connect US high school students with their counterparts in certain other countries. University students, including rock stars from AU in the back with their counterparts in other countries. And I know actually Kara here in the front was one of our guinea pigs in an early iteration of this where we connected AU kids with university students in Riga, Latvia. So I mean, these are 60 minute opportunities. It's certainly not going abroad for an entire semester or a year. But you know, what I see when I'm able to observe and take part in these is a real interest and learning process that happens between the two groups. And so we're excited to stand this up. Going for example to the English piece. The English language team has just done a great job in exploring and working with partners to figure out how we can take some of our fabulous English language content and bundle it to really distribute it in scalable means through mobile and online channels. And we're doing this I think awesomely in collaboration with IIP now because putting our two bureaus together will really open up some of those channels in a big way. Just to give a shout out to my colleagues on the English language team, they recently launched a video game, an online video game called Trace. This is state's first foray into online video games and actually it's been received to much acclaim by young people around the world who are digging into this and figuring out, not only exploring the English language and being able to improve upon their speaking abilities, but also along the way having an American experience. So they're visiting college campuses, they're going to farmers markets, very traditional American experiences that perhaps they have not been able to experience before. And I would say that very importantly, alongside that the English language team worked to take a basically a word jumble game and bundled it in an application called BINU. Anybody know BINU? Popular, especially in emerging markets, it's a means for someone with a dumb phone to be able to grab and access web-enabled applications like Facebook, et cetera. So these people are using that capability even in a $15 Nokia handset to go ahead and play around on a US Department of State English Language app and that's pretty cool. We launched that, they launched that in October and over 2.6 million games have been played since that date, that's awesome. So I would also say on the alumni, I mentioned one million people, how do you keep them coming back for more? These are busy people with big careers. So our alumni team has a fantastic web presence that's really meant to be an exclusive one for our alumni. Once they are in the site, they have access to grant funding opportunities, they have access to network with one another, jump off points to various social media platforms where they may already live like LinkedIn, Facebook, et cetera. And I think also some exclusive and very interesting webinars that would allow them to continue their education. And so that's been actually quite popular. And finally what I would say is on the educational advising, that's such a fantastic opportunity to work with students who wanna come study here. And certainly that requires a lot of hand holding. It's complicated even as American to apply to a university in the United States. So imagine navigating that, perhaps not with fluent English, with the financial constraints that surround that, et cetera. And so we had this fantastic network of educational advisors around the world and they number in the hundreds. That said what we see is that that's still not enough. And so many of our educational advising centers around the world have really leveraged many of the social media sites that we all know and love and use on the regular. And many of the ones that Hillary was actually referring to as well. So for example, Weibo in China, Vicontakte even in Russia. So they're really trying to go again to where people live and I think this is a fantastic thing. So I mean with that, just to say what we're trying to do is take the greatness that we see in people-to-people connection possibilities in that extending our foreign policy agenda and capabilities and opportunities and scaling that by digital platforms. Thanks. Thank you panelists. First off, I wanna ask a question about the safety of the tools you use. Particularly when you're engaging with countries around the world where there are concerns about anonymity, about safety, about privacy and security. How do you ensure that the tools you use are safe for those end users? And do safety, security and privacy concerns factor into your decisions about which technologies or platforms to use? Do you wanna try private fee? Like here's, I mean, I think we all would have slightly different answers. So let me just share one. So many of our exchanges that we run, for example through ECA, involve young people. You know, kids who are in their young teens or late teens. And I think that we enter into all of these engagements these days and see them if we look at it from sort of a digital perspective. This is a content opportunity, right? We can grab a photo, we can make a video, we can get a quote. And I think it's really important, not just for young people, really for everybody, but especially young people in certain countries where the situation on online privacy is a little bit more tenuous, to really make sure that we're connecting with them. So it's a very simple 1.0 thing, but just making sure that you are having that discussion with your exchange participants in advance. Hey, are you cool with sharing this content, you know, through social media and going ahead and having that discussion with them? That's one part of what I would share. The second part is we've started a series of engagements called youth tech camps. And these are really engagements around the world to empower young people to figure out how to engage with digital networks, whether it's for digital storytelling, citizen journalism, perhaps social activism, and always one of the conversations we have is around your security as an individual. And I think for young people that's important because as digital natives, they're just hopping on. They're probably not asking all the questions that they should be, and that's a beautiful thing, and it also can be a dangerous thing. So I think what we try to do, again in those sort of hands-on workshops, is to make sure that privacy considerations is part of the discussion. And then a question for Hillary specifically. I think you mentioned meeting people where the concept of meeting people where they are and assessing the needs of areas where you're doing outreach to best determine what technologies are being used. How does that outreach tend to occur? Is you mentioned a relationship with the various companies involved? Is it primarily from data from them or is there what kind of information gathering on the ground occurs as you're determining how you structure your outreach and engagement with other communities? Sure, absolutely. We stay in very close contact with our U.S. missions overseas and we rely heavily on their subject matter expertise there on the ground. There's also, for instance, a foreign service officer who serves in my office who is a great advisor on what will work in country. And so we really rely on our network overseas to be that reality check and to make sure that we're staying on top of trends in social media. We also look closely at the performance metrics. So you can get a lot from Google Analytics or Facebook Insights on where the traffic is coming from and where it's not and maybe where you do need to expand. So as social media professionals, you are aware of a number of tools that are out there that can help you get insights into what your audience is doing and where they are and how they're approaching you. And then a question for Richard. A lot of your work you mentioned involves outreach within the United States. How do you ensure that your message is reaching everyone? Is there a concern with your bureau about the digital divide and how does your outreach reflect that or are there steps that you're taking to mitigate it? You know, there's always a challenge for us. I have to say that Suzanne and Hillary's work by far the coolest that they do because they can delve in a lot more creative realms. Whereas in my neck of the woods in public affairs, we strive first and foremost to amplify the foreign policy articulations, the foreign policy points that come out either from Secretary Kerry or any of the State Department's senior leaders. Which to us poses a challenge because in many respects, how do you make foreign policy interesting? We had an interesting event I think a few days ago on food security. It was about, and it was a long name, I can't even remember, it was like harvesting food for something or another and you know, the team came in and talked to us to talk to us and say, we wanna really do something big on social. And we were sort of scratching our heads, how do you make this content interesting to people? And that's one of the biggest challenges we have. Really in public affairs as well because the Secretary of State and the Undersecretary of the States, they're gonna, they have the job of really being the voice and articulating foreign policy. That's not gonna change. And when we talk about issues that are important to us, whether it's human rights, religious freedom and trying to get those message points out to foreign audiences as well as domestic audience, how do you make it as widely accessible to people as possible? And how do you get them to engage? Cause that's also another objective of our social media strategies. How do you encourage active participation on these issues that are really meaningful in the State Department? So that's pretty much one of the things that we're working on in public affairs. And we try to do that through a number of ways. We're using various platforms to get our message out to again enable a broader participation from people. We're using more Google Hangouts. We're doing Twitter chats, Facebook chats where we're getting policy leaders into our conference rooms and in front of our computers and chatting with people. But then that's just step one. Step two is how do you get people to ask relevant questions and get people engaged? And it works most of the, sometimes we have people who are just very magnetic. We have a lot of ambassadors. And of course, when Secretary Clinton is online, she's a superstar in her own right. But when we have to get down to the nitty gritty and talk about really detailed issues, that's one of the things that we try to struggle with. And I know that Hillary and Suzanne, they, we rely on them a lot because one of the things that the international information programs does to compliment our foreign policy articulation is to explain American values. The values behind why do we say what we say? And when you put that as a, sort of like compliment that together for foreign audiences who may not be familiar with the way the US is or may have never traveled to the United States, it puts a lot of our policy words into context which thing resonates online. We'll say though, now you have a dude who tweets. That's right. Secretary, yeah. Signs of JK. And then a question for any of the panelists. What has been the most surprising result of social media? Is there one experience that sticks out in your mind as this would not have happened had we not leveraged this technology in this way? I wanted to piggyback on what Suzanne said earlier about how social media, it's no longer, diplomacy is no longer just government to government. It's people to people. And I would also add to that that with social media, we're able to really fine tune and expand our public diplomacy objectives to where it's government to the people. And now, thanks to social media, it's people to government. So we're able to listen to what they have to say. And you don't, you know, as a measure of our success in public affairs, you can't have meaningful social media unless you have a broad engagement with the people who are listening to you. People can take in so many press releases and speeches that we tweet out, but unless you're actually trying to delve into what really concerns them and listen to them, you know, when we first started doing our social media outreach in public affairs, it was just that, amplification, amplifying broad policy messages. Now we're trying to figure out how to take that a step further and have actual engagement. I think this is a small example, but I think a pretty exciting one of a US ambassador who earlier was stationed in Kathmandu and is now in Kampala, and he brought his fans from Nepal to his new posting. And so it's not just amplification one way or two way. It's, I don't know how many ways at this point, but it's really interesting as, you know, social media becomes part of the fabric or has become part of the fabric of the State Department and people obviously in the State Department are moving around all the time, but they take their followers with them to their new place and you get really interesting dialogues coming out of those situations. I would just add that it's kind of ironic. A lot of the sort of best results, if you will, are the standout stories over the last several years of how social media has been successful is when a digital engagement actually results in an offline engagement, right? So when it actually ends up being the reverse of the traditional, I'm thinking about disaster response situations, the donations we've been able to pull together. So from that very sort of life or death perspective to much more sort of positive engagements between people, at the end of the day, what is government good at? I mean, a lot of times we're kind of looking at each other trying to answer that question. And if there's one thing we can do at the State Department, it's to convene people together. What's kind of awesome is to bring people together and then see that relationship sort of become sustained in and of its own right. And just to give you an example, bringing it back to virtual exchange, for example, we are in the process of hooking up various institutions, high schools, universities with counterparts abroad, and then we don't have to be there anymore. I mean, it's a pleasure for us to be there as moderators and to think about discussion topics that would be great for the students to make sure they're plugged in with the right audiences, but that's where the relationship kind of goes on its own. So I think that's been the most powerful for me to observe. I think we can, we have audience mics. Thanks, Andrew. I think we can open up to audience questions. Are there questions from the audience? There's one in the back. Yeah, hi, my name is Aaron Cohen. I'm from American University. And this question's for Hilary. Hilary, you mentioned with the India example that there was a potential audience of I think 950 million people. How do you measure the efficacy of an ambassador video within that potential audience? Easy question. Yeah, no problem. Speaking particularly for social media, I mean, if you all have expertise in it, it is, you look at a variety of factors when you determine success of a piece of content in social media. This one had a lot of viewers because it also was deployed on broadcast television. So just a disclaimer there. The number of viewers is certainly important. So let's say it's a YouTube video. You definitely look at that. You look at the reaction, likes, dislikes. You can go into YouTube analytics and you can see if, I don't know how many of you are familiar with this, but you can go into YouTube and actually see where people lost interest. So you can gauge all sorts of things. You can get a lot of insight into how something works when you deploy it on social media. I think particularly in that case in India, having it in language was important. We found that two thirds of that audience was non-English. So that was important feedback for us. So there are a variety of means, both quantitative and qualitative that you use when you evaluate a product that we create. Does that answer it? Okay. Questions? Hi, my name is Will Fleece and I work in the press office and do social media at the French Embassy. And I wanted to ask how the State Department strategizes working in diplomatic capitals around the world, whether it's in Washington, whether it's in traditional allied countries or new markets, and how you see that today and then moving forward as fast as social media is moving currently. You know, when I was based in Beijing, I was the press officer at our embassy in Beijing and we were struggling with how to leverage social media, especially since in countries like China where the media is not really that pressure release valve that you find in a lot of Western countries or where you have a free media, people express frustrations through media. In China, you don't have that luxury. So they express their frustration. The pressure release valve was in social media in a place like China. So to understand in different capitals and in different countries, the role that social media plays, I think plays a lot into how embassies articulate or how they plan their social media strategy. I just wanted to really reinforce the point that, you know, I tell people this a lot, especially the ones who are going out overseas, these press officers, FSOs, who are doing public diplomacy work, don't let social media replace what really is good authentic people-to-people public diplomacy. That's really important. You can't just expect social media to take the place of that personal engagement that you can get when you're participating in international visitors leadership program or where the ambassador goes out and talks to a group of students. It can only help so much, but that's one of the key traps that a lot of people face, especially in the State Department, which is subject to group think. When they see something successful, they want to imitate it. And I always tell people, you know, find out how social media can play a meaningful part of your public diplomacy strategy. It shouldn't be the other way around. I could just add one thing to that. I'd say too, I think, I know that Hillary and Richard would both agree with us. To answer your question, you know, it's listening too, right? So it's the same way that we need to listen to our contacts when we arrive in a capital and sit down with them and have that conversation. It's observing what kinds of conversations go on on social media, what people are coming to us for. And I'd say that a lot of the main thing that individuals come to us for generally speaking in other countries is counselor information. And so a lot of what we've sort of tried to figure out is, how can we use that as an opportunity to share with them something more perhaps? And what sort of level of expectations do they have in terms of the style of conversation? The tone is gonna be different by country. Perhaps you're dealing with a country with many different languages. So there's a variety of different questions, but the overarching thing is you gotta sit down and listen, you can't just start tweeting, right? Richard brought up a good point about limits of social media and addressed some. Are there other instances either where you've identified situations where social media just clearly hasn't addressed a problem or a point of the State Department's mission? Or other just sort of times when social media use fell flat when it was attempted to use to resolve a certain problem or to address a certain need? Sir, it's always successful. It, you know, part of I think what you have to not be afraid of is failing. And the State Department, unlike the Silicon Valley, some of us are a little bit shy to take risk because we're afraid to fail. And I think that in order for something as innovative as social media or utilizing new technologies to work is you have to try and sometimes fail. And, you know, were there messages that we've tweeted out or were there ways that we've tried to communicate with people that weren't effective? Yeah, but you kind of look at the lessons that you've learned and we try to figure out, okay, how do you make this more interesting next time? You know, it helps, I think, to have leadership at the top that really believe in social media. Like I said before, Secretary Clinton, who championed 21st century diplomacy, 21st century statecraft, you know, and even though she didn't personally tweet, she was a big proponent of the department utilizing social media. So it helps to have that leadership from the top that gives us the autonomy and the tools to use social media and even try different ways to tinker with it if certain ways don't work. I didn't. There are other international information programs, products that are not online. I did not bring them up at first because this is social media week. But, you know, this is also us staying in close contact with our embassies overseas. An embassy will tell us, look, we really still need that publication on paper. That's really what works in my country. Excuse me, and so our office of written content produces a wide variety of high quality written materials. Some of them are on paper because that's what the embassy needs to do their outreach. We also have a number of what we call American spaces around the world. These are physical spaces and public places where people can come and learn about the United States and have events there. There are ECA alumni events there often. And so these are physical places where they can come and interact with public diplomacy staff and others from the embassy and with each other. There is also in IAP the speakers program where we send people overseas to speak about topics that are important in a certain country. So, again, it's, you know, my mantra of meeting people where they are, in some cases you do have to be offline. I would just share one thing to that question. I mean, there's an inherent tension when you think about the State Department or another government agency as just a huge battleship that moves really slowly, right? And with social media, there's an expectation of immediacy. So I think there's an inherent tension there that over the years we've gotten much better at dealing with. And what you don't want is a State Department that flies off the handle and tweets around coups that we have no clue about what's happening, right? I mean, that's the reason people are coming to us because we're the voice when it comes to foreign policy. So we appreciate that and we get a bit of a pass, if you will, to go ahead and have the internal conversation figure out exactly what's going on the ground, connect with our embassy or embassies to figure things out. And so there's different functions within the State Department and certainly the ones that are more political in nature or certainly Richard's work is going to be much more paced a little bit differently than generally speaking conversations on social media. I know Melissa Dilbert is somewhere in the audience. Where are you? So Melissa is one of our community managers in Educational and Cultural Affairs and really runs our Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms. In Educational and Cultural Affairs, thank God we are generally not speaking, dealing with life and death, right? We're dealing with awesome topics of people connecting with Americans, Americans connecting with foreigners. I think Melissa has done such a great job of communicating that out. We don't have that same time pressure. So it really depends on the function you're looking at and the bureau you're looking at at State. But it's that speed, you know, we can't always be as fast as others. Any more questions from the audience? No questions? Oh, someone in the back? Hi. I was wondering if we could speak to, speak into Nationals with Nationals, so sort of like expats. Mainly on topics like voter registration and absentee ballots. I mean, I work for the campaign this best election. And being able to talk to expats that maybe it may have not been weren't able to vote or it's using social media for a political campaign or even just voter registration. Can I take that? Yeah. I can actually speak from my experience working in Beijing. We had a lot of American expatriates that live in Beijing and work. And a lot of them are on Facebook and they, unfortunately, Facebook is blocked in China. So the challenge was is how to communicate to the American expatriate community in ways that it's timely in a place like China. And it's always a challenge utilizing the technology on the ground. But I think that one of the things that or quite a few things that my colleagues in our consular affairs office did in Beijing was find out Americans that who are using Sino-Weibo and QQ and communicate through them utilizing those technologies. And it's almost become expected now. In fact, our consular division has two Chinese social media accounts. One that's just for visa information. That's one of our most popular social media accounts in China because they don't want to pay the 25 cents a minute to get visa information. They could get it for free just by posting a question online, which is a great thing. And we also have information for American citizens. And in fact, we even have a Facebook page in China even though Facebook is blocked but we have a disclaimer that says, you know, because not every American can access Facebook, don't take this as timely, don't take this as authoritative. Please go to our website if you really want something that's authoritative from the US Embassy. So those are just little things that we have to keep in mind when we're at post. For an embassy, it's certainly not the audience that we think about, American expatriates, but they certainly are important. And there's certainly an audience that expects, has a level of expectation on what their embassy can do for them. But I would say consular affairs, getting a passport, filing a certificate of birth abroad, those are ways that we're trying to figure out how to utilize social media to get that word out. How do you rates compare of people who use online tools versus traditional means of acquiring information in those contexts? Well, in a place like China, you know, we rely first and foremost on our website, our public website. And we measure our engagement that way. When I was in Paris, also working in the consular section a few years ago, and we had a very, very active social media program dedicated to Americans, and, you know, the level of engagement, the number of followers, the types of discussions that we can get online in those spaces as opposed to the queries that we'll get by phone or by fax, is really the way that you can determine if people are responding. Suzanne, did you have something you wanted to add? I think in France and China, it's the online way to go, absolutely to reach your main audience, but I think a number of our MSCs as well on the consular side are leveraging mobile technology, just as a very sort of immediate way to reach out to American citizens. And so that's a voluntary thing, just like you have to follow a page or access a site. You also have to allow for the MSC to go ahead and contact you that way. That's been a really effective one as well. Sorry. You talked a little bit about not being afraid to fail and then also balancing the tension between the media sea and having a more methodical approach. Can you talk about how you select using social media sites? You talked about mobile technology, Vine is something that's kind of popping up and becoming more popular. What criteria do you use to determine when you're going to move to a certain social media channel? I think having very clear guidelines and sort of best practices, what's worked overseas, what works here in the department, being able to communicate those effectively. I know Hilary's office has a lot of maintains spaces where they were posts and people, social media practitioners can share best practices. I think that being able to create an environment and the expectation that innovation and creativity are hallmarks of what makes a good social media engagement. I would say that some of the most creative and innovative things that have come from the Department of State are not from the department here in Washington, D.C., but from our embassies and consulates abroad. I think that the reason for that is because we've given those posts broad autonomy to use social media in a way that they feel fits their local environment. We leave it to the ambassador to set those expectations. Now, have there been mistakes? Have there been instances where embassies have accidentally tweeted things? Of course. Part of it is awareness and training, making sure that our Foreign Service Officers at Post have the right resources before they go out to how to harness and use social media that's efficient but also safe, and setting clear guidelines as to what do they have the freedom to engage in, and what do they have to come back to Washington to consult? I mean, an obvious line is the tweeting of policy and things that are more in the public diplomacy realm. Things that the Secretary of State says are things that really have to do with hard policy. We would expect posts to make sure that those messages are coordinated with Washington, and for the most part, posts do that very well. But when it comes to talking about an engagement that the ambassador had going to an event or a visitor's group that's coming to Washington, wishing them best of luck, we would hope posts have those leverage, that freedom to do that. Can I add one thing? To your question in terms of the platform, I think that's the last thing that you determine. First, you're going to look at what are our objectives here? Who are our audience? What's the environment within which we're working and the policy considerations there at stake? And then you make a decision on the platforms. I think if you start with that as you're out of the gate, it's not going to probably work as well as you would have wished. Yeah, I completely agree that a lot of the innovation is coming from the field. It is also a role of my office in IIP to experiment with new tools. So we do that on a regular basis. We'll pilot a new Facebook plugin or an app. Start small and sort of see how it goes and then you can build it if you see success. So that is another approach we take. When we had Hillary Clinton gave a town hall at the museum a few weeks ago and Twitter was encouraging us to use Vine and we tried to use it. It's a little buggy but obviously video content is important, especially as audiences are expecting more visual. Vine and other companies that are engaging in video content are key. Can you give a quick explanation of what Vine is for those who are out of the loop? Vine is the way Twitter can measure or you can take six seconds of video on your mobile device. I think it's only available on the iPhone. It's not available on Android yet but you can capture six seconds of video and it doesn't have to be six continuous seconds of video and it creates a Vine page but Twitter allows it where you can link directly to Twitter so your video is shared on Twitter. I was talking a couple of Twitter representatives about this a few weeks ago. It's an interesting how people have used Vine and how it's gotten really creative. People are starting to use Vine to show recipes. They'll show different stages of a recipe and then the final thing. They'll show people who are doing sports or something that they're engaging in outdoors from step by step. That said, the State Department and a lot of the stuff that we're doing to harness social media we'd like to see how far what people are doing with it and what are some of the things that we can use. Unfortunately, we're just not there yet with Vine but that's not to say that we don't believe that video is a powerful component that we can leverage. We're trying to explore that every day. Thank you. I was wondering how do you stay current with all these technologies you mentioned before staying in touch with Facebook and I understand you probably learn from each other about new technologies, new innovations but still is there a formal process? The reason I ask, not all federal agencies are as adapt as keeping pace with new technologies with social media and using it to their benefits and what kind of advice can you give Harikipa? Well, and you do a lot of reading. That's one thing. So we have in my office a couple of people who watch every single little thing that's going on in social media and all the developments and they know enough about the State Department context and the U.S. Government context to sort of evaluate what would really work well or what could work well that we should be looking at really. And in monthly meetings we have a monthly meeting in the State Department where we discuss these brand new tools these cutting edge tools and we sort of brainstorm how these might be applicable to us and then we do send them around on email. We have a newsletter that goes out from my office that talks about new developments in social media. For instance, if Facebook changes its format or something like that. So it's doing a lot of reading. It's talking to other people who are practitioners. You know, there are formal education opportunities in the State Department through the Foreign Service Institute and social media. So it's just, you know, I think the regular professional things of staying on top of your game in what's going on in social media. I just wanted to add to that, you know, training is really important in that aspect and Hilary alluded to the Foreign Service Institute which is our school in Arlington that trains diplomats, both new diplomats and the ones who have been in the Foreign Service for 20, 30 years. And one of the things that came out of our discussions on how to use social media better for the department is this need for a training continuum. You know, we have sort of cradle to grave training aspects for new diplomats and old diplomats and how do you weave in social media so then that way you know, whether you're a new diplomat or an ambassador that's going out to post social media is sort of giving, impressed upon you as an important tool of public diplomacy. So and now we have a training division at the Foreign Service Institute that has different social media classes we're utilizing instructors from the private sector to come teach diplomats how to best use technology to further public diplomacy and I think that that's a good start. I just add one thing I think too it's, you need to stay flexible. I think we realize we're not again, we're not Silicon Valley, we're totally DC, we're policy wonks, we kind of are just reading and we're trying to keep up as best we can and I think there's a number of great ways that we try to have that conversation and build that network internally and keep an eye on things but we're not going to have it perfect all the time and so just a couple of examples from Educational and Cultural Affairs World when it comes to for example the virtual exchange team that we're standing up, we've made it a real point to make sure to say that we're platform agnostic. Seeing that there's so many different video conferencing technologies out there, one is going to have a lot of different aspects of Harari than it will in Lima. Making sure that it's very much field driven and what works depending on the environment and same with mobile English, there's a lot of people who do have smartphones and can access a richer interface and there's others who simply don't but certainly want to learn English while they're sitting on a bus or have downtime so I think it's incumbent upon us as well to leave ourselves multiple avenues to go ahead and explore things and connect with different audiences. Thank you so much for this question and I hate to ask kind of sensitive questions I imagine that you guys do a lot of monitor social media to know about what's going on in the world other than just CNN I imagine one or two scenarios either that in some giant command center somewhere there's CNN, Al Jazeera and Twitter or is it kind of your people watching what's going on and you're bringing a note look what's going on, look what's going on how does that work, how do you guys monitor Twitter for world but it's not as I wish it was the scenario that you described where we had Twitter feeds running around and we actually have I mean as you know in the State Department we have an operation center that actually has CNN and Al Jazeera and all these news outlets plugged in on big screen and they're actually just now learning how to utilize Twitter as a breaking news source which I think is great because most of the news at least for me a few years ago I didn't believe in Twitter but then when you saw that a lot of the breaking news is happening on Twitter and more and more people get on it it's really now my only source of news and I think that people in the department are starting to realize that that's the best way to monitor breaking events is through Twitter because not only do you have the news organizations who are tweeting out information but you have people around the ground thought leaders, people who are talking about perspectives and it really gives you a whole sort of like a whole perspective on how situations are evolving especially disasters and you know I think that as we get better at it you'll definitely see more of a practice of using social media as a means to monitor breaking information yes absolutely we do monitor and we do audience research but I would emphasize that there are a lot of really serious rules around monitoring on social media we don't drill down to the individual so we're monitoring at a high level sort of what's going on in social media but still staying within compliance of government rules for how we can use social media yeah this works kind of on that note how like what's the process of when you start to take a certain amount of tweets seriously obviously like with Arab Spring we were seeing kind of these live tweeting of events when does it like how do you go through that process of being like this is something we need to respond to now when you have to go through that kind of government process and security well one of the characteristics of social media as you all know it has a very large and wide sort of spectrum of users and I think that when you see this trending on social media a lot of them are just rumors or people expressing their opinion when you really start to see people like people who have a lot of followers news organizations, bloggers start to pick up that stuff then that's when we start to pay more attention to it obviously you know it's very hard to keep track of every conversation that goes on on Twitter and unless people are using the same hashtag I don't think people were using it well maybe they were for Arab Spring you know the sort of volume of tweets and social media content that was been going out during that time you start to see trends and I think that you know the first indication for us is who's speaking it and you know how far is you know who's their audience how many followers do they have I think that would probably be a good indication that something is you know is something trending I'm kidding but I was going to say to add on to what Richard was saying I think there's also a training piece there and we've talked about this a lot because so much of that listening process we're talking about happens at a local level so that's going to be in a certain language or languages that back here in DC we may or may not understand or we might have three language experts who happen to all be you know out sick that day or whatever it might be so I think too a lot of the discussion is around how we can empower our posts to go ahead and understand you know back here Hi, my name is Bernie given what's going on with corporate social media accounts and hacking how do you maintain security within the State Department and your Twitter account I was going to tell you but we'd have to sell you a big Mac you know there are best standard best practices for security that are industry wide and we follow those and I don't think I'm giving away any trade secrets there we're just susceptible to hacking in cybersecurity we pay a lot of attention to it because it's serious we take the usual precautions that anybody who runs a professional account should take it includes changing your password frequently something I forget to do on my own personal media account this gentleman here had a question what percentage of your diplomatic staff at the foreign missions do you think today are authorized to respond on social media and do you see a time in the future where like every diplomat is sort of authorized just like everybody's authorized to respond to an email if they get it right I mean do you see also like a bandwidth issue this is like a three point question you see also like a bandwidth issue people are tweeting and they're like thousands coming in every minute how do you keep track of which ones you want to respond to well I mean in that aspect we look at social media as like talking to the public so we have rules of engaging with the press very similar to the way we engage with the public on social media we have in most embassies they have a public affair section where they have a spokesperson that is authorized to speak to the media on the record and in a very similar fashion posts have ways of what is an official message from the embassy now there's two distinctions here and this is something that we grapple with I guess most organizations grapple with is that you know we realize that a lot of individuals now diplomats foreign service officers have their own private media social media accounts they have Facebook pages they communicate with their family and friends a lot of them even have Twitter accounts and then there's the official side where they have you know the embassies and consulates have Facebook and Twitter accounts that are really more for official use and when we we try to communicate to people that you know when you're a diplomat overseas you're a diplomat 24 hours a day so while you're face we're not going to tell people whether they can or can't open up their own private Facebook page we do expect them to understand that when when they're on Facebook and they're tweeting about things that they see even in a private capacity you know all that stuff is out there in the general public but then as a sort of a logistics point there you know public affairs sections really are the only ones who are and of course the ambassador authorized to speak on the record and that includes social media my question the next in the back sorry to Richard because similar question is last event but how do you see social media as improving state department foreign policy so rather than in carrying out foreign policy but building it into policy formulation I think that diplomacy is one of the last frontiers that's put by the masses I mean it's always been a practice of the elites and that foreign affairs to really understand it is you know like Suzanne alluded to earlier was really a practice that was between governments and governments it was between guys in morning coats that exchange pleasantries behind closed doors and I think with the advent of social media it's becoming more open and as I said earlier that's one of the things that we strive to achieve with our social media is making diplomacy more transparent but understanding that diplomacy also by its very nature has to have some discretion and I think that when you look at foreign policy as a whole and as it evolves public diplomacy factors in very much into how how we look at our foreign policy goals in certain countries and that social media as a component of our public diplomacy plays in with how we roll out a certain how we talk to the public about certain issues it's not at the same level as say governments interacting with their own citizens where you can go to the DMV or if you hate something that you know if you got bad service from the DMV or from the social security office you can tweet about it and there'd have to be some expectation of response you know we try to do that too overseas with foreign audiences primarily to explain foreign policy values but by listening and by engaging with members of the public on issues that are important to them in foreign policy I think that as a whole it helps our leaders understand you know how does how does how can we achieve that next step in in crafting a well thought foreign policy that benefits not just the United States but also the countries that we strive to build relations with if I could just add to that I think you know the expectation in the online space now is that we can kind of crowdsource everything right that if you are you have a Twitter account you know the hashtag for a certain conversation that's happening indeed you can contribute to that in a substantive way and so if you take that to the ultimate product when you look at what are the products of diplomacy you know maybe the most additional one would be a treaty and so we're not in the space of we're now going to be crowdsourcing treaty language like we're just not there nor are we probably ever going to get there and that's probably a good thing for national security however you know what Richard just said getting a better context for you know the pulse of the people you know what the expectations are in a general public around a certain theme that changing tone all of those go into the real time creation of things like you know a treaty perhaps or that's a very you know highfalutin thing but some sort of policy that we might be crafting with a bilateral multilateral partner. I had a question about human rights and it builds on the Arab Spring question some of the groups that I work with are very concerned about the conditions in Bahrain and when they're reputable and the the things that are happening of course are real so when they wait to the State Department or the embassy and they don't get any kind of response not necessarily a solution but just notice that they've been heard I think that they're frustrated that America doesn't care and I wondered what maybe advice you'd have for human rights groups who are trying to engage with the State Department to at least make sure that the messages are being heard what would you would potentially get even a response? Everyone's looking at me I I'm not going to we're not the best people to ask about what's going on in Bahrain although as a broad policy topic human rights is certainly one of the issues that is important to us and we try to make that point everywhere in places that we have diplomatic relations with but I would go back to my point I made earlier about how here public diplomacy the interactions that you have face to face with people is important even more so than the interactions you have online and we strive to follow human rights situations everywhere around the world embassies are required to write a human rights report that's mandated by Congress and a lot of that is shared with human rights groups overseas whether that's in person through traditional roundtables or online this is again human rights is a perfect example of where having conversations about that topic no matter how sensitive is a better way to understand where we come from as a nation why human rights is so important to us and why do we make the point for example in China when people always you know I mean their definition of human rights interesting enough is more broader than our definition of human rights I mean to them human rights is the right to have a job the right to have a salary the right to read and we look at more our definition is a little bit different that's one of the things that we hope to achieve through public diplomacy is to share this these informations and share these perspectives that may be different and I think that to your point about human rights groups having those lines of communications both offline and online I think contributes to a better understanding of how that policy how those policies are are develop and are expressed oh you can go over there I have Steven with the US Institute of Peace I was just wondering how you guys coordinate the messages amongst all the different posts and all the different accounts I mean if you have like the main state account that has millions of followers but then there's also something important going on in another country how do you share all the information between all these people well one important tool that we have that I IP produces is a daily email that goes out to the social media practitioners in the field and it contains suggested text for tweets and Facebook postings in English and in other languages and I know that that's a major tool of getting you know messages coordinated and messages out in a timely fashion how do you balance then the the risk of everything sounding to boilerplate I mean if everyone's using the the the prescribed text is there room for modification and it is right it's it's suggested text they can they are free to modify it to fit their local circumstances but it's it's you know it's it's easier for them to take something that's been drafted and edited rather than having to guess just you know from scratch so they are free to edit as necessary questions I guess beyond monitoring breaking news events can you talk a little bit about how you respond to breaking news that might require a fast but delicate diplomatic response in social media I'm thinking for example about the protest this spring or this fall at the U.S. embassies in response to the anti-Muslim video in particular one response comes to mind from the U.S. embassy in Cairo that called out the Muslim Brotherhood Twitter feeds in Arabic and English for spreading mixed messages thanks well when we look at how to respond to breaking news it's not just through we don't it's not just social media that we're looking at we're looking at more of a broader picture what is what's being said on TV what's being said in print media and then we look at all of those those things and you know I think you know one of the thing one of the the key important things to remember is that you know don't respond too quickly and as situations evolve things are happening quickly looking at social media as it plays out in addition to what's seeing what you're seeing on the screen on TV and on radio on traditional media is key the like I said earlier we give our embassies a lot of discretion on dealing with local audiences embassy Cairo has certainly have a very they have a very active Twitter account and they have a lot of people who follow them on Twitter and you know I'm not going I wasn't on the ground in Cairo so I can't really speak to the type of you know they're sort of why they were tweeting and why they're communicating with the Muslim Brotherhood but I will say that this is an example of how you know embassies and folks back here in DC coordinate and how necessary it is to coordinate whenever you have those fast breaking events because you know the State Department is still the authority and people will look to the US government overseas as credible you know for credible information even in the face of the media where in many countries the media doesn't have the same level of credibility so you know being careful about what we say and how we respond is important and monitoring social media and looking at how it's playing and how it's evolving is key and I think the embassy Cairo all goes far as to say that is an example of how looking at how a situation is evolving and seeing how it plays it's different if you wait and see how something plays out and tweeting something immediately and I think that's where the lesson was learned with embassy Cairo I think that we'll end there unless any panelists have any other remarks closing just thank you so much awesome questions and we thank you guys for joining and for everyone here for joining us as well