Foreign policy meets social media: Indonesia spy row ushers in digital diplomacy
The President of Indonesia has been Tweeting profusely from his personal @SBYudhoyono account in the wake of the spying row, in contrast between the Australian Government's dogged silence. Does his action signal the victory of new media over old, ushering in the era of social media as a foreign policy tool? Sam North, Media Director, Ogilvy PR Australia explains.
Digital natives are leading analogue dinosaurs behind
If ever Tony Abbott needed reminding just how much the world has changed since he was last in government then the events of the past week must have provided that insight.
When John Howard’s government, in which Abbott was a long-serving senior minister, lost power in November 2007 Twitter was less that 18 months old and was seen as a teenage curiosity that many expected to fade as quickly as it was rising. The leader of one of the world’s largest and fastest growing economies using its 140 characters to issue statements was unthinkable.
Yet that’s just what Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono did last week in a series of pointed attacks on Abbott’s response to the then developing crisis over revelations that the President’s personal mobile phone and those of his close circle, including his wife, had been targeted by Australian spies.
Mark Textor, the highly influential Liberal Party pollster and advisor, summed up the feeling of many when he entered the Twitter fray with a number of Tweets, the most rational and least insulting of which read: ''What sort of head of state communicates with a head of a neighbouring government by twitter FFS? SBY''.
Welcome to 2013 and a further step in the breakdown of the old forms of communication. Textor, as a communications expert, is aware that the world has changed, dramatically and forever, and the old methods of reaching an audience just don’t cut it anymore.
SBY learned from one of his fellow presidents, US leader Barack Obama, that social media offers a way to talk to a target audience without the filter of the traditional media. Indonesia is the world’s fourth most populous nation and its citizens have taken to social media in general and Twitter in particular with such enthusiasm that less than a year ago Jakarta was named the number one Twitter city in the world, with Indonesians generating more tweets than people from any other country.
Like a good politician, SBY wants to find the best way to reach his constituents. The response – widespread outrage in Indonesia and an escalating crisis in which Australia is seen to be constantly on the back foot - confirms his actions.
Textor seems to be pining for a time when a leader’s words and wishes were fashioned in dense diplomatic language then issued via media release so that the nuances could be picked over by various columnists who would pontificate their meanings, delivering judgements for the world to ponder and appraise.
The only trouble is that fewer and fewer people are reading those judgements. As Textor well knows, people in 2013 are getting their news in different ways. They no longer need or want a filter.
That’s why on Sunday night Abbott (advised by Textor?) employed exactly the same tactics as SBY, issuing a video media release through YouTube and social media calling for the Senate to repeal the carbon tax.
There was a time in the very recent past when Prime Ministers preferred to call media conferences and argue their case through the cut and thrust of journalistic questioning. Those days are gone and Textor, described on his company’s website as the "most astute judge of public sentiment in Australia today", knows it.