The Intercultural Management Institute is excited to incorporate our conference attendees in our 12th Annual Conference blog! The specific purpose of this blog is to provide information, increase intercultural dialogue, and promote intercultural understanding, leading up to, during, and after this year’s conference. We encourage all attendees to participate!
Laurie, great job on the live blog. I know we attended some of the same sessions today, so here are my reflections.
Day one of the conference opened dialogue on how to define leadership qualities that lead to demonstrable management success. Day two really expanded on this issue area. I attended the session on best practices for NGO management and feel I came away with valuable insight on how to plan, carry out and assess social advocacy, coalition building and grass-roots activism. In the long-term, building trust and opening channels of communication are essential.
Next, I attended the session with Michael McCarry from the Alliance for International Education and Cultural Exchange. He provided clear information on the landscape within the Senate regarding international exchange programs. There is strong bipartisan support for exchange programs, which is good news. He also highlighted the role of advertising to promote particular social networking, which will in turn increase awareness. One example cited was a full-page advertisement that ran in the New York Times with the strategic message: ‘International Exchange Programs: An Investment in International Security.’ This type of messaging was successful because the Alliance for International Education and Cultural Exchange was able to send a pdf of this advertisement to all 78 member organizations and they in turn contacted their constituents. So the reach of this print publication and associated electronic presence far surpassed the daily readership of the New York Times.
The afternoon session I selected dealt with e-diplomacy. It was refreshing to see the tools and techniques adopted by the State Department and practiced by Foreign Service Officers. Christina Tribble stated that we’ve moved beyond the information economy and suggested that the attention economy that now pervades presents multiple challenges to the government and specifically to public diplomacy specialists. These challenges include new technology, rate of change, locus of control, vulgarization, validity and fracturing of audiences. In order for the U.S. to provide interesting and relevant information about America to audiences abroad, Foreign Service Officers need to identify key modes of national and regional communication in their host country and respond to criticisms that come from non-traditional media, sometimes even working with NGOs on the ground to provide strategic messaging that has resonance with particular communities.
Why? Why did I attend this conference? Clearly it was to explain: who can take ownership of ideas, to understand what conditions are necessary for success, to determine how to provide collaborative leadership and how to encourage others to claim these ideas and in the process bring about substantial reform.
1 comment:
Laurie, great job on the live blog. I know we attended some of the same sessions today, so here are my reflections.
Day one of the conference opened dialogue on how to define leadership qualities that lead to demonstrable management success. Day two really expanded on this issue area. I attended the session on best practices for NGO management and feel I came away with valuable insight on how to plan, carry out and assess social advocacy, coalition building and grass-roots activism. In the long-term, building trust and opening channels of communication are essential.
Next, I attended the session with Michael McCarry from the Alliance for International Education and Cultural Exchange. He provided clear information on the landscape within the Senate regarding international exchange programs. There is strong bipartisan support for exchange programs, which is good news. He also highlighted the role of advertising to promote particular social networking, which will in turn increase awareness. One example cited was a full-page advertisement that ran in the New York Times with the strategic message: ‘International Exchange Programs: An Investment in International Security.’ This type of messaging was successful because the Alliance for International Education and Cultural Exchange was able to send a pdf of this advertisement to all 78 member organizations and they in turn contacted their constituents. So the reach of this print publication and associated electronic presence far surpassed the daily readership of the New York Times.
The afternoon session I selected dealt with e-diplomacy. It was refreshing to see the tools and techniques adopted by the State Department and practiced by Foreign Service Officers. Christina Tribble stated that we’ve moved beyond the information economy and suggested that the attention economy that now pervades presents multiple challenges to the government and specifically to public diplomacy specialists. These challenges include new technology, rate of change, locus of control, vulgarization, validity and fracturing of audiences. In order for the U.S. to provide interesting and relevant information about America to audiences abroad, Foreign Service Officers need to identify key modes of national and regional communication in their host country and respond to criticisms that come from non-traditional media, sometimes even working with NGOs on the ground to provide strategic messaging that has resonance with particular communities.
Why? Why did I attend this conference? Clearly it was to explain: who can take ownership of ideas, to understand what conditions are necessary for success, to determine how to provide collaborative leadership and how to encourage others to claim these ideas and in the process bring about substantial reform.
Post a Comment