The revolution will be censored (and blogged!)

Unlike when utilities are down, life doesn’t appear to go quiet when the Internet is down. Or cut off.

While on-ramps to social media sites are blocked, as we see in Egypt this week, something else gets to work. Call it the Internet effect. The connected world has learned to find its way around broken nodes, to bypass toll-gates, and evade any form of censorship — soft or otherwise.

This is what happened in Egypt on Thursday.

Foreigns journalists were being attacked and arrested, including two AP journalists and a Guardian reporter who were beaten up. (Listen to the Guardian’s Jack Shenker’s recording of this.) He was released and was able to blog about it:

“Along with nearby protesters I fled back down the street before stopping at what appeared to be a safe distance. A few ordinarily dressed young men were running in my direction, and I assumed they were demonstrators also escaping the oncoming security troops. Two came towards me and suddenly threw out punches, sending me to the ground. I was then hauled back up by the scruff of the neck and dragged towards the advancing police lines… All attempts I made to tell them in Arabic and English that I was an international journalist were met with more punches and slaps;”

Other voices are getting out, too, despite the bans and threats. The next few days will certainly reveal if such attempts can contain the uprising, or backfire.

While Washington wrestles with the right response, other countries (and not just those countries in the region) are obviously watching this live-action drama closely. “Authoritarian governments” observed Clay Shirky,  ”stifle communication among their citizens because they fear, correctly, that a better-coordinated populace would constrain their ability to act without oversight.” But any attempts to promote social media as the tools for regime change are wrong, he warns. This is not what the Twittering masses want to believe.

Promoting access to media and social media as a basic human right is complicated from a foreign policy perspective. Consider what Wikileaks has just done!

But the lesson is clear.  The world is quite a different place now, with amplified communication and greater means of collaboration.

 

Passport to ‘Digital Citizenship’ Webinars next week

Really happy to announce a series of Web conferences that I will be starting next week for the U.S Embassy in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

This follows a digital video conference I conducted last year for the U.S.E, in association with the US State Department.

These six workshops –Webinars– are designed to be more interactive; the majority of participants will be at one location in Colombo. They were selected based on their application and response to a survey on the state of social media in Sri Lanka.

We are covering the usual suspects: Blogs, social networking, micro-blogging, video sharing and social search.  The attendees are from diverse backgrounds: advertising, corporate communications, government, web-based businesses, management, universities, media and non-profits.

Presenters: To make these sessions more focused and relevant I have brought on board some top practitioners to co-present with me. They are:

Dan Wool, a corporate communications and PR consultant for APS, a large electric utility in Arizona. Dan co-founded one of the world’s top blogs on public relations, marketing and social media.

Steve England, Chief Technology Office of MobileSoft, an advocate of on-demand digital printing who advises large tech companies and international advertising agencies on interactive marketing.

Gary Campbell, a communications manager at Arizona State University, a former print journalist turned digital, who has led numerous university training sessions in social media.

I will also bring in a few ‘surprise’ guests who will pop-in with some real-world examples of how they are using a particular strategy in their communication!

 

Two years of ‘broad public access’ at State Dept blog

Last week Dipnote, the blog by the State Department, turned two.

So much has happened in two years. It was the year that the iPhone debuted, and Microsoft bought a stake in Facebook. A few months before that TIME named all those people creating content and connecting through social media as the ‘Person of the Year’ – the famous “YOU” issue.

Luke Forgerson, Managing Editor of Dipnote

Dipnote took to this new way of communicating with amazing flair. If there is one example of I’ve been using repeatedly to illustrate how any organization could stop firing press releases and start a conversation, it’s been them.

Think about it. Foreign policy to many is as sexy as watching paint dry. But given the right angles –heck, the right to loosen up– and the interest in listening as much as speaking, it turns out to be a different animal.

I have talked to many organizations who are terrified at the thought of saying something that could come back to bite them. Blogs, and videos, and photos pulled from a diverse group of individuals seem like total anarchy to them. It might damage the brand, they fear. The question I get asked a lot is ‘What if someone says something nasty?” –followed by “should we publish that too?”

I won’t go into the responses I give, but you’d think a group of people who represent the brand image of a country must have thought about this a lot. There must be bookshelves of white papers and journals on this subject in their offices. There must be legal advisers shaking their heads in disbelief.

And yet…

If you look at the social media initiatives the State Dept has rolled out over the past few years, these ‘government employees’ seem to take to new media in a way you’d expect of a marketing organization. Maybe they understand that good marketing is all about good communication. It’s more than the ingredients of ‘technology and talent‘ that Sec. Clinton spoke about.

It’s about using social media as an antenna not a bullhorn.

 

Quotes for the week, ending 15 August 2009

“We’ve just had a demonstration of democracy.”

Senator Arlen Specter, after a person attending a town hall meeting shouted at him. The man was escorted out of the room, at a Harrisburg Community College.

“The Obama administration has delivered … a message of tough love. We are not sugarcoating the problems. We’re not shying away from them.”

Secretary Hillary Clinton, summing up her trip to Africa

“The Internet disrupts any industry whose core product can be reduced to ones and zeros ..it is the biggest virgin forest out there”

Jose Ferreira, founder and CEO of education startup Knewton

“Doing sustainability is fine, but being sustainable is where we want to wind up.”

Michelle Bernhart, author of “The Rules of the Game” in an upcoming edition of IABC’s Communication World magazine, interviewed by Natasha Nicholson.

“FriendFeed, in my mind, is the new RSS reader.”

Robert Quigley in Old Media New Tricks

“Macaca Day, for those of us who make our living from video on the Internet and elsewhere, is a holy day – the day that marks the birth of YouTube politics, and reminds us that citizens with cellphone cameras and a YouTube account – or at least an election.”

Dan Manatt, at Tech President, on the infamous comment by senator George Allen during the election campaign

“Google Voice “is merely symptomatic of that larger question.”

Ben Scott, public policy director of Free Press, a Washington-based consumer advocacy group in Washington, on the investigation on whether the carrier (AT&T) and handset maker (Apple) had anything to do with banning Google’s voice application from the iPhone.

“This is a decision based upon consumer experiences, child protection and our strategic investment to build up MSN Messenger.”

Geoff Sutton, GM of MSN Europe, on the decision to shut down Microsoft chat rooms in 28 countries.

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Diplomacy’s BFF, social media, opens third way

In 2005, an article that largely went unnoticed about using technology appeared in Hoover’s Digest. It was authored by someone names Jared Cohen.

In it he analyzed the pent-up resistance in Iran, and what it means for the future stability in the Middle east.

“That resistance, however, no longer appears in traditional forms of oppositional activity, such as massive political demonstrations and an organized opposition. Instead, it often manifests itself in the form of a “passive revolution,” a widespread social resistance that, given its methodology of engaging in activities that are antithetical to the regime’s values, is political in and of itself.”

He spoke of something called ‘virtual association’ a form of symbolic social networking among people who were passively resistant. These real, but invisible networks posed a threat to the status quo, he said, because “there is no leadership, network, or covert movement to crack down on.” Cohen also predicted there would come a Tipping Point, when those networks could be nourished.

That Tipping Point came in June this year, with the media bans and snuffing out of any form of protest.  That idea of  ‘nourishing’ the assets inside a country appears to have been turned into a diplomatic policy.

In April, the State Department took a technology delegation from Google, Twitter, AT&T and a few other companies to Iraq. According to TIME, the person behind the idea of a technology delegation was Jared Cohen.

I find this interesting because for decades, we have adopted a for-us-or-against-us approach to how we deal with the rest of the world.  Now, a consensus toward a Third Way is being taken seriously at all levels. It involves first listening to those unlike us, seeing what ways they engage between themselves, and try to become part of their conversation.

Goli Ameri, US Asst. Undersecretary of State has also referred to this approach this third way: bringing people together to create greater mutual understanding. Dialog and exchange all fit nicely into the template of social media, which has no use of message-force multipliers –a failed PR strategy that is as crass as the phrase– and the likes.

Public diplomacy has been hamstrung with a top-down we-talk/you listen approach for decades. Today we have begun to understand the antenna is more important than the loudspeaker.

If social media and the possibilities they open up are making people try new ways of listening, connecting, and engaging we will be all better off for it.

 

Quotes for the week ending 4 July, 2009

“Hire those who lean forward, who are curious and interested, who listen before they answer, who love learning.”

Valeria Maltoni, in a Twinterview with Jason Baer

“The marketing industry’s idea of a two-way communication is to put an 800 number or a web address in an ad and take orders.”

Josh Bernoff, Groundwell

“All those are my screwups”

Chris Anderson, on being accused of plagiarism in his new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price

“Venus played as if she had someplace to go and she was in a major league hurry to get a great dinner.”

Serena Williams’ father on watching his daughter in the semi-finals.

“… the menus on the Kindle DX need to be made so blind students can use them,”

Chris Danielson, director of public relations at the National Foundation of the Blind, commenting on the story that a blind student at Arizona State University filed a complaint against ASU to avoid the use of the reading device until the menus are accessible to blind students.

“The work we’ve done with Jack and Twitter is a good example of the way we can work with Silicon Valley companies.”

Jared Cohen, State Department’s policy planning staffer, on taking Silicon Valley companies such as Google, Twitter and other startups to talk to government officials, business people, and students in Iraq

“ambient awareness”

Clive Thompson, on what Twitter is good at creating; quoted by Steven Johnson in a TIME, about how Twitter cwill change the way we live.