This blog post first appeared on blogs.fco.gov.uk on 10 July 2009 

Mark Kent is the British Ambassador to Vietnam. He is also a blogger (in Vietnamese), and an avid web user. 

He was in London this week, so I took the chance to ask him a few questions. He talks about his blog, getting Dizzee Rascal to answer questions from the Vietnamese public, and the role of digital diplomacy.

Transcript

My role 

Mark Kent: I’m the Ambassador to Vietnam. The context of our relationship with Vietnam it’s developing very quickly. The  UK hasn’t traditionally been a major partner with Vietnam, so what I’m trying to do is get the message out about where we can cooperate with Vietnam. For example, in the area of education bringing more Vietnamese students to the UK, trade and investment, and international issues – Vietnam is on the Security Council and is a major player in ASEAN.

My blog

It’s part of engaging – especially with a younger generation in Vietnam who are very technologically literate. Something like 65% of the population are under 30 and the blogging scene there is very active. So it helps getting some of my messages across, but also getting feedback from them about the kind of issues that they’re interested in, climate change for example something that’s been really high on the agenda there.

Yoosk

We were really lucky in meeting up with Yoosk because Tim Hood who runs Yoosk is actually based in Vietnam. And the Yoosk project is about promoting interaction between celebrities, well known people, and the general population who send in comments and questions. So we ran a trial of that in Vietnam with a range of people involved from Dizzee Rascal to Mark Lynas on climate change, to celebrity footballers from the premier league.

Using the web

I’ve become very avid as my wife would point out to me,  looking at other blogs, both in Vietnamese, from other government and FCO bloggers, and internationally. In fact over time my own reading habits have changed so that a more of what I read is direct off the net rather then through publications or magazines and newspapers.

Finding the time

You can do a lot of this in down time, whether it’s in an airport, in the back of the car, or just when I come home in the evening when  I’m perhaps having a beer, writing down some of the main thoughts from the day. So it doesn’t take a lot of time I’ve found.

Reaction

First of all it’s a reaction of surprise and novelty, because they’re not used to ambassadors doing it. But there’s been an underlying interest which has carried on. Part of the challenge for me is to ensure that the material on the blog is relevant, of interest, and sometimes slightly counter intuitive. So we’ve mixed it up quite a lot from having for example Sir Alex Ferguson and David Miliband on there to having videos of Bill Rammell talking about climate change and the effect that’s likely to have in Vietnam.

Other tools

To get the full value out of my blog I need to ensure that it’s promoted through more traditional outlets such as press conferences, contact with the press, articles etc. I think there will come a point where increasingly digital diplomacy is becoming traditional diplomacy. We have to move with the times and make the most of the tools that we’ve got at our disposal.