Category: Social Media

Event: Homeland Security’s Wicked Problems

~ Matt Armstrong

“Homeland Security’s Wicked Problems: Developing a Research Agenda for Homeland Security” is a two-day event co-hosted by The Heritage Foundation, Center for Strategic and International Studies, The U.S. Army War College’s Center for Strategic Leadership, and The George Washington University’s Homeland Security Policy Institute.

The location is The Heritage Foundation’s Allison Auditorium and the dates are November 12, Thursday, 9a-4p and November 13, Friday, 9a-12:30p. RSVP to attend.

I will be on the first panel Friday morning at 9:30a: Communications During Crisis: Roles, Responsibilities, and Capabilities. On the panel will be Jonathan Thompson, Executive Vice President, Systems Media Group, and former Director for External Affairs, Federal Emergency Management Agency; Kimberly Dozier, CBS News Correspondent; and Matt Armstrong, Armstrong Strategic Insights Group, LLC. Moderating is Professor Dennis Murphy, Professor of Information in Warfare, United States Army War College, Center for Strategic Leadership.

Bullets and Blogs: New Media and the Warfighter

~ Matt Armstrong ~ 1 Comment

image From the US Army War College’s Center for Strategic Leadership and The SecDev Group comes “Bullets and Blogs: New Media and the Warfighter” (2.7mb PDF). The report is based on a three-day workshop that took place at Carlisle Barracks in January 2008, one of the best events I have attended. It is required reading for anyone (e.g. more then than the Defense community) involved in the modern information environment.

This report is rich with soundbites and recommendations supported by examples, including operations where the insurgents were the first to write the first draft of history, the draft that usually sticks especially when a factual challenge is not made within days or weeks. It will be required reading for my upcoming class as well as a class I’ll likely be teaching in the spring (details to be announced).

This report deserves a better write up, but for now, download and read it yourself and comment below. More information can be found here: http://www.carlisle.army.mil/dime/.

Guidelines for publishing on Twitter

~ Matt Armstrong

Engaging people within social media is generally a given, even if decision-makers do not necessarily understand why. Too often we hear the equivalent of “get me some social media”.

But how do you use Twitter and what is the value? The UK has a smart strategy on Twitter that can be found here (148kb PDF). It covers:

  • Objectives and metrics – why we are using Twitter, and how we will assess its value
  • Risks and mitigation – how we will contain the risks to our corporate reputation
  • Channel proposition and management – how we will populate and use the channel
  • Promotional plan – how we will promote our presence on Twitter to maximise value

I recommend reading it. The whole version (I removed the last six pages) will be available to my students in my forthcoming class Understanding and Engaging Now Media in November.

Censoring the Voice of America

~ Matt Armstrong

Censoring the Voice of America: Why is it OK to broadcast terrorist propaganda but not taxpayer-funded media reports? by Matt Armstrong, 6 August 2009, in ForeignPolicy.com. 

Earlier this year, a community radio station in Minneapolis asked Voice of America (VOA) for permission to retransmit its news coverage on the increasingly volatile situation in Somalia. The VOA audio files it requested were freely available online without copyright or any licensing requirements. The radio station’s intentions were simple enough: Producers hoped to offer an informative, Somali-language alternative to the terrorist propaganda that is streaming into Minneapolis, where the United States’ largest Somali community resides. Over the last year or more,al-Shabab, an al Qaeda linked Somali militia, has successfully recruited two dozen or more Somali-Americans to return home and fight. The radio station was grasping for a remedy.

It all seemed straightforward enough until VOA turned down the request for the Somali-language programming. In the United States, airing a program produced by a U.S. public diplomacy radio or television station such as VOA is illegal. Oddly, though, airing similar programs produced by foreign governments — or even terrorist groups — is not. As a result, the same professional journalists, editors, and public diplomacy officers whom we trust to inform and engage the world are considered more threatening to Americans than terrorist propaganda — like the stuff pouring into Minneapolis. …

But compare this scenario with what might have happened if the community radio station had instead asked to broadcast a program made by a foreign government-owned channel, say China’s CCTV or the Kremlin’s Russia Today. At one time, broadcasters were required to label media from foreign governments as “political propaganda” under the 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act. Not anymore; as part of the 1995 Lobbying Disclosure Act, Congress changed the law and replaced the mandatory “propaganda” label to a discretionary one, “informational material.” In practice, the disclosure is hardly used. CCTV, Russia Today, BBC, and other foreign government-financed broadcasts are increasingly available inside the United States.

Request for assistance: feel like typing a number between 1 and 4?

~ Matt Armstrong ~ 2 Comments

I have nearly 2,000 rows of data that I need coded to do some analysis. That is, I have some information that in its present form cannot be easily analyzed. The instructions are simple:

Enter a "1", "2", "3", "4" into the data entry box based on the the location. A "1" means the location is within the United States, "2" means outside of the United States, a "3" means the location indicates both inside and outside of the US, and a "4" means there is not enough information to determine which other number to use.

You will only see the location data and each entry could take as little as a second for you to process. Devote a minute and you could power through 40-90 records. If there are twenty volunteers, then the work will be done in less time than it takes to respond to a Tweet.

Your work, should you decide to help, will be the basis of a future post / analysis. All I will say now is the analysis is on the global audience of a social media application.

If you’re interested, simply go here and type a number between 1 and 4, depending on the data of course.

UPDATE: Thank you to those who helped out. All of the nearly 2000 rows have been coded and there were very few errors.

Congrats to Dan for figuring out the source of the data.

Here are the statistics: 982 of the rows were self-identified as in the United States, 149 did not give a location but selected a US time zone (likely US resident), 320 self-identified as outside the US (including apparent Americans who listed Tehran), 59 gave a location that was both US and outside of the US, 132 gave indeterminate locations (iPhone geocoding typically put here), and 159 had no location and no time zone specified.

Rough analysis: out of the 1908 records, three times more users are in the US as outside the US, add time zone data and the multiplier goes up to 3.5.

Public Affairs and Public Diplomacy is at Odds with Social Media, and What to Do about It: an interview with Matt Armstrong

~ Matt Armstrong

Over a week ago I discussed public diplomacy with Eric Schwartzman for his OnTheRecordOnline program. The 30 minute interview is now online here.

Public affairs and public diplomacy blogger Matt Armstrong of Armstrong Strategic Insights Group, LLC discusses U.S. Public Diplomacy, repairing America’s image abroad and whether or not the U.S. Department of State will ever be adequately resourced to lead the nation’s global engagement efforts through social media.

Mountain Runner is a blog on the practice and structure of public diplomacy, public affairs and public relations. It is read by senior government officials, practitioners, trainers, academics, and analysts from the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Department of Defense, the United States Congress, related institutions, think tanks, and government agencies around the globe.

Eric has a good index with time codes for the topics covered at the interview website.

One note: at the beginning of the interview, I said “culture” wasn’t a part of “security” in a way that could be construed to mean cultural diplomacy etc is not important to public diplomacy and national security. That is not what I meant and I should have worded my response better in the interview. Cultural diplomacy is certainly very important.

Guest Post: Explaining Why Afghanistan Matters – Whose Job Is It?

~ Matt Armstrong ~ 5 Comments

By Tom Brouns

As highlighted in this blog and others, the use of “new” and “social” media by military and government organizations as a part of their public communication strategy is undergoing a quiet evolution – or in some cases, revolution.  Where consensus between allies is not a concern, organizations like US Forces – Afghanistan are taking the bull by the horns: their Facebook page amassed 14,000 fans in six weeks, and their 4500+ followers on Twitter are nothing to sneeze at.  In an alliance like NATO, progress has to be a bit more tentative and exploratory.  Regardless of the pace, increasing dialogue and transparency between military organizations and their publics should be seen as a positive thing.

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Defense Department Plan on Strategic Communication and Science and Technology

~ Matt Armstrong ~ 3 Comments

A newly released report from the Department of Defense may be the first to specifically consider the role of science and technology (S&T) efforts supporting the broad range of Strategic Communication (SC) activities across the whole of government. The Strategic Communication Science and Technology Plan, April 2009, (PDF) produced by the Rapid Reaction Technology Office (RRTO) within the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s Director, Defense Research Engineering (DDRE), responds to direction in the Fiscal Year 2009 National Defense Authorization Act, which calls for the Department to leverage these efforts to designate an “S&T thrust area for strategic communication and focus on critical S&T opportunities.” Congress and RRTO authorized publication of this report on MountainRunner.us.

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Guest Post: Let’s Get Susan Boyle to Sing the National Anthem

~ Matt Armstrong

By Sherry Mueller

At a recent Washington, DC symposium on public diplomacy entitled “Public Affairs in a Global Information Environment,” I joked to a Swedish colleague: “Success in public diplomacy will be getting Susan Boyle to sing your national anthem.” That is not as far-fetched as one might think. What are the lessons all of us involved in practicing or studying public diplomacy can learn from the Susan Boyle phenomenon?

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Event: InfoWarCon April 23-24

~ Matt Armstrong ~ 2 Comments

Next week is InfoWarCon, a conference to discuss “theoretical and practical changes and uses of Information Operations/Information Warfare, Cyberwar, Strategic Communication and Public Diplomacy.” Giving keynotes are LTG Thomas F. Metz, Director, JIEDDO, (title: “IO: The Great Enabler") and the Honorable James Glassman, former Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs (title:"Can a ‘Conversation’ Win the War on Terror?").

The conference is two days, April 23-24, and in Washington, DC. Check their website for registration details. The panels promise to be interesting. Check them out below:

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Can Social Media organically transform government?

~ Matt Armstrong

Social media is an appropriate title for much of what is generally called “new media”. Social media creates connection through information dissemination systems that facilitate and encourage dialogue, enhancing the original message to subsequent readers and repeaters.

Technologies like Twitter, Facebook, Digg, blogs and other systems are interesting in their own right, but searching for and mashing up of data is a more interesting and more valuable. The potential for mining knowledge from heaps of noise and clutter that result from dynamic networks that last for only a split-second or for years.

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Should a presentation about promoting dialogue include time for dialogue?

~ Matt Armstrong

Recently, I was briefed on the global engagement efforts of a three-letter government organization that has neither a "C" nor an "A" in its acronym. Unknown to me, and not mentioned at the beginning of the briefing, was that the back to back presentations would last about four hours. My expectation was for two hours at most so I scheduled one casual meeting (over cocktails) afterwards, which, fortunately, was easy enough to push (and, as it turned out, ultimately cancel).

I learned a fair amount and I was impressed by the breadth of the programs. Presentations were made by the principal actors, some of whom I knew, some I knew of, but many I didn’t know. This group is dynamic and trying hard to move up the metaphorical knife toward the pointy part.

Overall, I was impressed with their efforts and saw great potential. A question I frequently asked when they mentioned how they are tracking their success was to the effect of "So what are you doing with this knowledge? Does Congress or anybody else in USG know about your success?" Invariably, the answer was "no" which was sometimes coupled with a stare as if I had a third eye.

Besides not anticipating a 2p to nearly 6p meeting, the briefing very clearly was not a discussion. Granted they had a ton of information they wanted to present to me and there was not a moment when we dived into minutia, but answers to my questions were frequently followed by comments by the briefing chair that there was a tight schedule to keep.

There’s a certain irony that a presentation about dialogue itself stifles dialogue. I wonder if they saw that? I know they do now.

Facebook launched in Arabic and Hebrew

~ Matt Armstrong

From the Guardian.co.uk (Where’s the American media on this?):

Facebook, the world’s most successful social networking site, has officially launched in Arabic, tapping into a potentially huge market in the Middle East and beyond, the company has announced. …

In Saudi Arabia the site has more than 250,000 users and in Lebanon more than 300,000.

Arabic, spoken by 250 million people – and Hebrew, spoken by 7 million – will now be available from a drop-down menu at the bottom of the homepage. …

Fifty million of the world’s 250 million Arabic speakers already use the internet, but Arabic only makes up 5% of global web content.

See Facebook’s official announcement here.

Interested in social media for global engagement? Then you should be interested in this development.

Noteworthy

~ Matt Armstrong

Posts and articles worth your attention.

Smith-Mundt and Domestic Dissemination by Darren Krape (3 March 2009)

This post grew out of the recent Smith-Mundt Symposium… First my general read-out of the event is that the issue remains quite contentious and with little overall agreement. Many argue the law should be kept, or even strengthened (and its remit expanded to the entire U.S. government) while others argue it should be completely repealed. A third group feel the argument is pointless since the law is out-dated and should be ignored, which can be done since, in the end, there are no “Smith-Mundt police” to arrest anyone for violating the law.

State’s Wrong Turn on the Information Highway by Scott Rauland (560kb PDF) (Sept 2008)

Many of us who have been involved in the State Department’s information outreach efforts since the very first days that the Internet became available as a tool for U.S. missions overseas are concerned that the department is falling steadily behind the
technology curve and that our ability to reach foreign audiences is actually shrinking.

Social Networks Now More Popular than Email; Facebook Surpasses MySpace by Brian Solis (9 March 2009)

Two-thirds of the world’s Internet population visit social networking or blogging sites, accounting for almost 10% of all internet time.

Time spent on social network sites is also expanding: Across the globe in 2008 activity in ‘Member Communities’ accounted for one in every 15 online minutes – now it accounts for one in every 11.

[Important Note: “Global” for the Nielsen Online report Brian Solis quotes from is really only Australia, Switzerland, Denmark, Spain, France, Italy, UK, and US.]

Why Social Media is Scary by Steve Radick (11 January 2009) and Part 3 Social Media is Scary – How to Address Middle Managers by Steve Radick (2 March 2009)

Businesses and our government are structured in a very hierarchical way – everyone is part of an org chart, everyone has a boss, and everyone is working to get to the next level.  Why?  Because inevitably, the next level brings more pay, more power, more respect, and more influence.  In the current organizational structure, everyone’s role is nicely identified on the org chart and with that, there is a structured way to act.  Raise your hand if you’ve ever said or have been told something like, “you can’t contact him directly – get in touch with your manager first,” or “draft an email for me to send to him,” or even better, “talk to “Public Affairs and Legal to get that approved before sending it out.”

The problem with this structure is that social media renders these traditional roles and responsibilities obsolete.  It introduces unpredictability and opportunity, unauthorized emails and tremendous insights, inappropriate language and humor.  Social media gives everyone a voice, whether they want it or not.

Can The US Air Force Save Darfur? by Chris Albon (9 March 2009)

Last week, the Washington Post published an op-ed by General Merill A. McPeak and Kurt Bassuener arguing that President Obama should establish a no-fly zone over Darfur. The idea has been proposed before, but was repeatedly shot down (pardon the pun) by humanitarian groups who (rightly) feared reprisals from the Sudanese government. However, the objections will be less vocal now that Bashir has booted 13 aid groups from Sudan after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against him. Bashir also reportedly launched more air attacks.

Are you a blogger interested in foreign affairs? Want a job?

~ Matt Armstrong ~ 3 Comments

If you like the State Department’s Digital Outreach Team and wanted to join them, you may be interested in a job offer I ran across. Orbitus, LLC, is looking for an “international blogger” to engage

global audiences online in discussions pertaining to American culture, society and foreign policy via social networking forums, blogs and chat rooms in an effort to further dialogue and promote common understanding and cultural exchange.

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