"Our experience (of Social Media) with the Public Diplomacy division has been transformational, and given the events in Egypt and Libya, we have to be there," Navdeep Suri, Joint Secretary (PD), Ministry of External Affairs, said at the Gov 2.0 conference held in Delhi last week. Suri said that the image of India's foreign office has been that they're "fuddy duddy", and they joined Twitter and Facebook with the intent of building a positive narrative about india, development partnerships, and create Friends of India communities via facebook." More importantly, it was about communicating quickly, setting the agenda, get feedback and improve the interface between government and citizens: a focus on greater responsiveness and accountability. "We started with Twitter in July, and have 7000 followers. We got reactions spontaneously, many of them positive and welcoming because people had low expectations from government. We were the pilot (project) for the Department of Information Technology," he added. The Libya Experience "The Libya experience," Suri said, "has shown that it has worked very well for us. While the Facebook experience has worked better than Twitter experience (in terms of the positive responses), we used Twitter for utility during emergencies. (During the Libya evacuation), we put up over 300 tweets, the Foreign Secretary (Nirupama Rao) became the first senior official to join twitter. We used it to sent the agenda and be the first to put out factual information, rather than interpretation. Credibility needs to be key for us, and we need to be quick…
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