Baked in and Wired: eDiplomacy @ State

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 […]

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Facebook: The Making of 1 Billion Users (Isn’t Social Media a Foreign Policy Tool? Think About It)

The team in charge of tracking Facebook’s (FB) growth works on the second floor of Building 17. Most days, the offices are like anywhere else at Facebook: whiteboards, toys on desks, shorts and flip-flops, pretty low-key. Around noon on Sept. 14, the second floor was packed. In one of the common areas, a giant screen showed the […]

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Foreign Ministries Are Getting The Hang Of Social Media

MINUTES after last week’s violent attacks on America’s missions in the Middle East, the country’s embassy in Cairo was already on Twitter. It tweeted an emergency number for American citizens. It criticised Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood for supporting the protests on their Arabic feed. And it thanked fellow tweeters for their condolences on the murder of […]

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5 Reasons to Believe in the Indonesian Miracle

When most people think of Indonesia today, they think of beaches and temples or of its famously teeming cities, but this country of 240 million and counting is a much more modern, diversified, and dynamic economy than many international investors and companies assume. To make the most of Indonesia’s vast potential, they’re going to need […]

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How Facebook Can Still Rule the Internet Economy

The unrelenting negative reports about Facebook Inc. (FB) are enough to rattle even the true believers among us. Yet it would be premature to despair over the company’s long-term viability and health. Facebook is still potentially the most valuable information-based business. It had 955 million monthly active users at the end of June, and benefits from a tremendous […]

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