The Foreign Service Journal, May 2017

22 MAY 2017 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Easier said than done. How- ever, other highly regulated orga- nizations have figured out how to do this, like the banking industry and the Depart- ment of Defense. Even the CIA has a pretty funny Twitter feed. Sometimes they even post cat pics. So What’s the Fix? A lot of things could be done. Here are a few ideas worth considering. First, tweak training. Digital media training should be both compulsory and feature prominently in all PD prerequi- sites. Tradecraft courses should also capi- talize on the expertise of digital media professionals from the private sector, as FSI’s public speaking and press relations curricula already do. The goal should be to equip all PD offi- cers with the basic technical skills to create digital content across multiple platforms andmanage baseline analytics. Clearly, there are equipment and software consid- erations, but one idea is to cover skills in common, industry-standard production and analytics technology like Hootsuite, Adobe Creative Suite and others. Second, have a cache of best prac- tices at the ready. There are missions where courageous, tech-savvy officers have done innovative, spectacular work. Too often, though, we don’t know who those officers are, what they did or how they did it—so we miss a valuable chance to learn from them. The use of digital media in diplomacy is in many ways an experimental field. We can and should find ways to capi- talize on our own experiments and promote them from the inside. Third, restruc- ture PD shops at posts. Here, State can take a lesson from the private sector, where the average com- munications team would have at a minimum a creative director, a Web designer and a graphic artist. Imagine a scenario where a PD officer oversees two or three local media spe- cialists whose sole job is to create digital content and track analytics. In addition to their media production skills, these professionals would have a deep under- standing of the local media market, strati- fied target audience, media consumption habits, and language and cultural norms. The officer would guide the content, using data from the analytics to drive the message forward while clearly linking it to strategic mission objectives from the Integrated Country Strategy. The aim is to engage with audiences daily to create communities of interest on matters of U.S. foreign policy, not just publicize ongoing embassy activities. Fourth, reconsider hiring practices for PD professionals. Yes, I know: This one may be total pie in the sky. But there is just no denying that public diplomacy is becoming an increasingly technical field. The private sector certainly gets this, and hires only the best people in video production, graphics, marketing and Web design. So State should consider either mak- ing the PD cone a specialist category, or creating a new specialist career track focused solely on digital production and engagement. Or, at the very least, it should hire people into the PD cone who already have significant backgrounds in communications fields like journal- ism, broadcasting, marketing, campaign managing and so on. This would significantly reduce the pressure to train officers in a field that changes every day (and leave FSI free to do what it does best: train Foreign Service personnel in the art of being diplomats). The Importance of Leaning In Let’s face it: the Cold War is over and USIA is dead. It’s time to overhaul the way we do public diplomacy. We are the United States of America. We are lead- ers in the field of branding, marketing, advertising—we are better than anybody at selling stuff. We have Silicon Valley, we practically invented the internet, and we are conquering the world with Facebook. Given this, we at the U.S. State Department should be writing the book on digital diplomacy—not wandering the halls of the Harry S Truman build- ing, lost somewhere between the Ralph J. Bunche Library and 1993. Nothing I’ve written here is a surprise to anyone working in PD. The question is, how do we get from knowing what the problem is to actually fixing it? Person- ally, I think that we FSOs should not just stand around and wait for change to come. We have the option, as Sheryl Sandberg would say, to lean in and advocate from the inside. It’s important; there’s a lot at stake. In the battle to win hearts and minds, we cannot afford to be 20 years behind the times. n TWITTER.COM/CIA