This blog post first appeared on blogs.fco.gov.uk on 04 March 2010

Sometimes we get over excited about our global reach in the Foreign Office.

We do have global reach. We have offices in 260 places around the world, in 150 different countries. We run 250 websites in 50 languages. And we work on issues like climate change and counter terrorism, which are truly global issues affecting millions of people around the world.

But that doesn’t mean we run digital diplomacy campaigns that reach people every country in the world. We’re more likely to have success targeting particular audiences with lots of small campaigns, than aiming for very large audiences with massive campaigns.

In fact, most our digital successes in the last couple of years have worked because we have been very clear about which particular niche audience we were targeting. Dominic Asquith’s Arabic blog, or John Duncan’s tweets about multilateral arms control, or our embassy in Vietnam’s videos of songs in Vietnamese all work because they are focussed on the audience that they include, rather than the vast majority that they exclude. We’ve been less successful when we’ve aimed for a popular rather than a niche audience.

Of course, one of the brilliant things about the social web is that it can help connect people with similar interests that wouldn’t otherwise be connected, regardless of location. Communities emerge that wouldn’t otherwise have existed. If you’re a left handed banjo player then you can find a left handed banjo playing community. This is really the power of the social web. It’s not global audiences, it’s niche audiences from around the globe. 

I was at Gov20LA a couple of weeks ago. One the things that really impressed me there was the focus on solving local problems. Tools like SeeClixFix and GovLuv are designed to engage local audiences. They might scale, but their initial focus is local. They work because they solve niche problems.

My digital colleagues at the State Department told me that for them everything they do is local, “but local isn’t necessarily geographical.” I think they’re right. It’s tempting for foreign ministries to try to run campaigns with global reach, but the ones that really work are likely to be those that address local issues first.

I was asked to be on a panel with Lovisa and Dillon about global citizenship at Gov20LA. What was striking for me was how much of the discussion was about local issues, and how much agreement there was that “global citizens” are local citizens first.