The New York Times has a story on the State Department’s trip to Moscow, with various social media honchos in tow, along with Twitter King Ashton Kutcher. They’re calling it “geek diplomacy”:

This week, in lieu of the congressmen and capitalists who typically make up delegations to Russia, Washington sent a detachment of Silicon Valley dreamboats: the 33-year-old creator of Twitter; the “chief lizard wrangler” of Mozilla; the chief executive of eBay; and — for good measure — the actor Ashton Kutcher, who has edged out Britney Spears to become the world’s most popular Tweeter.
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TechCrunch has a post on the latest State Department/private sector trip to practice “21st Century Statecraft.”

Prolific tweeter Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) is going, along with Jack Dorsey (@jack), founder of Twitter and the Square, plus a variety of State Department officials — including policy planning staffer Jared Cohen (@JaredCohen) and White House CTO Aneesh Chopra.  Cohen lead a similar trip to Mexico last year.
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Check out this handy Creativity article on how new media is helping the rescue and relief efforts in Haiti. Among the initiatives Tali Krakowsky cites are:

Ushahidi is an open source project which allows users to crowdsource crisis information to be sent via mobile. They have created a Crisis Map of Haiti in collaboration with International Network of Crisis Mappers. The map represents a comprehensive and up-to-date crisis overview for to the humanitarian community.
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One of the great cultural tragedies of the Iraq war was the 2003 looting of the National Museum, which once housed one of the world’s most impressive Mesopotamian collections.

The United States was blamed by many for not doing more to stop the looting. Now, an American company, Google, is planning to digitize the museum’s collection and make it available online, for free, according to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who made the announcement at the museum yesterday.
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I’ve written a lot about Facebook, which is wildly popular in the United States. But as Alec Ross, senior adviser on innovation at the State Department, noted in an interview with Kojo Nnamdi that I blogged about in a previous post, Americans tend to focus on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook because they’re popular here. To be sure, those companies have a global presence, but sometimes they’re not the main site in other countries. For example, Brazil’s population has adopted Google’s Orkut as its main social networking site over Facebook.

Steve Hamm has an article in Business Week talking about the latest social networking site with global ambitions, XIHA Life:
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Becoming a Foreign Service officer – a prestigious position in the U.S. diplomatic corps – isn’t easy. There’s a written test and an oral test and less than 10 percent pass both. But for college students who may be curious about what it’s like to serve as an American diplomat there’s another option: the Virtual Student Foreign Service.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the creation of the program in  May 13 commencement speech at New York University:
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Jeff Mascott had a column yesterday in The Hill, a congressionally-focused Beltway newspaper, in which he talks about the State Department’s use of social media as a tool in diplomacy.

Mascott edits kstreetcafe.com, a blog about how technology and the Internet are changing the public affairs industry, and is managing director of the Adfero Group, a public relations firm. He highlights the Democracy Video Challenge – which we mentioned in a previous blog post – as a prime example of State’s use of social media:
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William May, who works out of the State Department’s Bureau of International Information Programs in the office of innovative engagement, spoke about some of the social media initiatives they have undertaken to engage with the world. They include:

* Official State Department social media sites — 130 Facebook pages, 50 Twitter sites, and 15 blogs. They’re also on YouTube and Flickr.
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Duncan MacInnes from the State Department spoke about some of the challenges at the department and the way that they are incorporating new media to augment their programs.  

“Why is iDiplomacy so important? iDiplomacy is actually … more than public diplomacy. We have to look at the new media communications technologies as important for public diplomacy but also important for AID, programs in Africa – so you’re doing AIDS and other kinds of health programs via cell phone – you have marshalling communities such as the ‘No Mas Farc’ movement, and others where whole communities have come together against terrorism, against women; we see possibilities to use it in microfinancing, using cell phones to give loans to Africans and others. Those are not public diplomacy but ways that iDiplomacy can actually use new media to make a difference in the world today.”

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Colleen Graffy has an article, The Rise of Public Diplomacy 2.0, in the Fall issue of The Journal of International Security Affairs. Graffy is a professor at Pepperdine University’s law school and director of global programs. She recently served as the first deputy assistant secretary for Public Diplomacy to be appointed to the State Department, serving in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs. According to her Pepperdine bio, “Professor Graffy was the first high level US government official to actively advance ‘Public Diplomacy 2.0’ using Twitter and other social media platforms to further U.S. communications.”

Traditionally, the State Department has been risk averse when it comes to getting its message out, Graffy says, with off-the-record, print-centric roundtables the primary means that U.S. embassies used to communicate. But audiences in those countries were increasingly shaping their views from watching television and listening to radio.

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