On the first Friday of each month the Interpreter will publish Digital Diplomacy links instead of the weekly Digital Asia links. As Australian digital diplomacy strives to catch-up to the rest of the world, these links will highlight the most creative and effective ways in which countries are leveraging the Internet for foreign policy gain.
- America's #LGBTI digital diplomacy blitz provides valuable lessons for how states – no matter their resources – should conduct coordinated digital campaigns.
- Israel's Foreign Ministry takes a stab at the international media's coverage of Gaza in this animated video.
- I argue it's time for Foreign Minister Bishop to champion a forward-looking strategy that commits resources and the right expertise in order to pull Australian digital diplomacy out of catch-up mode and into real-time.
- The Pentagon's YouTube war with Russia is heating up.
- It's this French Ambassador's (@gerardaraud) last posting and he's as senior as he can be so, as he explains to the New York Times, there's no better time to take risks.
- How the British Embassy in Phnom Penh ran a campaign to boost awareness of the UK among youth and grew its Facebook fan base by 24,000% in one year (Australia's embassy in Cambodia isn't on Facebook).
- Six rules for the use of smart power from UK's Ambassador to Lebanon Tom Fletcher, via his personal blog.
- This research leverages big data to assess the state of Canadian digital diplomacy. The researchers mapped 467 official social media accounts and graphed the impact of major foreign aid campaigns.
- Genius, a social site that allows users to comment on online content such as music and news, is attracting foreign policy actors. Current experimenters include Hillary Clinton and Turkey's Office of Public Diplomacy.
- US Secretary of Defence Ash Carter becomes the first Defence Secretary to join Facebook.
- Australia's Ambassador to Israel Dave Sharma has posted a speech he gave recently on diplomacy in the digital age on his personal blog. It's a shame our own Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade hasn't created a blog so that insights such as these can be shared more widely.
- This interview with Australia's Ambassador to the UN Gillian Bird is hard to find but worth reading, particularly her views on UN silos and fragmentation (more content for a DFAT blog).
- The State Department's new Medium account, Foggy Bottom, encourages the public to post responses.
- Is this Bollywood-inspired video by Germany's embassy in India a stroke of genius or totally ridiculous? Featuring the Ambassador and his partner, who have defended it, you be the judge. But with over 1 million views, there is no denying it is a triumph for German digital diplomacy (h/t Brendan):