 So, good morning everyone, let me welcome you to the New America Foundation. My name is Benjamin Lennett and I direct the policy team here at the Open Technology Initiative. Before I turn it over to Alex to get us started, let me just say a few words about New America. New America is a public policy institute that invests in new thinkers and new ideas to adjust the next generation of policy challenges facing the United States. We have programs that work on a variety of issues including international development, economic growth, healthcare, and education. My program, the Open Technology Initiative, formulates policies to support open source innovations and open networks. We promote universal and affordable communications access through partnerships with communities, researchers, industry, and public interest groups. OTI believes in the potential of communications and media technologies to impact society writ large. And as recent events have demonstrated, social media has had a transformative impact on public diplomacy and democratization. Beginning last January, all states were forced to grapple with the implications of social media, seeing either promise or peril and as such whether to harness the technology or attempt to suppress it. OTI would like to thank Alex for organizing this great panel and we are pleased to host such an expert panel to discuss this critical issue. So without further ado, let me turn it over to Alex to get us started. You send the obligatory tweet to let everybody know that we're live. Very important. So my name is Alex Howard. I work for O'Reilly Media. I have the good fortune to get to cover the intersection of government technology and society. It's hard to think of a more stunning intersection these days. Have you seen how much change is sweeping the globe? How much we are all connected in real time? How much we're experiencing events together? You know, you go right down the line, whether it's the turmoil that's rolling the Middle East, popular protests against bills here in Washington, upset consumers about decisions that organizations are making on their behalf, concern about technology companies changing their terms of service, issues around privacy, issues around security, and of course, things like the Super Bowl or the Grammys, which we all talk about in real time. We're all connected in ways that I think really only existed before in science fiction. So let's get more connected right now. If you haven't tuned in, there is in fact a back channel here. It's on Twitter for all the fact that more people are on Facebook than Twitter. Twitter is still where the real-time chatter is for any given event. That's no different here at Social Media Week. There have been thousands of tweets. I expect there'll be many more today. I encourage you to get on there. It's Pound SMW Diplomacy. If you're interested, tune in to that particular channel. If you're not familiar with the concept of hashtags, there are a lot like channels on cable TV. You can tune in to the conversation you want. And I wanted to start off with a quick exercise to get a sense of what the room is like. How many people here are on Twitter? Okay. How many people here are on Facebook? Okay. How many here are on Google Plus? All right. Editorial comments later. How many people here have checked in on Foursquare so far? Okay. How many people here have watched a video on YouTube in the last day? All right. How many of you are on Pinterest? Wow. Okay. That's fast user adoption. Okay. So that sets a pretty good grounding, right? We're all on these platforms in one way or another. There's still some exceptions here. If you're not seeing the difference between social media and past forms, the most important difference is the fact that it's reciprocal. It's a two-way channel if you want it to be. People still can and do get on there to broadcast. State departments, no exception in that realm. But now there is media, nonprofits, other parts of government, general people. So there's a dynamic that's different, but we want to explore how that could be used for different ways. There is something that's important here, though, in the sense that social media is not a new phenomenon in other senses, right? We've been communicating with each other for a long time. And as I've gone through this week, and in fact, I've gone through the past couple of years in DC at events like this, people spend a lot of time like this, right? So what I'd like you to do just to loosen things up is to turn to your right and introduce yourself, and then turn to your left and introduce yourself. Hey. Hey. Hey. Nice socks. You took a picture. Excellent. Dude, you just did a meet-up. Well done. Isn't this fun? Excuse me. You know what I mean? Echo Chamber. Remember? Remember Echo Chamber? Okay. I should have said in five minutes or two minutes if I had a bell, I'd start ringing it now. Thank you for acting social. Social in a real sense, right? And then this is not to say that being on social media isn't real. Quite real. And one of the questions we're going to get into is whether some of the interactions that happen in these platforms have offline actions. One of the most important questions I think that gets asked, why be here? Does it just change people's conversations? What's the value of a retweet or a like, right? It really has to convert to something else. It doesn't matter what space it's in. But here I'm really glad that you all got to meet each other because those are the kinds of weak ties that later on turn to something else. So with that, let's do a couple of introductions. Sitting next to me, I have Ed Dunn. He is at Ed and Dunn on Twitter. If you need to attribute him. He's the acting director of the U.S. Department of State's Digital Communications Center. Sitting across from me, I have Nick Namba. He is Nicholas Namba, if you want to attribute him. He's the Acting Deputy Coordinator for Content Development and Partnerships at the U.S. Department of State's Bureau for International Information Programs. That's just one side of the card, right? And then we have Suzanne Hall. She is at S-U-Z-K-P-H on Twitter. And she's the only one who's not acting here. You are the Senior Advisor of the Innovation Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Department of State. Now, it wouldn't be government if they didn't show up with PowerPoint presentations. I've asked each of them to keep it under five minutes, and they will, otherwise they'll get cut off. And they're going to rock out starting from here and head on in. So, three quick PowerPoints, and then we're going to get right to Q&A. So, morning everyone. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks so much for the organizers for New America, for Alex. I come from the Bureau of Public Affairs, the Spokesperson's Office at the State Department. Talk a little bit about what we're doing on Twitter and then a few, or excuse me, on all social media properties and then a few examples. I'm aiming for four minutes, so go ahead and time me. So, my office, we run Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr. We have a blog called Dipnote. It's sort of the official mouthpiece from the Spokesperson's Office. So that's sort of how we couch it. We also run 10 foreign language Twitter feeds. Let's see if I can get them in alphabetical order right. Arabic, English, Farsi, French, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Urdu. We're trying to communicate mainly policy messaging on sort of official US positions. So that's sort of the arena that we're operating in. We're trying to move from broadcast into more engagement. This is difficult, but also this is what I think people want. They want to engage the US government. They want to engage the State Department, both domestically and overseas, in English and in other languages, on policy issues that they care about. So we've been trying to craft a number of different initiatives to get at this a little bit better. One of the things we did in January was we held a series of Twitter briefings where we had the Department Spokesperson, Toria Newland, we basically crowdsourced questions from Twitter on all 11 of our language feeds, English plus the 10 foreign language feeds. And we allowed people to submit questions on anything they wanted. And then we took those questions every week and she answered them from the podium in English. We then took those answers and we subtitled them in the source language, created YouTube videos and pushed them back out and then tweeted them out to people who submitted the questions. It's just another way that we're trying to engage people more robustly, not just here in the States, but overseas and do it in real time. Another example of what we're doing is we have a program called Live at State. It's built on the Adobe Connect platform. It essentially is shot in our studios in D.C. It gives journalists specifically overseas and around the world an opportunity to engage with senior government officials in real time on policy issues that they care about. We've done this in English, we've done it in Spanish, we've also done it in Chinese. Live in real time with journalists overseas on issues ranging from assistance in the Horn of Africa, education and cultural exchange with China. We had the U.S. Ambassador to Libya talking about salient issues there. We've done Arab Spring, anything like that. And it's, again, an effort to break down these barriers. It's all web-based and then afterwards we provide video content, the transcript and everything for journalists and bloggers and they can embed it on their blogs. They can do whatever they want with it. This is an example of sort of what the page looks like in the interface. Another example is the secretary did some some robust outreach to Iranian audiences. We did two interviews, one with BBC Persian and one with Parazit, which is kind of an interesting show because it's very web-based. A lot of questions came in online. And then afterwards we ended up shooting a lot of behind-the-scenes video, which tends to be very popular with Iranian audience. Again, moving a little bit past having someone at the podium talking about formal policy issues and sort of getting into a little bit more engagement, trying to generate some conversation but about sort of what is the U.S. position on X issue. And then here's a recent example of engagement in Syria. Our ambassador, Robert Ford, messages to the Syrian people and images placed. This is from the Facebook page, the U.S. Embassy Damascus Facebook page. So again, using these properties to try and get past just broadcast and into more engagement and having robust conversations when we can't be there physically. For us to have more conversations with more people across more spectrums when we physically can't be in a location because we can't be everywhere at once. And again, I also think the drive from our perspective is doing more and more in foreign languages because we can't just be communicating in English. We have to be doing it in the vernacular and on the platforms that people want to use and having conversations in the language in which they're comfortable. All right. Thank you. Five on the nose. We're all driven by the PowerPoint at this point. Hey, my turn. Hi, guys. How are you doing? My name is Suzanne Hall. Alex, thank you so much for making this happen. Thank you guys for showing up at 9.30 on a Thursday, really. So psyched that this is a subject that you guys are interested in and willing to come out early for. So I work in the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. And I think what we were talking about before is between Ed and Nick and myself, you really have representatives of the three major pieces of the public diplomacy family at state. And I, you know, we're really interested to be able to kind of tell our story and connect with you guys today and have top objectives. But there's a lot of ways that we are collaborating behind the scenes, and so we got, you know, what I think is a great story to tell. From our perspective at Educational and Cultural Affairs, you know, what do we do? What's our headline? We do people-to-people exchanges. We do 50,000 a year, more or less. Can I ask how many of you guys have gone on an exchange academic or otherwise over the course of your lives? Did you like it? Keep your hands up if you liked it. Do you remember it? Keep your hands up if you remember it. The thing is, that is a great thing. Probably I don't even know how to use this. Okay, let's go traditional toolkit. That's a great thing. We don't want to touch that. We see that that creates sort of mutual understanding that you just can't replace. Those are personal experiences. The question that I've got sort of is how can we leverage, you know, social media platforms and other technologies to sort of scale and tail that experience. Really make it available to as many people who want to take part as possible. So, you know, holding on to our core objective, connecting people in a person-to-person, first-person kind of way, but supplementing that and complimenting that with virtual exchange opportunities. Another sort of core element that we do is English language programming. Very popular with both teachers and students abroad, as you can imagine. Educational, USA advising. So, the whole deal on this is there's so many kids who want to come and study in the States. How do we help them navigate that process? I don't know about you guys, but for me I'm not educated enough. I barely remember it. I feel very old now, but, you know, applying for college, applying for grad school, you know, it's, okay, send in this fee, apply for this. Now, add on to that also taking an English language exam just to be able to get in. Not a straightforward process. So, we do have a network of more than 400 advisors around the world that we partner with to be able to help kids through that process. And finally, alumni. This is a big one for us. Business and person exchanges are our wheelhouse, right? 50,000 people a year that we are facilitating connections for. We have now a network of a million alumni around the world who have participated in some sort of State Department exchange. That's an awesome number. So, we don't want to lose that power. There's so much networking capability. There's so much smarts there. We can be learning from them. Hopefully providing them resources that might be helpful. How do we stay engaged with them? I'm going to walk you guys through. I bet I'll go over five. I talk so much. So, exchange show. Just hitting the first sort of virtual exchange one. Again, scaling and tailing that physical experience. How can we make sure that this is more accessible to youth? Specifically, lower and middle income who may not have, for example, the opportunity to apply or the cash to apply to participate in programs like this. Leveraging video conferencing platforms. Ed mentioned our use of Adobe Connects. Nick will be discussing that in more detail. I've got Skype up here. You know, there's so many different ways that we could be making this happen. It's not for us a question of, hey, let's use the flashiest tool. Quite the opposite. A lot of the work that we do obviously happens in developing countries around the world. We need to be plugging in in a way that people can connect that's useful for them and where they live. In a place like Haiti, that's going to be more on a dumb phone, on a feature phone via mobile. Not on a high bandwidth, live video stream. And just a couple of examples. Again, using virtual exchange experiences to connect wider audiences. There's a lot of sort of global events that take place around the world that the State Department plays a role in. I've got a few up here, namely the World Fair coming up this year in Yosu in the very southern part of South Korea. How can we bring the themes of Yosu, focused on climate change, for example, to a wider audience? Otherwise, it's going to sort of not even impact an American audience or people in the region. We want to get those conversations out. You've got incredible talent coming through there. Let's engage in a broader way, and I think there's a lot of ways we can do that. Alright, mobilizing English. I mentioned English language you know, resources both for teachers and students are a huge piece of what we do from the public diplomacy standpoint through our embassies and consulates abroad. We're really pleased to say that this is the first mobile-based English language program in Tunisia in November of last year. This is a 90-day pilot in collaboration with our US Embassy in Tunis and the largest mobile network operator in Tunisia called Tunisiana. So I'm really psyched because I was trying to get you guys numbers so I would actually have some relevance today standing up in front of you. In a country of 10 million people, we have 535,000 unique users. Rock on. So we are very focused on the fact that traditionally our measures, our metrics have been around did we actually work with you in a way that improved your English language skills? Reading, speaking, whatever it might be. In this short term, this was more about reach in a country post-revolution where we had this opportunity. Going forward, we're really going to be focused on those metrics that are kind of more on the traditional side. Did a mobile-based English language program help you improve your English skills? I will say, and perhaps many of you are involved in this, but mobile education around the world is an emerging sphere so we're all still trying to get our arms around how it can be a useful complement to a traditional sort of bricks and mortar classroom experience but we're excited to learn more from this project. At USA Digital Outreach. So again, all these kids want to come study in the US. How can we help them? Well, we have this incredible physical network of 400 advising centers around the world that in no way meets the demand. So our team has really developed a strong set of social media resources that can help sort of guide these kids at three in the morning when they finally got an extra minute and they can actually check things out. We're also developing some really impressive tools that will be available for low-media environments where you can't really hook into that bandwidth. So thumb drives, CD-ROMs, etc. And alumni. Finally, those million people I was talking about. One of the things we're really focused on anybody here go over on a State Department exchange ever? Hey, cool. So are you guys on alumni.state.gov? You know why? Because it's a really powerful place, right? But it's probably passwords that we don't remember. And so what we're focused on now, well that's a really impressive space that includes more than 80,000 of our alumni. That's not nothing. They've got incredible resources there, webinars that are taking place, etc. We want to expand that circle. And one of the things I think we're getting our arms around now is localizing that experience and making it really relevant for our alumni groups locally in language, on the platforms that they use, whether Facebook, LinkedIn, just text, whatever it might be. So we're really looking to look to work with our local coordinators and you know beyond the massive website that seeks to connect everybody, how can we localize this networking and make it as impactful as possible for our alumni. Okay, last one. I'm sure I'm over. This is just for discussion later. Where can we take this to? Nick and I were just talking about really the spectrum of virtual exchange and making it sort of more of an on-demand experience like I've got listed up here. You would like to connect with a counterpart in Japan and you're 18. Or we can make it more formalized. This teacher would like to connect their classroom with one in Ghana. There's a spectrum of engagement and we hope to be able to support the efforts that are ongoing right now in the private sector and non-profit space. I talked about the Singlish Language Program we have in Tunisia that's an incredible body of text-based information and hopefully audio at some point. Can we make that sort of open resource? Can we make that a part of a public domain library that could be available for related projects? Data visualizations. How do we better tell or impactfully tell the story of person-to-person exchanges, right? It's one thing for me to sit up here and say yo, we do 50,000 a year. It's a big number. We've got a million people around the world. Tell me the story. Make it real. I mean, Alex just had you guys meet each other, turn around. It's that quick video with an alumni of how it changed the life, let's say, of a woman from Pakistan. So just some sort of ideas I'm going forward. That's how you can reach me and I do want to give a shout out because my son's here, he's four and a half and I'm really hopeful that he's the youngest participant in social media week, February 2012. Not that he's in the room, but he's virtualizing his experience by watching cars. Thank you guys. Nice. All right, well, we're waiting for this to come up. Thanks to everyone. I'm not going to get into it. They said thanks. That's going to be into my five minutes if I thank everyone I need to thank, but I think we all got it. So we've got Ed, who comes from public affairs. That's the policy. That's the president. Everyone knows you got to go to public affairs if you want the official word on what our policy is. You've got my friend over here, Suzanne, who's educational, exchanges, English language, study in the United States, come to the United States, long term, really impactful, probably the most impactful thing that the United States government does in terms of our engagement overseas. If you go on an exchange program, there's no better way to learn about America than think positively about America. So what do you do in between that? So you don't want to listen, you don't want to hear 30 minutes, and you don't want to go on an exchange or you can't afford it and you can't afford English language training. You come to IIP. This is the place where we have sustained conversations on a daily basis. It's our job to talk to almost everyone in the world every single day. Social media is a new fancy toy. Everyone's loving it. It's growing really fast. It probably will be our main platform, but we do have bread and butter products that are working today and are incredibly impactful. So just to give you a little bit of background, IIP provides 800 American spaces all over the world. These are spaces that are owned, operated, or partnered with local institutions to offer an American experience to local people on the ground, walk up, engage, learn about the United States, meet with someone. Just to give you some kind of context for that, that's more international stores than Apple gap and target combined. So that's the U.S. government storefront, if you will. We create the publications that everyone reads about America overseas. Books, publications, magazines, journals, tweets, Facebook postings, they reach about 50 million people every year. These are all foreigners by the way. We conduct about 1,000 virtual events every single year and about 5,400 in-person events and that's connecting Americans to locals on the ground across every spectrum of the United States culture, government, business, entrepreneurship, you name it, we do it. And then on the technical side we run a website for the U.S. Department of State. So every embassy site, every consulate site, all of our virtual posts, that's 450 websites, 55 languages, 300,000 people a day. So that's the stuff that we do on a day-to-day basis but it's the social media stuff that's grabbing everyone's attention. So what are we doing on that front? Oh by the way, building America's reputation overseas I'm kind of trying that out. Let me know what you think. I want to talk about Race to 4 Million. So we just completed that. This was a social media campaign where we wanted to raise the department social media, fan-based followers, etc. to 4 million people. We did it over a three month period of time. We focused on really engaging content market-specific strategies. We went to every single country that has a Facebook presence and we figured out what they wanted to read about America, hear about America, study about America, tailored content to their needs. We ran promotions, we worked with our embassies, we worked with the private sector to do it and in just over three months we did, we got to 4 million. So we went from 800,000 to about 4 million. Why did we do that? Frankly we felt that we needed some kind of statistically meaningful engagement with the world. We were kind of ho-humming around at under a million and we were like we got to build this up, we got to see if it makes sense. So we raised to 4 million, it was fantastic. The results are we got 125 million views, 350,000 engagement, top countries that overtly wanted to engage with us, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt, Bangladesh, Nepal. Our engagement rates were on par with White House and Coca-Cola. So we did something right. We learned quite a bit and that's one of the reasons why we did it because we needed to know what the hell we were going to do on social media. We didn't really know. We needed to try it out, we needed to gain some expertise in it. And so what's next? We launched it this week, social media week, 2100 social media challenge. This is taking what we learned from the race to 4 million and moving it out to 20 of our embassies. So we are deploying teams, I come from the private sector, so I'm going to say deploying consulting teams to 20 embassies and we're going to double their social media presence over the next year. And essentially what we're going to do is we're going to take what we learned from the race to 4 million, devise really specific content, help them target their message, understand their audience, figure out what their audiences are talking about and then really go after them. It is going to be a fantastic initiative for those embassies and it's growing their local Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Youku, Weibo, whatever it is, because we don't care, we don't necessarily focus on Facebook until we focus on whatever is indigenous in the country. So work it, you name it, we're going to help them do it. And we're really excited about it and our posts are really excited about it because it's an expertise that frankly our diplomats are gaining, but not everyone has it. So we're going to deploy our teams to help them out. And then our future which we are working on right now and it will be more hopefully sooner rather than later and actually I'm going to have a shout out to our director of audience research and analysis who is in the audience so if you have questions about that. But this is so you understand social media, you know you want to go out there but it still doesn't tell you what your audience overseas wants to hear. What are they thinking? So what are we trying to do? We want to give our officers in the field, our ambassadors, our public affairs officers, our economic officers an idea about what their publics are thinking on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, on a monthly basis. So they can come in if you will, this is sort of our pie in the sky goal is someone will walk in, they'll get a report out and they'll be like these are the issues that people are talking about now. Here are the trends that are happening over the past day 48 hours, week, month because for too long our officers have been based on a lot of education, based on a lot of frankly cultural awareness in a way shooting in the dark with social media you don't have to do that a lot of the data about what people are thinking feeling saying is on social media but you got to suck it all in, analyze it and then present it in a way that our people can take really quick actions with and so this is next for us that's it Shortest So this is a great evidence of the fact that the State Department is quite eloquent in talking now we get to talk a little bit about how good you are at listening. Let's pull this together a little bit if you don't mind so we don't have to stare across the golf got a live stream right there so see how this goes now I used the interwebs to get questions ahead of time we have 54 votes and 14 questions from 14 people they're not a perfectly representative sample, the people who are following me or New America but there are some good questions that came through and if you have questions that you want to see asked that you don't think I'm asking, want to hear from people here in the room too it is my practice during these forums I will say to take questions over Twitter because I find that that means they stay short and they continue to be a question not a statement and because a lot of the time on modern discussions with government that's desirable hmm so that being said this question of listening is not a minor one these days especially in these platforms someone who covers this we see news break there first all the time, Twitter has been letting us know when Houston's death broke that actually news of it was on Twitter an hour before mainstream media picked it up someone had shared it out that it was starting to expand within a certain conversation people on people who knew given how fast change is sweeping certain parts of the globe certainly in the Middle East certainly when there's an event like the tsunami in Japan we see the news break there first, famously this happened in Haiti too then is the State Department listening to these conversations and then bringing that back to actionable intelligence from open source intelligence that then policy makers who need it literally at their fingertips can use it and how I mean before we even answer that was so over 140 characters Alex I'm allowed to ask long questions he didn't tweet it do you want me to take that what I can tell you is is that you're absolutely right listening is key but we don't have the capacity unlike anything else our diplomats have been really good at having one-on-one or one-two very small group conversations historically but with so much of the conversation moving online now we have no bill we don't have the staff we don't have the resource to listen to at all but if we look at what's happening in the Middle East it's really important to listen to what's happening listening what everyone is talking about so in terms of initiatives we have this is not just PA, ECA or IAP this is a broader department of state broader national policy issue and that is to figure out a way where we can on an enterprise-wide level bring down the data analyze it and then make it actionable for the field and for the secretary and for all of her principles it's really nascent I can tell you everyone's trying to do it and no one has really figured it out it's costly it's a boatload of data and so we have numerous pilots under way to try and figure it out before we make the hardcore investment but I can say that we are piloting a process to suck down large amounts of social media data and then provide that information to our posts and to department principals so you're not just following Andy Carbon we do that part of it if I could I would say given that's sort of where we're going what we're doing now there are a number of free open source tools that we can utilize that scrape this data at various levels I would say it goes deeper than sort of the first tracking hashtag level to get at where are these conversations happening is it not just happening in English there are some free tools available that we're using and especially in the event of a crisis like you said in Japan the Haiti earthquake I would say now it's basically par for the course when there's a task force that stood up there's a social media component of that to make sure we're given the tools that we have available we're doing our best to listen to these conversations and not miss something because as you said the stuff breaks very quickly and Twitter is an excellent example of that so we're definitely moving in that direction and we're using I would say some stopgap tools that we have right now at our fingertips given the absence of more sophisticated enterprise wide deep dive analytics I mean we're living in the age of big data right it's the exabyte age at this point so the tools that we've typically had for analysis of these gigantic data sets simply aren't up to it and I could put in a free plug for Riley's big data conference at this point Stratoconference because this is what we're interested in and what's notable in fact is dynamic you mentioned that open source tools are actually lending the power that people need to get through this amount of information and make sense of it can you share what states trying to use in this space I mean my office we're using we've used think up we've used sort of the free stuff in Hootsuite we've also used tweet reach immediately after some engagements that we have to sort of see what the bounce is who's having these conversations and Google analytics a couple other what is it tweet map things like that to sort of get different snapshots and aggregate it and then move forward it is by no means a comprehensive deep dive look but it gives us a good snapshot of information that we're tracking Alex if I can mention Andy Carvin who obviously has become this global voice specifically around events in the Middle East North Africa over the last year it's true too that stories break locally one of the things I think we're encouraging our post to do is really like you said it's how do you listen how do you listen locally so we can draw our kind of global nodes map with you know those big voices on Twitter who are talking about the subjects that internationally folks are paying attention to but then who are the voices who are going to talk about a landslide in Columbia right and there are those local voices and so one of the things we're working with our posts around our embassies is to say you know start identifying who those folks are how they how they interact interact with them directly so I think this is both sort of it's got a global some global elements that we from here in Washington can can start to tackle but it's also an exercise that needs to be done on an embassy basis that's one point second point quickly is just to say we are totally aware that we're not going to be able to get this right by ourselves and to that extent many of you might have attended the last Tech at State we had in real time awareness where you're you know trying to jump into that issue what efforts are happening in the private sector in the nonprofit space to help us kind of filter and more accurately drink from the fire hose right and so this is this has got to be a group effort these are big questions that many of us State Department far beyond are trying to tackle I think one additional point is we can't discount the human factor both in Washington and in in the field is it's been a pivot for the for our diplomats here and in the field to start listening with or without the technology and that is an important movement to take place because for many years we have been in the dissemination mode and now we are sitting back and we have people assigned just to take it in and then move it amongst ourselves and I think that is an important step for us to take regardless of whatever technology makes it easier so State is actually trying to move towards being a listening organization but some time here to figure that out we need to make it easier in ourselves that no doubt about it I mean it's you know it's the world we're tasked with monitoring the world and you know as we all know far fewer diplomats than military personnel for instance for instance so there's a if you're talking about the military they're quite protective of their tactics understandably people in diplomacy are quite protective of their sources and methods in public diplomacy though it's somewhat interesting because of course you're all out there but there are many cases in countries where if you're listening to people if you're listening to the right person at the right time you have to be careful about how to say making that action public and if you see the people who are often at great risk to themselves tweeting or sharing information from these spaces they are taking risks so if you're actively listening that can pose challenges how are you as you move into this process making sure that the people who you want to protect on the ground are not damaged by that listening that's a really good question I'll take a stab all of us right now I mean you're looking at service officers we've all served abroad in a number of different places we're all right now back here in Washington honestly we're not the right people to be asking that those are locally developed sources those are networks that we are not managing thank God from here in DC we're not the best place to manage it and those are decisions that need to be taken locally both informed again the listening effort if you're developing that one-on-one relationship with a person who has privacy considerations security considerations it might be it's that person who's got to define the terms and that's just a very localized process you know I think there's best practices I think that you can say you know it's a female in a certain country where that person with a high profile would be in a lot of danger and you can carry those with you one part that again is in terms of you know the weight and history and experience that we bring we have to be careful to not just simply implant that somewhere else I mean it really can't be a cookie cutter approach I think one advantage too of us having essentially one you know we're a large multinational organization we've got field offices in almost every single country in the world so the key I think to to that protection question is you listen and frankly listening is part of the reward we need to we need to make sure that they understand they're being heard but what's great is we take it offline we've got people deployed so we don't have to go back in cyberspace we don't have to worry about someone we've got folks on the ground that can take that conversation offline or through another mechanism which I think is is not necessarily what you have when you have a one person in the US trying to communicate with someone in Syria well no no we've actually got folks there and that helps us out I think quite a bit from protecting our sources and also the State Department has a long history of being very careful about that and I think people have learned to trust us so in an example of real-time listening I see some people in the crowd are getting angsty about wanting outcomes and in fact the number one voted question on moderator was what offline outcomes have resulted from social media and digital diplomacy so let's go down the way here one outcome real action real difference that was made from using tools starting here coming on down um you know I get to reach beyond okay Tunisia mobile English our our access programs these are micro scholarship English language programs that are great that are reaching hundreds of kids but they're reaching kids in the capital of Tunis in Svax and a couple of additional cities are embassies in the process of sharing that out but how do I reach youth in particular in Tunisia in the south and the central places we are working right now with a carrier to get sort of a deep dive into that demographic information but the anecdotal information around it through informal focus groups has been that we have reached beyond those traditional places where we offer those again bricks and mortar educational experiences so I'm proud that you know while looking at a small cellphone is not in any way going to make you fluent in English that is a touch that we've made beyond you know the urban centers where we normally have a presence I'm going to give you two examples both from Vietnam because we have a fantastic team in Vietnam who are really reaching out to the folks via social media platforms one small one a little bit larger but they're indicative of programs that are going on everywhere in the world and that is and this is a simple action but has garnered quite a bit of goodwill in Vietnam and that is our American spaces which we have these are libraries that are places for people to learn about America they decided to turn what they put in that American space from the library from the books to the DVDs to the posters to the speakers they bring in and they crowdsource everything they make sure they ask their audience via social media what they want to hear and so what has that done completely reinvigorated the place it's standing room only for all of their events and they've I think they've doubled the amount of people that are visiting that space in any given time frame which is fantastic the more people we see the more people we can inform and influence and then let me take it up a little bit notch again I'll focus to our ambassador here in Vietnam he wanted he's one not your typical ambassador because he was assigned to go to Vietnam he's like I want to talk to young kids in Vietnam and he came to us and he said how do I do that we said well why don't we introduce you why don't we figure out a way so you can not be on camera talking about policy but why don't you tell people about yourself and so we did a very short two minute video of him talking about his life his family what he wants to achieve social media friendly we worked with the post to distribute it via social media via broadcast television print news you name it in the end the three quarters of the Vietnamese population saw it before he even arrived on the ground he had young kids wanting to engage with him on policy issues that affected Vietnam-U.S. relations never happened before and he credits you know that social media activity as opening up an entirely new door to him to figure out what a large segment of the Vietnamese population are thinking and doing offline outcomes that people are interested in meeting with him and the key is and you'll hear this from me several times that social media is one venue you've got to link it to traditional media and other offline activities for it to really be successful in the way that we want it to be. Our mission in Brazil initiated an effort to get out to the 50 largest cities in the country massive country very large population so they worked to identify people who were young civic activists journalists types who were very active online and then when they would go out and visit in small teams to these 50 cities they would then make an effort to meet these people in person and that online offline interplay which then continues and they go back to one of the cities in the country where we have a formal diplomatic presence that conversation continues and then the next time we go out and visit we are able to meet with those people with people that they're in touch with people they think are important young rising leaders in country so using digital tools to reach out and identify people that we want to have a deeper conversation with and then blowing that out you know expanding that sort of outreach is a good example of how digital tools can take it going from online to offline and then back and forth to sort of expand people that we're talking to and making sure we're getting a multiplicity of views and meeting different people in different geographic regions in a big country like Brazil. So one of the most overused words currently I think in government whether it's social media, data crowd sourcing is innovation it's become buzz worded into the ground it's unfortunate because government desperately needs it and public the world needs it and the simple way to describe it tends to be doing more with less right using the available resources you have to do something in a way that you weren't able to previously get into a better outcome the challenge the government has with it is often quite full of risk averse institutions is that there's not a lot of tolerance for failure and that cultures do not reward that right well so the question is what's an example of a place where using social media in the context of public diplomacy has failed what did you learn from it? Failfair PD 2.0 so we are the government it's hard for us to answer that question Alex I have to ask it it's very important um guys while you're thinking I would say that and this is sort of a general comment on deploying these technologies you know at times there's a rush to be in the virtual space like we need to be there we recognize how important it is and with certain audiences and certain populations some of these tools are just not appropriate they that's not where people are having these conversations it's not what they're using them you know certain platforms are not available in certain countries around the world so it's not really useful to be plugging away on some of these platforms if populations that we want to have conversations with can't access them I would say just generally and that that has happened in a number of cases in a number of countries you ready for us all to speak in generalities I got one the government contracting process is a lengthy and clunky one and there are great reasons behind that and that's to protect American tax dollars as we think about creating digital spaces often that are the most engaging for youth or otherwise those are sometimes big investments we've got to make and the amount of time we take for us to number one make that policy decision to go ahead and invest in something do an open competitive bid to identify the right firm to develop said effort and then you know modify and sort of iterate on that project while it's in development what seemed like a fabulous and groundbreaking idea you know three to five years ago is now you know not irrelevant but perhaps needed to be morphed in a big way so I think our challenge you know a lot of it comes in sort of institutionally how we work the government contracting process is not going to change anytime soon how do we balance the need to have that flexibility and that agility as people change what platforms you guys are operating on where you live let alone here in the United States abroad right so you know kind of trying to balance how the government contracting and investment process meets with the space of technology what I will say to the to the premise of your question and that is you know failure acceptable what I will say is is that the highest level of acceptance that I've ever seen in the department of state and it has changed dramatically since we all entered the foreign service when you needed to you know have the public affairs officer or even Washington authorize any tweet or any Facebook posting that has gone a long way where now we have officers all over the world tweeting and posting on their own also I think that in the public diplomacy world we have we were blessed by private sector leadership who understands that to succeed you have to fail and I think that our previous under secretary was accepting of that not that she would have taken a bad ratio of failure to innovation and then I guess to more directly answer your question is anytime our officers or folks in Washington have thought that social media was the singular answer to any problem it has failed because it is not and I think that we have proven that over and over and over again and people particularly early on a couple years ago thought it was the panacea and what we have proven is that it's not particularly in public diplomacy when you're trying to move the needle inform change perspectives inspire action social media is one component of our overall engagement let me make this a little bit more concrete what happened with the virtual embassy in Iran any lessons learned there nothing that surprised us we were geared up for the hackathon that would become the onslaught against that website well before it went live and you guys can comment on this as well the team our colleagues on the Iran desk and all those who were supporting them in Nick's shop were quite aware of again offensive that would come with them when they launched that was a very public announcement and for those of you who don't know it was end of December that the virtual US embassy to Iran was launched and almost immediately it was not accessible in country because the government blocked it basically and so that was a site that had a lot of high profile voices around it the secretary herself had noted that it was going to be launched a lot of us worked on developing content that would be most useful for Iranian citizens that we hoped would engage there that to say Alex we are going to continue with that effort we think it's the the only foot that we can put forward right now in Iran is a digital one right in a sense and so to that end we want to continue to support this thing and we'll do it in spite of this offensive if there are feet in the ground it's probably not the state departments are we here to talk PDA or not that's a different department so can I just add one more thing and you guys can talk I'm going back to the fail fare and this has nothing to do with technology I think again the theme here when we talk about public diplomacy let's just take it a step back here's diplomacy that's governments talking to governments public diplomacy is talking to people or people we're people too right like we're diplomats we're people too talking to people and I think the fail comes digitally or otherwise when it's a monologue when it's not that got that listening part right and so that can then you know manifest itself in any different in a variety of different ways that show that lack of listening whether it's something as simple as a public diplomacy officer in the field who didn't really gauge what their music would have been the most appropriate to really like spark a conversation with youth and instead of bringing in the hip hop group you're bringing in like the Appalachian cloggers Wicked sorry if anybody's from Appalachia but just to say like there's a way to listen and to figure out what part of American culture or our you know who we are would best connect with those people again digitally or otherwise that is an exercise in listening like you couldn't have nailed it harder okay so we'll go back to the questions from the audience is it possible to see we already got into a little bit of this second question is it possible to use social media platforms as data resources to evaluate or assess public diplomacy projects how can we make better use of the data great question I would say I would unpack that a little bit differently social media is a great way to amplify on offline public diplomacy programs like performance groups is a good example you can shoot video you can share you can stream it on Facebook you can use this to increase sort of the bang for your buck and I think it's a good indication of how popular something could be if you try and expand the audience out in a digital way and it doesn't really pop I think that's and you can quantify that you can also quantify how many people were in a given auditorium to listen to a performing group but when you take it digitally you have much more data to mine and you have I think more anecdotal evidence commentary whether it runs in media things like that so I think they're useful tools if you deploy the content properly to give you another way to evaluate the efficacy of what we're trying to do the famous adage in management you can't manage what you can't measure and one of the challenges in government we're seeing right now is whether you see what the performance of a given program is especially if you're spending X amount of dollars against it that goes to the earlier question about do these programs do these efforts have offline action or not right is there something that comes with them when you're looking at this specific issue around data how close are you to establishing metrics for outcomes and then putting them against how much is being spent against that to actually see the efficacy of the next pair of dollars against these actions is that something you have the data for that are you putting it up in some way you can see internally is that something you'll be able to dump quietly to the senate intelligence community when they ask for it on their iPad you want to put your R hat back I mean I guess from a you take that away I think that this is a question that many people have been asking us and as we in particular move into difficult budget times we have to justify our existence I don't think that we can do what we do without doing it with that said it's incredibly challenging as you all know to figure out what public diplomacy projects, programs worked what didn't work, to what degree did they work or didn't work we're working on it every single day because we know it's incredibly important for us to figure it out we have made progress over the past couple years at coming out with some broad brush stroke measurement and evaluation of what we're doing in the field and I'm going to point out our director of evaluation and research and evaluation she's here if you have a specific question she can answer a lot of that because she is charged with making sure we do that but guess what I'll tell you what it's important because you know I think Dean has been in her job for less than a year but we established an office just to do solely that link money dollars impact together and to put it forward for wider consumption we don't have the great solution I'll tell you what it's really expensive I think social media can play a role but it's not the only role so we're trying to work out how we exactly do it we have data some broad level data we know it needs to get a lot better frankly and there's that big our department perspective I will tell you our posts are doing a much better job at it locally on their own they're actually thinking about okay was it impactful what was the impact and they're asking their people via social media in person through surveys whatever mechanism makes sense mobile SMSing and so we're seeing a lot of our embassies do what makes sense in their area and then they're in turn moving it up to us so down the line here have US diplomats been using social media effectively in the Arab Spring or post Arab Spring period speaking about the Arab winter now and if so what are some examples I would say one of the prime examples just in the past couple weeks is Ambassador Ford's use of the embassy Damascus Facebook page to communicate and it's not just the past couple weeks the past couple months to communicate directly with the Syrian people you know I got a shout out as well Ambassador Rice at the UN she's been a very strong voice at the diplomatic pointy end of the spear on this one so perhaps not she's not there sitting there in the region but she's been incredibly vocal on Twitter real-time kind of updates on the negotiations behind the scenes for example most recently our strong standpoints around the resolution that we tried to get through that ultimately did not pass so I would say that not only are you seeing an effective use of social media by our missions in the region but you're seeing the multiplicity of voices that are by definition working on this very complicated very broad topic from a number of different points and you know let's talk resources too it's not perfect let's go back to the fail fare these people are under an enormous amount of pressure our colleagues in these embassies as we go through these revolutions and part of our discussion and it's a very real one is in a time of revolution when you're having evacuations from embassies what priority is placed on continuing to post on your Facebook page and to be honest with you these were questions that first kind of came to the fore when we really were around the Haiti quake now a couple of years ago but what we found was this is an incredibly important place for for example American citizens who live overseas to receive information regarding their status in those countries so I think in the disaster response in the political upheaval space and in the arguments we see the value in it the challenge still comes in a time of limited resources and really a lot of high pressure who's going to be tweeting right it's just a very real question some posts have it figured out better than others often times that's our leadership that's who the ambassador is and what kind of premium they put on those spaces but it's something it's a a great space that we're still trying to sort out if I could just jump in again I think also you know during the recent you know situation up in New York Secretary Clinton was up there Ambassador Rice was up there we were also amplifying those messages basically in real time in Arabic Farsi and other and French you know languages spoken in the region I mean in a broadcast mode but just to get our message out there using social media saying this is what we're saying in New York in real time so the follow up question comes from Rob and it's I guess to this point so it gets more into it what are the best examples of how diplomats are transcending social media as a broadcast platform to choose sustainable community engagement you know when we talk about social media in the context of media I think social is going to drop out of media pretty soon it's going to be integrated into what we do but it's social media week so we're going to talk about it the difference I think in engagement is whether you're willing and able to amplify the voices of your community to raise up the people who are disempowered to get those voices who are crying out for help or for attention that need to have their message heard by a much broader platform into a broader space that's probably the secret sauce what Andy Carvin does that comes down to it and it has some kind of documentary side to it either someone he authenticates it there and uses their text or a picture or a video to what extent can the State Department do that on your platforms again getting back to the issue of risk to them but if something's out there in these public networks can you raise that up and to share what's happening there with a much broader audience because obviously there are a lot of people listening to you Offer start you guys might have different perspectives I think one of the biggest challenges again this goes back to the listening thing there's a couple of themes that are emerging here one of the toughest things for a government to do what's our job is to have a unified message in part we're not a company words are our currency to a certain degree and so making sure that we all kind of step forward together so what's the scariest thing you could propose to a government that someone else would be taking that word that someone else would be sharing a message that would feel like it was being supported by you so just that as a frame one space and Alex this isn't an all the way answer to your question but it's given the reins to your Facebook page to a youth who participated in an exchange in country hey dude come blog for us come post something up share your photos that's going to be something that the youth in this case a Brazilian kid let's say would have to agree to do but I think one space where we're doing this a Ning site that we manage in educational and cultural affairs where we do just that this is something that we acted as a catalyst to kind of set up right it's a Ning site that we manage yes and my colleagues back and ECN the web team are doing this day in and day out but the idea is to not have our voice dominate and not to have our information dominate it's to let people who have participated in exchanges of all ages from all around the world share information around specific themes around you know what's coming up just socializing around certain things but again it's that taking the scary out of it right and showing that indeed these people have incredible views to share and it's in our best interest to be listening I think that one we're doing it it's a great question and using our platforms to amplify another voice is important I can give you some examples we have a climate change focused Facebook page we regularly invite people to guest blog to use our platform in their words and it's incredibly successful and it's probably one of our fastest growing assets that we have and I think in part because of that it's legitimate and then what I'll do is again a theme the offline version so we also use our American spaces as platforms as well and so we don't expect people just to come to our programs we literally say here's a room that's fully connected that's air conditioned you use it the way you want to use it you set up an event and it's been particularly successful in India where India is going through the roof in terms of development but guess what more than half of the population never have access to this kind of air conditioned room for instance or the internet so we let them use our multi-story American center in New Delhi to bring and to talk about whatever they want set up their community group use the space for what it is so I've got a question here from Matt Armstrong mountain runner so this is going to get a little bit wonky but I had the opportunity to look at the RSVP list of you all you're all pretty wonky so here we go now Matt is the former executive director of the US advisory commission on public diplomacy and he blogs at mountainrunner.us so we can probably assume he's thought about this a bit so questions from Matt there are three organizations represented about on the panel two are in public diplomacy and one is not how do they coordinate and de-conflict messages one two and this is very interesting the losses IAP messages are not allowed in the US public affairs messages are the losses Nicholas Namba can't share message details thoughts okay so why should IAP not be in public affairs or why should public affairs social media not be in IAP this is an interesting question right in a world where tweets Facebook posts are accessible everywhere how do old regulations or laws apply to this so to you do you want me to start one what I would say is Matt's first question two of us are in public diplomacy and one of us is not I would actually reject that I would too because I think that we're all in public diplomacy but go ahead I think you talk about the IAP-PA divide if you want to call it that social media has brought this issue to the forefront for some people and you know there's a lot of discussion inside the department about how we handle this and I would say from the PA perspective the three of us are a good example of this there's very much a role for all three parts of the public diplomacy apparatus to play in social media and use it as a way to amplify their core mission so from the PA perspective my lane is communicating official policy messages in English in foreign languages doing it through social media doing it through traditional media just doing it through media because traditional and new and social those are going to go away it's all going to be media you know IAP engaging foreign audiences on a variety of issues about the US about you know other things ECA just like it says educational and cultural affairs program I think there's a lane for all three of us and all three of us have a role to play using social media platforms not just in English but in other languages that's how I would look at it I think that a couple of things one the notion that there's not enough to go around for all of us to stay busy on a day to day basis you know it we really don't think about these things who does what on a day to day basis we all have so much to do guess what the world wants to hear what Secretary Clinton is saying the world wants to hear what Secretary Clinton is saying maybe not the way she said it but in a quicker fashion 140 characters a video and maybe they want to learn about the US they want to learn about what someone in West Virginia does for Valentine's Day in the same way they also want to know how to get to the United States how do I get a masters program so there's plenty to go around for all of us now operationally Matt brings up a good question he's an insider he knows exactly he knows that we're grappling with this but the way I look at it is sort of like the publishing industry everyone thought magazines are going to be gone you know with the advent of online you know what does it mean what does it do has it been a hard transition are we still trying to figure out who does what absolutely and that's a little bit of insider baseball we're just trying to figure out who does what Matt also made a reference to Smith-Mutt what prohibits me from distributing any of my work products to domestic audiences in an internet world is that relevant I don't know I'll let Congress decide that but it is certainly we have all of our messages up on Facebook it is our intent 100% to only talk to foreign citizens our messages are geared to foreign citizens and you will notice that if an American read something that we didn't be like I know or that's not how I would read it so we start from the get-go and then we start focusing on on foreign citizens and PA has a dual purpose both domestic and foreign which frankly is sometimes harder so you mentioned that everyone wants to hear what Secretary Clinton has to say judging by what I have read on social networks that's not entirely true maybe it's also rational for us also having read those same conversations I can say that there's perhaps equal or more interest in having Secretary Clinton hear them interesting things that's come out of the discussions I participated in or moderated or watched you name it here in DC is seeing where and when U.S. politicians are actually using these platforms themselves Mindy Finn from Twitter estimated earlier this week that 15 to 20% of the Congress folks who are on these on Twitter are actually using it themselves so the classic joke in the Senate these days if you want to see when a Senator is tweeting watches AIDS fingers on the blackberry you know and I Senator McCain really does tweet himself I've seen him do it but I've also seen him literally talking on a panel while tweets are going up so there is a disconnect there in terms of personal use and with state that's an interesting question now you three are really you on Twitter you are out on the edge of that what about leadership of state does Secretary Clinton ever read tweets and log on and follow up question PJ Crowley famously was tweeting as a spokesperson I don't think Victoria Newland is what's up with that so to take the first part of that I think where we're at right now you know the three of us very obviously if you look at our handles it's us you know I was tweeting while I was getting ready for this this morning we're also of a demographic and sort of we've come up using these tools and we're comfortable with it I think senior leadership are getting more and more comfortable with it and as we move forward you're going to see more and more people literally using this stuff themselves I think an example right now is Ambassador McFall in Russia he's tweeting like it's him you guys are at McFall check them out MCFAUL I mean in English and in Russian and he's very interactive as soon as he meets with somebody he's tweeting you know there are more and more senior people like that I think you'll see that continue moving forward in terms of the prior spokesperson PJ Crowley Barry on Twitter all the time I think you know the current spokesperson I can't speak for her directly but I think that we're moving in a way where we're centralizing sort of who's talking she's focused on the daily briefings and you know responding to journalists questions and helping to amplify the secretary's messaging and doing it sort of the way that we've been going along the past few months and that's what we're comfortable with at this point just a couple of points so you guys know like Chavez is on Twitter right in Venezuela Chavez Kendanga so I don't know if you guys have read this but he is like allegedly a team of a couple hundred who are tweeting on his behalf so I can assure you that nothing like that is happening at the State Department or any of our embassies at any point right and I think just to kind of piggyback on what Ed was saying you guys who of you guys are on Twitter in a personal manner okay I mean this is a personal choice right it's a platform I said in my remarks at the top that I hope are brief I just talked too much in general but you know you're comfortable with us you're not it's not a place if you're forced to be there people who are like trying to listen to you are going to know that right that's going to be an ugly engagement we are not using these tools because they're hot and flashy and we like to walk through the different verb tenses associated with the word tweet right we're much more interested in figuring out where the audiences live who care to engage with us and then doing so there's a wrestling match going on in certain instances on one side of the spectrum you have you know the Alec Rosses of the world or the Ambassador McFalls of the world who are doing this on others it's hey do we put an institutional face there should we be a bureau on Twitter you know what I mean so we're still trying to figure out this space you know we look to you guys as well to help us do this better when you see something that doesn't feel genuine or something I mean we all know that to make this stuff work it's got to be authentic and I'll tell you what like our ambassadors before they go out when they come back in the field they are hearing about digital media and being asked to take a look at the various platforms that we're managing to get a feel for it whether they're already on it or not there's a discussion that we're having with them we're asking them to make the choice locally in terms of what makes the most sense but what we are asking them to do is figure out where those digital communities are and the countries you're going to have responsibility for and how to best engage with them so it's a wrestling match I think we also acknowledge too that whether you or I sign up for Twitter and whether the secretary signs up for Twitter those are two different things I mean what the secretary says matters and it is you say what we say doesn't matter no, I didn't say that at all actually and so I think that yes I think senior leadership will slowly move on and they are, the trend is there it's very clear but to a degree I mean when the president and the secretary say something even choosing one word versus another it matters and I'm not sure that necessary lends itself to being authentic is she going to want to take that risk is the president going to want to take that risk I'm not so sure and be authentic at the same time we've seen PJ continue to be quite authentic if you are following at PJ Crowley you see he's I'd say more plain spoken than he was as a spokesperson and that's very interesting to see that dynamic play out certainly the secretary's boss has not been very active but we do see more tweets signed and notably we saw him actually do his first presidential hangout and there's no way to dodge very effectively in that space the thing that people who are interested in this world were watching is to see whether the kind of real-time engagement mediated by the internet through that platform enabled there to be unexpected outcomes if you're managing the official face of the White House or the State Department or any government agency some degree of predictability seems to be desirable put it that way for the government Alex and you're here to help I understand so the question though is in this context would you ever consider doing hangouts and then broadcasting them globally as the next frontier absolutely stay tuned soon soon so I can run a tweet saying that State Department will be doing a Google Plus hangout soon they're going to do that in a sec let's do it we want to be where the conversations are happening and on the platforms where people want to participate and engage so whether it's Twitter Facebook, Google Plus to do a hangout we need to be in that space if we're not in that space that's a huge opportunity let's keep walking we've still got lots of questions and we've only got 15 minutes here so let's see what we can do one of the interesting things other parts of government are doing is trying to approach problem solving with something called open innovation other people call that crowdsourcing whatever you call it the idea is that you expose the kinds of data of APIs of the policy constraints the moment we're in is that social media plus the internet plus that data plus mobile devices allows us to do that in ways that just simply couldn't before do you ever see a time where the State Department would or could crowdsource a solution to a diplomatic or development question? so great question how do you show true listening you act on it you take it in you consider it you incorporate it into your solution the challenge in diplomacy and you guys jump in it's not just us acting we are acting in the world with our partners bilaterally, multilaterally whatever it might be so we are very excited to figure out spaces and opportunities to kind of take in ideas and opinions from our digital communities and implement them but I mean to be honest I think that that's going to have to be on a case by case basis when Ambassador Rice is behind closed doors of the security council it's not going to be a crowdsource effort to finalize the negotiation with Russia and China around Syria do you know what I mean that's just a brutally honest statement there are a lot of spaces where that kind of input would be critical and welcome I think we're getting our footing we're starting out on what we would consider things like what do we bring into our American spaces books, DVDs, you know, events what kind of people do you want to talk to we're starting out there where we're all comfortable doing that I think that our former ambassador in India took the next step and he said tell me where you want me to travel tell me, you know, tell me who you want to meet within those places that's the next step so I think our envoys our officials are getting there but whether or not it comes down to that that security council decision where you're like hey what do you guys think DVD crowdsourced questions for the spokesperson you know we're saying what issues do you care about from the state department what do you want to know about our policy and in what languages so I think we're getting there we're not all the way there I think there's an immense amount of potential just given the way countries and foreign affairs agencies interact with each other the diplomatic solution crowdsourcing is very difficult for reasons that my two colleagues just pointed out I think on the development side there is an immense amount of potential there so people at USAID are also thinking about these issues and Raj Shah from USAID is on Twitter and they just hosted a forum from the White House with a chat about this exact sort of direction so there is a lot of interest I think the next question we can leave for our future panel will be outcomes and I know that there's a lot of interest in here about outcomes so we'll sort of try to get back to some of that there is an interesting question here that came in from Terrio and I think it's an important one do you think the ability for folks in the US to hear in real time about government brutality in places like Syria via tweets from those under attack hastens the US government to act in some way I would say that getting more information faster on any issue where we have direct concerns will obviously help the formulation of a decision and help us to move further along because if you don't know what's going on it's very difficult to decide how to move forward so whether it's from on the ground in a place like Syria or if it's other issues the faster we have information to make a well informed decision the better I think it is I'm not sure it hastens it but it certainly I think makes the decision better the model is you knew it was going on then there was an information gap and then you made decisions and you didn't know what was going on I think today our decisions are based on that immediate data so our decisions I think are better whether they're faster or not I don't know I don't have the data to actually prove that one way or another but I do think that our decisions are better and more reflective of what's happening on the ground covered great so it's certainly pretty clear I alluded to this when we started the panel that the internet is acting as a platform for collective action now people are very motivated about something they can find other people who are discussing it and then potentially take that coordinated action offline and the interesting dynamic I think certainly I'll be watching is whether US citizens are able to use these platforms to collectively ask you all to do things to what extent is the State Department listening or able to listen willing to listen to what the public is asking for certainly the White House is quite a node of angst at times if you ever look at our chats Congress is Congress I think is right at the bottom unfortunately of institutions that have public approval at the moment can State should State respond to the American public and social media? A little bit earlier who has the authorities under the current sort of framework of Smith month to engage with the American public clearly we can all be listening and then what are we authorized to do in terms of actions from our perspective in educational and cultural affairs it's a much more limited and very positive space to be in discussion with the American people we are engaging with them directly around trying to encourage American families to host exchange students who are coming here it's more of that kind of thing and when we do so the space that we're in with them from a relational perspective is one that hey we're looking for an exchange student we want to host a group coming through it's much more on that sort of grassroots public diplomacy effort and again they're also as far as we are supporting Americans who go abroad and participate in exchanges we welcome their comments in our alumni circles around policy related topics and certainly we're watching their comments there but this is all more in the space of a comfortable discussion I would put it as opposed to an urgent sort of emergency. So discussions in this space aren't going to be comfortable sometimes and they may not even occur depending upon which countries that you're trying to have them in Iran has famously cut a lot of the connection internally other countries are less tolerant for different reasons and in different contexts for certain discussions. That said how important is it for the State Department to be participating in conversations on other social media platforms and I take this question right here from Twitter from Awazniak711 and let's see if I've got a name attached to that yes Amy Awazniak besides Google Plus Hangouts what is state doing on local social media sites like Weibo and Cyworld where foreign audiences are and is China letting your account stay up because Nick Kristof got in Weibo and he got knocked off we're good we in China we engage millions of people every single day we do it with properties in China like 2.5 million followers that are run out of the embassy I mean I mentioned educational advising that's happening via micro blogs in China right now just by way of examples it's Russia I mentioned earlier but we are on the platform where the people are we are not dedicated to Facebook or to Twitter because they'll be around tomorrow but who knows what will be around a year or two years we are on the contact Korea too but the predominant local platforms in almost every country we have some sort of presence do you have any foreign service officers who are engaging with the Starcraft community oh my god I don't know what that is let's put that on that's a reference to if you don't know South Korea has got one of the most wired populations on earth and Starcraft is a very very popular video game there that actually is covered and treated much like professional sports are here so something for Yosu something to look forward to and I guess I could go and ask you about World of Warcraft another time too we'll come better prepared there were a couple of stats and I want to share them with the audience here that I got during the panel just because stats are fun the US Department of State and US embassies and consul manages 125 YouTube channels with 23,940 subscribers and 12,729,885 million video views so that's a lot 195 Twitter accounts with 1.4 million followers so that's a lot with 7.4 million followers 288 Facebook pages with 7.5 million fans also the Department of State maintains a presence on Flickr, Tumblr Google Plus maintains content for official blog Dipnote other embassies and consulate maintains presences on these social media platforms and currently producing content in 11 languages Arabic, Chinese, Farsi French, English, Hindi, Portuguese Russian, Spanish, Turkish and Urdu in addition many embassies are tweeting in local languages including German, Indonesian, Korean and Thai I wanted to do the stat dump because I think that's interesting and they were talking about what else is out there I didn't see that in that mention that the local platforms can you list the stories so much bigger than that that's very to be frank it's a little Washington focused but because what our folks are doing on the ground is in dozens and dozens of languages across many many more platforms so I think we'll have to get you guys a more holistic looking thing but I mean that's a good story right? it is good, it's damn good actually considering where we were a couple years ago it's a start okay so we're here, I think we've got four minutes left and I gather there's an event coming in after us yes so New America is saying yes please wrap this up closing thoughts on social media at the State Department in terms of what you need to do to do your job better metrics, right? I think that's the theme here you know I had the bus ride home the other day we don't have the full answer to this but my bus ride home, my thought was damn I'm so glad to be hearing that word toss around more metrics and analysis is what it's all about why did that put a smile on my face on a bus ride home it's a hard space to assess from a quantitative standpoint social media I think is helping us get there in a little bit better way how did we used to do it? what's the readership of the main daily in Lima, Peru do you know what I mean? can we prove that everybody actually picked up their paper and opened it? absolutely not, did we change an opinion by running an op-ed by our ambassador? who knows really so I think it's an imperfect space to put metrics around but social media is helping us get there and there's a big focus on that we have a mandate to talk to as many people as possible and that's not just elites and that's not just people in government and that comes from the secretary on down and she's dead serious so I think that what we need to do though is work on in addition to metrics which are incredibly important training for our staff we have a lot of people out there that don't know it that are of a different generation or are young and don't know it but the expectation that they do know how to operate on social media is there so we're getting our ducks aligned to make sure that we support them in the way that we can support them and then from a Washington perspective we're trying to provide global services so enterprise wide metrics enterprise wide research and evaluation training, those types of things so we're definitely moving in the right direction and we're moving quicker than I've ever seen the government I would say more engagement moving beyond broadcast more engagement in more languages and also trying to create more useful content from a video perspective especially whether it's with subtitles or smaller clips both for media and for people to replicate on social media properties to sort of feed our posts overseas stuff that's timely that they can use and also the metrics and the training so more to come on all of those I think in the next year Thank you all you've got some interesting questions so I appreciate your taking shots at the answers thanks to everyone here for attending for asking questions thanks to our online audience thanks to New America for hosting us and again thanks to all of you for participating I hope you'll continue to engage these folks online