The State Department, Twitter and Iran

The State Department asked Twitter to stay live instead of pausing for scheduled maintenance so activists in Iran could keep communicating both with each other and the outside world. A great deal has been made of the fact that the protests in Iran and communication about them has been driven by social media, and I agree that it's an important and unusual development, although one of limited value. Even in reasonably wealthy, reasonably educated countries, only a segment of the population both has access to and is using social media like Twitter, Facebook, etc. In poorer or more repressive countries, like Burma or North Korea, protest can't flow out through those tools, which makes it both harder and more important to find out what ordinary people think.

But I digress. To me, the really interesting part of the story is that State appears to have recognized the importance of social media very early on after the elections, and to have acted quickly to request that lines of communication stay open. That suggests that State is far enough along in its social media analysis programs to be analyzing the information coming out through social media channels. And that's encouraging. DipNote, State's blog, may sound pretty stilted sometimes. But it's far more important for agencies and departments to be Web 2.0-savvy in operations than in their public affairs strategy (though ideally they'd be comfortable in both areas).