Many foreign policy mandarins might not like or understand it, but the foreign policy operating environment is changing quickly.

When in 2011 the Swedish Foreign Minister, Carl Bildt, was unable to get in touch with his Bahraini counterpart during the heat of the protest movement there, he opted to publicly shame him via Twitter.

When General Electric was selecting topics for a summit of its most senior government relations executives, it chose Google….and the U.S. State Department’s e-diplomacy. When on July 12, 2010, Terry Jones, a fundamentalist reverend from Florida, wrote a series of tweets attacking Islam, one of which read: “9/11/2010 Int Burn a Koran Day” news of his proposal spread virally resulting in a wave of global protests, some of them deadly.

Read Here – Brookings