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  Written by:  Ilija Zhupanoski, Digital Communications Advisor to the Prime Minister of North Macedonia   It is common knowledge that many government communication services already have crisis protocols in place to deal with different emergency and disaster scenarios. Regretfully, the Covid-19 pandemic had left many of them staggering. Nobody could have imagined that something like this could befall the world, least in such scope and effect. Hence, at its onset, the pandemic brought about great uncertainty and raised many questions for those tasked to setup proper communication strategies for dealing with the public health crisis. At a time of global [...]

  Written by:  Roman Osadchuk, Eurasia Research Assistant, Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab Jakub Kalenský, Senior Fellow, Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab   What is disinformation? Academics and researchers[i] oppose the use of the term “fake news” due to its vague and broad nature, and distinguish between three concepts of information addressing various kinds of false information: disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation. While many definitions of disinformation exist, most of them agree that this sort of information is “deceptive”[ii] and “intentional”. Claire Wardle and Hossein Derakhshan define disinformation as false information that is “deliberately created to harm a person, social [...]

Written by:  Joanne Sweeney, CEO, Public Sector Marketing Institute and Author, Public Sector Marketing Pro   Digital communications transformation in Government and public sector is shaking up traditional work practices, challenging leadership’s personal bias and re-framing the fundamental premise of ‘in the public interest’. Add in a global pandemic and you have no choice but to rethink digital diplomacy in a world where there are more people using social media than are not. The public interest, previously dictated by civil and public servants, politicians and policy makers, is increasingly in the hands of the people – those that Governments are there [...]

Written by:  Matthias Lüfkens, Founder & CEO at DigiTips, Founder of Twiplomacy.   Which and how many hashtags will make a post go viral? Hashtags are the lubricant of social media. Just as oil makes engines run smoothly, tags and hashtags help aggregate and categorize similar content on social media. A popular and trending hashtag might make your social media post stand out; however, hashtags are no silver bullet for your content to go viral. The historic tweet picturing a plane in the Hudson River went viral without any hashtag. Former U.S. President Donald Trump rarely used hashtags in his tweets [...]

Written by:  Lauren Hug, Founder and Principal of HugSpeak Consulting, Author of Digital Kindness Jacob Anderson, Community Engagement & Public Participation Manager City of Colorado Springs   In this noisy, digital world, audiences are bombarded with catchy, carefully drafted, meticulously targeted marketing messages -- and are increasingly tuning them out. With so many messages coming at them, it’s hard for people to know which ones are worth their attention. Faced with overwhelming information and options, people look for “social proof,” turning to those they trust for guidance. Accordingly, messages from friends, family, and any source a person trusts (regardless of whether the [...]

Written by:  Roger Croix Webb Public Diplomacy Practitioner, on Leave of Absence from the United States Department of State.* *The views and opinions expressed in this essay are exclusively those of its author and are not in any way meant to reflect the opinions or policies of the US Government. “No man is exempt from saying silly things; the mischief is to say them deliberately.”                                                                                                                        Michel de Montaigne There was a moment in history when the United States was desperate for a friend. The fledgling nation was a year into its war of independence and faced certain defeat at [...]

  Written by: Miriam Možgan Former journalist, former Secretary-General of the Bled Strategic Forum, strategic communication advisor, digital diplomat, currently working at the Slovenian Diplomatic Academy.   The digitalisation of diplomacy has been constantly shaped by offline events. From remote working to diplomacy, banking, and online retail, the pandemic has compressed a year’s worth of transformation into months, bringing with it a dramatic shake-up in how people live, where they work, and how they socialise, and in how governments communicate to each other and with their public. We have witnessed diplomats adopting Zoom and Webex technologies, dropping their risk-averse costumes and adopting [...]

Written by: Marina Marković Head of the Public Diplomacy Office, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Serbia   First of all, I hope that you are all well, that these strange, sometimes even scary times marked by COVID-19 have not been too harsh on you, that you and your close ones are all doing well, and that we shall soon have an opportunity to meet in person to do a proper EDDE (European Digital Diplomacy Exchange … I like all these words, but my favourite one has become exchange, in the sense of a proper, in-person chat—the EDDE has [...]