This report identifies the outreach platforms (broad range of venues, both physical and virtual to engage foreign audiences outside of embassy compounds overseas) the US uses to engage foreign audiences, but due to attacks against US embassies and safety measures, it has had to confine these to embassies or consulate compounds and often moved to the outskirts of the city, making them not as accessible to foreign audiences. Thus, this report tries to identify alternatives to these platforms and come up with new ways to expanding the ways in which the US can conduct public and cultural diplomacy in an attempt to engage foreign audiences.
The report goes on to identify that one of the key aspects of public diplomacy is engaging directly with the public audience in foreign countries, and this has not been used to its full potential. Some of the outreach platforms reviewed are social media efforts such as Facebook, American Centres, Binational Centres and others. This report goes on to further describe the external outreach platforms the Department of State currently uses overseas, examines the challenges and opportunities the State faces in maintaining these outreach platforms, reviews the possibility of expanding these outreach platforms and assesses the extent to which the Department of State has evaluated these outreach platforms. The fieldwork was conducted in Brazil, Indonesia, and China where they met with US embassy officials and representatives of several foreign cultural organisations. The GAO teams also travelled to Mexico and Pakistan to for other engagements in relation to this report.
The report goes on to further identify each outreach platform, what it does and how many of each are there overseas. The outreach platforms identified are: Information Resource Centres (180 worldwide), American Presence Posts (9), American Centres (39), Binational Centres (123), American Corners (401), Virtual Presence Posts (42) and Social Media Efforts such as Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and blogs which vary according to each tool. [230 Facebook accounts, 80 Twitter feeds, 55 Youtube channels, 40 Flickr sites, and 25 active blogs]
These figures certainly show that the US is putting a lot of effort into conducting public diplomacy and through various means, and is definitely keen on staying with the changing times and becoming active through the internet and social media. Yet, due to budget cuts, certain constraints have to be made and it has been identified that social media efforts are one of the best ways to keep engaging foreign audiences and reaching large audiences which otherwise could not be reached.
Some of the challenges faced by the centres are the fact that they may be attacked, and technical problems related to social media efforts as the systems used by the centres or embassies are sometimes incompatible with the new updated social media networks.
Some of the opportunities identified are using social media effort such as Facebook and Twitter and text-messaging which has proven to be rather effective in South Africa. The advantage of social media is that all one does is post something and then that information is in turn shared by a large amount of people and thus the information is transmitted to a larger audience than one could ever imagine.
Another opportunity identified is working with NGOs or private organisations as well as with language centres such as the British Council.
In conclusion, this report provides a large amount of information on what it is these outreach platforms do and how useful they really are. But it also highlight that the US cannot rely on social media alone and thus should concentrate on APPs.
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