An interesting “interim” post from Ali Fisher at Wandren PD, who is pursing an ongoing protest to map the use of Twitter in the post-election crisis. He has added to his October post, “The Iranian Election: Following a Conversation”, by taking on the daunting task of mapping data from those using the #IranElection tag:
The level of traffic limited the extent to which a user could keep up with the flow of information from #IranElection. at its peak the #tag was running at over 22,500 tweets an hour and nearly 100,000 tweets in a day. There is little anyone can get from reading 375 tweets a minute, forcing users to rely on filters such as the more specific tags, or choosing only to follow certain users; narrowing the field of view but having a chance to understand what is being produced.
His work is at an early stage, but here’s a number to make the head spin: in the 10 weeks after the election, there were 1,466,708 tweets using #IranElection.
Equally important (from my point of view), there are still quite a few using that tag, even as we add #16Azar.
Our colleague Ali Fisher, who writes the excellent blog Wandren PD on public diplomacy and new media, has unveiled the first results from his study of the interaction of Twitter users with post-election protest in Iran. Writing for the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, he has mapped the conversation around the tags #GR88, #FreeIran, #Neda, and #Sohrab as well as the tag #helpiranelection (which I did not know about and was apparently created by a software developer in Israel).
As promising as this study is, the potential for it is even greater. As Fisher notes, “[The tag] #IranElection had so much data that a user would have had to scan 1,000 tweets every hour to keep up.”
As we write regularly on public diplomacy, we noted the latest entry by our colleague Ali Fisher on his Wandren PD site. As BAE Systems (British Aerospace) faces prosecution over bribery allegations and the prospect of the largest financial punishment in British history, Fisher notes:
The British Council has been running programmes in partnership with BAE Systems for almost 20 years. Although the allegations of corruption are unproven, they may still undermine the British Council’s commitment to increase international understanding and bridge trust gaps in order to create harmony and prosperity for all.
Partnerships with BAE have included the Post-doctoral Summer Research (PDSR) Programme in Saudi Arabia. The British Council website acknowledges that The programme is supported by BAE Systems, the major British company with overall responsibility for the Al-Yamamah programme. The Programme has been sponsored from its inception in 1991 by BAE Systems and administered by the British Council.
On his blog Wandren PD, our colleague Ali Fisher, who is producing breakthrough work on public diplomacy and networks, evaluates a recent survey of a “global” audience for a US Government initiative. Noting that the majority of responses came from within the US, he asks, “What does it mean if the demographic of two-thirds of your audience is not your target demographic?”
If [Twitter] is just another means to deliver a message (even if it has more of a human voice than other methods), another way to ask for comment just to answer back with the same rebuttals that will also appear in other media, to take a centralised view and drive traffic to other sites or stories produced by the same organisation, it is a missed opportunity. But if that’s all you want if for, then it will do the job just fine.
Our partner, Ali Fisher, runs one of the best sites considering public diplomacy. His latest entry on Wandren PD takes on the issue of how to “win hearts and minds”:
There have been many attempts to pin down what Public Diplomacy is about, and as I’m currently finishing editing The Trials of Public Diplomacy, this has been at the forefront of my mind. Rather than seeking another definition to encapsulate (or exclude) certain actors, methodologies, or bureaucracies, I’ve been seeking to think about what PD is it at its core.
To me it is attempting to influence behaviour to change the odds of certain outcomes occurring….
An interesting “interim” post from Ali Fisher at Wandren PD, who is pursing an ongoing protest to map the use of Twitter in the post-election crisis. He has added to his October post, “The Iranian Election: Following a Conversation”, by taking on the daunting task of mapping data from those using the #IranElection tag:
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Our colleague Ali Fisher, who writes the excellent blog 
As we write regularly on public diplomacy, we noted the latest entry by our colleague Ali Fisher 
On his blog Wandren PD, our colleague Ali Fisher, who is producing breakthrough work on public diplomacy and networks, 
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