Having worked in the area of public diplomacy and international broadcasting at the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors, we were intrigued this morning to read this Walter Pincus item in the Washington Post:

The State Department, departing from traditional public diplomacy techniques, has what it calls a three-person, “digital outreach team” posting entries in Arabic on “influential” Arabic blogs to challenge misrepresentations of the United States and promote moderate views among Islamic youths in the hopes of steering them from terrorism.

The department’s bloggers “speak the language and idiom of the region, know the culture reference points and are often able to converse informally and frankly, rather than adopt the usually more formal persona of a U.S. government spokesperson,” Duncan MacInnes, of State’s Bureau of International Information Programs, told the House Armed Services subcommittee on terrorism and unconventional threats on Thursday.

MacInnes’ entire testimony, which you can find here, is worth the read.  But this excerpt in particular stands out for exhibiting strategic and tactical appreciation for how the Web 2.0 world works:

The Digital Outreach Team was launched just one year ago as a pilot initiative to counter ideological support for terrorism. It employs Arabic speakers to post entries on influential Arabic-language blogs, challenging misrepresentations and providing accurate information about U.S. policy and American society. These bloggers speak the language and idiom of the region, know the cultural reference points and are often able to converse informally and frankly rather than adopt the usually more formal persona of a U.S. government spokesperson. This is a major departure from our previous ways of conducting public diplomacy. It requires both creativity and a new set of skills.

The cultural sensitivity that this approach affords has been very successful, but it is labor-intensive. We are currently in the process of expanding the original team of two Arabic bloggers to six, while also adding one Urdu and two Farsi (Persian) linguists. The team does not engage hardcore militant sites, but concentrates on mainstream sites with heavy traffic that discuss U.S. policy, such as BBC Arabic, Al-Jazeera Talk, and Elaph On-Line News. We are also exploring how we can use the applicability to our mission of new cyber-technologies such as Second Life and cell phone games to further advance our mission.

Second Life embraced by the State Department?  Bravo.

We’ve been skeptics of the old-school, traditional approach to public diplomacy, which essentially relegates the communications and information revolution to second-class citizen.  This testimony and this approach gives us — finally — some hope that the State Department will get it right.