The White House press corps gave Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy Judith McHale a rough time on July 15 when Press Secretary Robert Gibbs brought her over to brag about the messaging on President Obama to foreign audiences.
The State Department has been sending highlights of major Presidential speeches via text messaging to subscribers in other countries, and has collected a quarter of a million e-mail addresses from people who have requested them. State and its embassies conduct other PD activities through Facebook and other social media, amassing information electronically through those channels. Embassies magnified the President’s travel activities through video showings and other means to their host nation publics.
This drew pointed questions, to which McHale didn’t have crisp answers.
- How much did [micro-grants for cine showings] cost?
- Did you coordinate with the national governments on making lists?
- How many did you reach for [Obama's] Moscow speech?
- Doesn’t this medium reach only the elites?
- Is the government building a data base with records on U.S. citizens?
The fact is that the State Department has a poor record of keeping track of embassy contacts around the world. Most diplomats have neither the skill or the software to track their relationship with host-country nationals of interest. That means that public diplomacy people can never demonstrate whether they really got the message out , or use numbers to evaluate how they are spending our dollars.
Social media offers built-in measures of success (number of comments, number of those who sign up for messages, etc.) It’s not the whole answer, but it’s a start to build serious evaluation based on audience records.
New efforts of this kind will draw serious scrutiny from the media — and probably some push-back. The White House press corps may be skeptical, but it sounds to me like good government.
