Helle C. Dale of Heritage Foundation has just written a report on the U.S. government’s use of social networking in public diplomacy. The full report can be viewed here.

Her suggestions for what Congress and the administration should do are:

• Create a National Communications Strategy articulated by the Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy. The Administration has been tasked by Congress with producing such a strategy by December 31, 2009. If public diplomacy is to become an effective outreach tool for the U.S. government, it will be as part of a tool kit, a coordinated government-wide approach, and a deliberate effort to harmonize messaging. Such a strategy is critical for Public Diplomacy 2.0 to reach its potential and be more than decentralized, trial-and-error efforts by individual government departments.
• Formulate government-wide guidelines to ensure that the new media is on message, as well as standards for official use of social media, ensuring that government Web pages can be identified and differentiated from impersonators without destroying the appeal of the particular media to its audience. Proper analysis of the way government agencies use social media will be needed to make Internet presence more than simply a nifty way of issuing press releases. “Web 2.0″ is not a cohesive whole, but a collection of different, complementary tools that must be evaluated individually as well as in concert.
• Establish a new non-governmental or semi-governmental research organization (a Corporation for Foreign Opinion Analysis) that can track the effectiveness and persuasiveness among foreign audiences of U.S. public diplomacy and strategic communications. A Corporation for Foreign Opinion Analysis would analyze the effectiveness of the new media in reaching targeted audience segments around the world, which vary widely according to the availability of technology, the control by autocratic governments of information flows, and local cultures.