As we all know, in international diplomacy a word choice here or there can mean the difference between smooth international engagement and a diplomatic tussle. Now, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has, as we've been tracking, been extolling the power of "digital diplomacy" -- the idea that we tech-savvy Americans can meaningfully interact with our counterparts around the world. The future of the U.S. image abroad is in our hands. But few of us are trained diplomats. So what if we goof, blog something impolitic, and set off World War III?

At a Center for American Progress event yesterday, reports NextGov, Alec Ross, the State Department advisor charged with bringing innovation to Foggy Bottom, admitted that "social media is a messy space and government doesn't always lend itself to messy spaces." But Ross argued that a sense of context and proportionality should guide digital diplomacy, here in the context of empowering those within government to engage freely online:

Ross responded that the context of the online discussion, whether the topic is war negotiations or commercial trade, for instance, should determine when it is permissible for a federal employee to speak about State business. "There are different levels of appropriateness and openness for each of those contexts," he said.

Ross pointed to Secretary Clinton's Text Swat program -- which used cell phone SMS texting to send relief monies to Pakistan's war-torn Swat Valley -- as a taste of what tech-powered 21st century statecraft might entail. (State Department photo by Jose Luis Arnal)

(Photo by Scott Heiferman)

You might remember that about a dozen representatives of American new (and newish) media companies -- YouTube, Twitter, Google, Howcast -- recently headed over to Baghdad as part of a State Department delegation. The participants are back in the U.S. and have now done a debrief. In sum, the three-day trip seems to have left them impressed by the Iraqi government, enthusiastic about the prospect of a new and better Iraq, and in awe of the service of the U.S. government employees who are working to help rebuild the country. Below are some choice bits from the briefing.

Jared Cohen, the State Department representative who arranged the trip, explained the thinking behind the "fact-finding mission":

The purpose of this trip, first and foremost, is, you know, again -- these people around here, they're not going to Iraq in their business hat. They're going to Iraq in their expert hat. And it's first and foremost a fact-finding mission. We're just trying to get a sense of what the lay of the land is in terms of the digital environment in Iraq. So right now, it's about identifying what the opportunities are, what the challenges are. You know, at the end of the day, what we're looking to do is, you know, figure out, you know, what the Iraqi Government needs in terms of capacity building, in terms of support for what it's trying to do on the ground in Iraq and see if, you know, staffing the tools and those of the expertise could help them actually achieve that.

Representatives of Google, YouTube, Twitter, Blue State Digital, MeetUp, Automattic/WordPress and other well-known American social technology companies currently have boots on the ground in Iraq, according to a press release from the State Department that targets the group's mission as "explor[ing] new opportunities to support Iraqi government and non-government stakeholders in Iraq’s emerging new media industry," such as it is. The group includes YouTube director of product development Hunter Walk, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Blue State vice president David Nassar, and MeetUp's Scott Heiferman.

Below is the full list of members of the delegation, running from April 19 to April 23. (You might notice that the trip manifest comes up a bit light on participants of the female variety -- as in, not a one.)

• Jason Lieberman, Chief Executive Officer-Founder, Howcast
• David Nassar, Vice President, Blue State Digital
• Scott Heiferman, Chief Executive Officer, MeetUp
• Raanan Bar-Cohen, Vice President, Automattic/WordPress
• Richard Robbins, Director of Social Innovation, AT&T
• Jack Dorsey, Chairman-Founder, Twitter
• Kannan Pashupathy, Director of International Engineering Operations, Google
• Ahmad Hamzawi, Head of Engineering, Middle East/North Africa, Google
• Hunter Walk, Head of Product Development, YouTube
• Steven Levy, Senior Writer, Wired Magazine

Gathering together representatives of the U.S.'s most talked about (if not most profitable) about technology firms and sending them to spread some American tech magic in Iraq seems to be the brainchild of the State Department's Jared Cohen, described by the New Yorker in a profile two years ago as Foggy Bottom's "precocious...party starter." Cohen is also known for pulling together the Alliance of Youth Movements, a nascent State Department initiative aimed at supporting the global youth's use of social media to create social change.

Here's the full text of the State Department's press release announcing the trip:

The Department of State is facilitating the travel to Baghdad, Iraq of a delegation of nine senior high-technology company representatives Sunday, April 19 to April 23. This will be the first delegation of its kind to Iraq. While in Iraq, the group will explore new opportunities to support Iraqi government and non-government stakeholders in Iraq’s emerging new media industry.

The delegation includes a mix of CEOs, Vice-Presidents and senior representatives from AT&T, Google, Twitter, Howcast, Meetup, You Tube, Automattic/Wordpress, and Blue State Digital. During their visit to Iraq, they will provide conceptual input as well as ideas on how new technologies can be used to build local capacity, foster greater transparency and accountability, build upon anti-corruption efforts, promote critical thinking in the classroom, scale-up civil society, and further empower local entities and individuals by providing the tools for network building. As Iraqis think about how to integrate new technology as a tool for smart power, we view this as an opportunity to invite the American technology industry to be part of this creative genesis.

During the trip the delegation will meet with representatives from the Government of Iraq, the public and private education sectors, Iraqi technology companies, and groups active in Iraqi civil society.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has been a strong proponent of using the full range of tools, including emerging new media and communication technologies, to leverage capabilities that will allow for diplomacy not just with governments, but also with people and between different societies.

(Photo credit: HoboTraveler.com)

Yesterday, the White House announced the nomination of Judith A. McHale to the position of Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs at the State Department. That's a post of particular interest for us here because under the tenure of former Under Secretary James Glassman we saw State experimenting with what Glassman called "Public Diplomacy 2.0" -- that is, engaging with adversaries and allies around the world through Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other (local and global) high tech mediums in popular use by targeted populations.

But McHale's nomination for the "R" post, as the Under Secretary's slot is known in the secret language of Foggy Bottom, is causing some public diplomacy (PD) advocates some serious agita. The tension in R's role in state is between marketing the American message abroad -- the path that could be said to have been taken by Karen Hughes, the first holder of the post [SEE CORRECTION BELOW] -- and engaging in strategic two-way conversations with the global community, aided where appropriate by the agile use of technology. Glassman went the latter route.

McHale is a former executive with Discovery Communication, the parent company of the Discovery Channel. According to the White House press release, she has worked extensively to broaden Discovery's reach in Africa, Latin America, and Western Europe. McHale also happens to be a generous Democratic donor. The Washington Post's Al Kamen refers to McHale as a "longtime friend" to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a "Democratic mega-donor."

McHale's apparent lack of diplomatic experience has George Washington University's Mark Lynch calling her nomination "a terrible, terrible selection." (Lynch concedes that "I don't know Judith McHale at all, and obviously have nothing against her personally.") As National Journal's Amy Harder points out, Glassman is less judgmental on his blog. He calls Lynch's criticisms "unfair." The big question, writes Glassman, is "what she thinks the job is." Pending her Senate confirmation, we will, he notes, "soon find out."

Of course, the buck stops with Secretary Clinton on setting the model for how tech-powered public diplomacy will fare in the Obama-era White House. There are signs that she's eager to grow State's PD 2.0 efforts. Tomorrow, in fact, Clinton will be engaging in a "Digital Town Hall" in conjunction with HowCast -- a relationship started under Glassman's tenure.

CORRECTION: An astute reader to point out that I was completely and totally in error calling Karen Hughes the first person to hold the Under Secretary of Public Diplomacy. I misrembered and regret the mistake. Now's a good a time as any to review who's actually held the position. From the State Department:

Name: Evelyn Simonowitz Lieberman
Appointment: Oct 1, 1999
Termination of Appointment: Jan 19, 2001

Name: Charlotte L. Beers
Appointment: Oct 1, 2001
Termination of Appointment: Mar 28, 2003

Name: Margaret DeBardeleben Tutwiler
Appointment: Dec 15, 2003
Termination of Appointment: Jun 16, 2004

Name: Karen P. Hughes
Appointment: Aug 2, 2005
Termination of Appointment: Dec. 14, 2007

Name: James K. Glassman
Appointment: Nominated Dec. 11, 2007

The State Department has announced that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will host a "Digital Town Hall of the Americas" just before this weekend's 5th Summit of the Americas in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. The "town hall" portion of the events, says State, will consist of Clinton taking questions submitted online, while she's on a stopover in the Dominican Republic on her way to meet Haitian President René Préval. Clinton hits the DR Friday. State's press release came out midday yesterday. That suggests that this event went from planning to execution very quickly. In fact, State has released few details about how one goes about putting questions to Clinton before the event, beyond some general mentions of Ustream, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, Orkut, and something called Hi-5.

But there's a case to be made that State has made a branding error here. Secretary Clinton's "town hall" might be the least interesting part of how State is using multimedia to open up what should be a diplomatically important meeting. The 34 democratically-elected leaders of western hemisphere countries, including President Barack Obama will be meeting to hammer out agreements on the rather vital topic of energy security and environmental sustainability in a time of global economic instability. Past summits -- 1994 in Miami, 1998 in Chile, 2001 in Quebec City, and 2005 in Argentina -- saw concrete working agreements emerge. For example, at was at a Summit of the Americas that the United States and the countries of Latin and South America worked out an arrangement to drop the processing fees on remittances (cash sent home by those living abroad) down from extortionist heights to more manageable levels. Before you start marveling about my intimate knowledge of the history of Summits of the Americas gone by, stop. All that good knowledge and much more is found in a video that the State Department and the up-and-coming HowCast has put together to introduce us to the event. There's another one that makes the case of how I, as an American in the broadest sense, will be impacted by what happens in Port of Spain this weekend. Standard issue State Department propaganda, perhaps. But it's still good information that a citizen of the world want to know. Civic education goes down easily when it comes in the form of well-produced chunks of web video.

The State Department's decision to go the participatory route, no matter how rushed a choice it might have been, signals that State embraces the idea that there's a role for the American public how the United States engages abroad. State, it's worth noting, is actually putting up a promising game online across the board. For one thing, they post full videos of spokesperson Robert Wood's daily press briefings, like the one above, the same day they take place. (As a point of comparison, WhiteHouse.gov posts Robert Gibbs' daily briefings only in transcript form.) The State Department online hub for the summit will live at townhall.america.gov. The will, they say, be posting on-the-scene video interviews with world leaders as the summit takes place.

Speaking to an audience at Monterrey, Mexico's TecMilenio University, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced plans for a second Alliance of Youth Movements summit, to be held in Mexico City in September. The first AYM, held at Columbia Law School this winter, was a Bush-era project that quickly came together out of some shared thinking between Facebook, the U.S. State Department, HowCast, and a few other tech companies. There's sort of two different strains of thinking behind it. The first (and more public) thread is that social-networking tools can help people all over the world resist oppressive governments. At the New York City event this winter, the stars of the day were folks like Oscar Morales, who used Facebook to organize against the FARC guerilla group in Colombia, and the creators of No Mas Chavez, a Facebook group against the Venezuelan leader. The second is more subtext: that the United States can win over hearts and minds online to the American way of thinking. On his way out of Foggy Bottom, Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs James Glassman had wondered aloud how supportive of those "public diplomacy 2.0" efforts the new presidential administration and new Secretary of State would be. Clinton's remarks are after the jump.

In an exit interview with the new Public Diplomacy Magazine, former State Department point person on online/offline diplomacy James Glassman reports, "In my humble opinion Web 2.0 has completely changed this game." But with Bush-appointee Glassman taking leave of Foggy Bottom, there has been some questioning inside and outside State of how well his Facebook/YouTube/Twitter-powered "Public Diplomacy 2.0" had a place in Hillary Clinton's universe. The Associated Press's Matthew Lee, at least, sees signs that PD 2.0, as Glassman liked to call it, is a natural fit for the Clinton era. "In less than three months, Clinton's State Department has embarked on a digital diplomacy drive," he writes, "aimed at spreading the word about American foreign policy and restoring Washington's image."

In the handful of weeks of Clinton's tenure thus far, reports Lee, State started or juiced a number of new-media projects. Clinton's State Department launched an multimedia-enhanced Google map of her global jaunts. They've been experimenting with a "Text the Secretary" mobile feature that allows anyone to pose a question when she's on the road (though questions like "How was your trip?" aren't exactly provocative.) And they've kept the well-produced DipNote blog rolling along. Clinton also plans to expand upon X-Life, a mobile phone game that aims to bring the English language and American culture to the Middle East. ("Salah Moaveni has received the opportunity of a lifetime, an international exchange program to International University in Philadelphia Pennsylvania, USA... He will maneuver around the University, learning about the local culture, in order to take on trivia challenges, complete quests, and modify a project car to road-race against a bullying school tyrant called The Zephyr.")

And Clinton aide Cheryl Mills says things like "New media is critical in this new era of diplomacy, where smart power and expanded dialogues are essential to achieving our foreign policy goals." All of which is no doubt pleasing to the good folks at the Hillary Grassroots Campaign. Did Condoleezza Rice have a fan club like that?

President Barack Obama managed to pack into a three-and-a-half-minute YouTube video clip both well-wishes to Iranians marking the celebration of Nowruz and the extension of a semi-open hand to Iran's leaders -- deriding "threats" but offering up hope for "engagement that is honest and grounded in mutual respect." (The White House makes plain on YouTube that the clip is in the public domain. What's Farsi for "Forward this, please!"?) The Guardian U.K.'s Julian Borger argues the video's mission is to undermine the claim of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and others that Obama is nothing more than George Bush redux. Bush, to be sure, delivered his own Persian New Year's message last year, but he did it via the Voice of America's Persian News Network -- and he used it to chronicle the failings of the Iranian leadership. But how many Iranians living in Iran actually saw Obama's message? That's somewhat unclear. The Associated Press notes that, unsurprisingly, the clip wasn't aired on Iran's state-run television. And, reports the AP, "popular video-sharing sites like YouTube are blocked in Iran." But Berkman Center's new crowd-reported Herdict site tells a different story. Out of 30 reports coming out of Iran, a full 22 contributors say that they're managing to get their YouTube fix.

Deciding to "go naked" and expose yourself online is a difficult enough decision. When you represent some part of the sprawling federal government, though, there's more to contend with than just personal demureness. Federal agencies, reports NextGov's Gautham Nagesh, are in the very final stages of negotiations with YouTube, aimed at creating a safe place for government departments to play, a la the House and Senate's walled YouTube gardens. The Federal Web Managers Council is helping to lead the talks, and the sticking points are two. First, an indemnification clause that refers YouTube disputes to state court. That's a no-no for federal agencies, which are required to settle things in federal courts. The second is the easily-solvable matter of videos of scantily-clad vixens showing up alongside a FEMA "How to Apply for a Housing Reimbursement" clip.

The State Department -- a department for whom social media carries, arguably, the most promise and potential peril -- had been aggressive under the Bush Administration in using the Internet to engage in what it branded "Public Diplomacy 2.0," with initiatives like the cross-cultural social-networking site ExchangesConnect and the Alliance of Youth Movements. National Journal's Amy Harder surveys the landscape and sees signs that new Secretary Hillary Clinton is committed to a webby State. But one bit of contrary evidence: Undersecretary James Glassman, PD 2.0's main champion in Foggy Bottom, skedaddled when Obama took office. He's yet to have been replaced.

Israel's social media offensives -- on Twitter and on YouTube -- in the days since the start of air attacks in Gaza includes attempts that seemed aim at winning the war of public opinion on the idea that the military operation is a reasonable response to Palestinian rocket attacks and is targeted solely at Hamas properties and assets.