VasGk | Κοινωνικό Νερό

John Kerry delivered his first remarks as the new U.S. Secretary of State. In his first speech at the State Department, he noted :  "...We get to talk about empowering people through our ideals, and through those ideals hopefully they can change their lives..." This is really important to underline;  given that public diplomacy now has a much more crucial role to play. In utilising new and social media, people now have the opportunity to engage through digital diplomacy.  As Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Tara Sonenshine has said :  "...we have to introduce more and more virtual exchanges and the use of social media particularly to reach young people where they are..." Secretary Kerry Tours the Ops Center Also, I came across a tweet from the State Department which informed that #SecKerry will be tweeting from the  +U.S. Department of State  twitter account . #SecKerry will start tweeting fr...

David Plouffe, Senior Advisor to the President, in a recent email said: We're about to change the way Americans engage with President Obama and his Administration by launching a new way for you to join with fellow Americans to petition the federal government on a range of issues. We the People  is a new e-goverment solution from the Whitehouse in order to engage with people online. I hope this is not just another 2012 campaign tool...   Although the Whitehouse is not the first administration to launch this sort of opengov initiative, it is always good to give people new ways to interact with Government.  Another initiative like "We the People", that I clearly remember, is from number 10 in the UK. I remember this e-Petition being in place even from the previous labour administration of Tony Blair.  The UK version also states that: You can create an e-petition about anything that the government is responsible for and if it gets at least 100,000 si...

I always try to find new ways to talk and engage with people on twitter. Although I maintain what I consider to be a very modest account ; I know I need to put more time and effort in my personal tweeting. At the moment, I mostly tweet through the corporate accounts I manage. In a Blog post back in 2009.. " Twitter as a public SMS pool " I wrote that: "I think twitter as being, not just a mini-blogging platform, but an open SMS pool" Through twitter, you have the opportunity to create context between relationships and interact with people.  An excellent recent example comes from the account of Kevin Spacey . One of Kevin's fans, Danielle Luttrell , tweeted: "I had a dream that @KevinSpacey called me to say happy birthday. I cried. #biggestfan" to which Kevin Spacey replied " @DanielleLutt how about a tweet? Happy bday! " I find this amazing! A Hollywood star like Kevin Spacey with over 2million followers on twitter repl...

Shimon Peres & Benjamin Netanyahu, in two different occasions, talked about the role of the Internet in the recent events throughout the Middle East. Peres at a Chatham House Conference: Sixty Years of British-Israeli Diplomatic Relations (30 March 2011), and Netanyahu in a recent YouTube interview (31 March 2011). Both messages carry the same principles. Peres said: It's actually a revolt without organizers. Nobody knows who organized it. It arrived from an unknown combination of sentiments and knowledge introduced to the younger generation by modern communication, the internet, smartphones, Facebook. For the first time, young people in the Arab world could have seen with their own eyes the ugly face of dictatorship, of corruption, of want. And they could have compared their lot with the lot of other young people in the world. And ask themselves why they're not here. And actually, it is really a revolt, unorganized, spontaneous, against autocracy, against oppressi...

Browsing facebook, I came across an update from Barack Obama : We have a choice as a nation. We can return to the failed economic policies of the past, or we can keep building a stronger future. We can go backward, or we can keep moving forward. I want to move forward, and I think America wants to as well. These remarks were made during a speech at Carnegie Mellon University concerning the Economy, on June 02, 2010. It is astonishing that a forward looking politician like Obama, will end up using a cliché pseudo-dilemma as a campaign message. I suppose that with the 2010 mid-term elections coming up, partisan politics will start to re-appear in political speeches. In a recent article on Politico " Obama must match rhetoric, reality " Danielle Pletka, who served on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and is vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, argues that: It doesn’t matter what the president and his...

I had a chat with my brother recently and ...like you do, the subject of communication reach in social media came up ;-). When he asked me about twitter, I urged him to open an account and start tweeting! "Yes but, what is twitter?", he asked. Just repeating a twitter definition seemed very obvious. I remembered watching Biz Stone in an interview at the Colbert Report saying that one of the reasons that twitter has a 140 character limit, is because a txt SMS is 160, so in order for twitter to send out tweets (as SMS updates) it had to be less than 160. The extra 20 character space is for the @username and other network info. So, I think twitter as being, not just a mini-blogging platform, but an open SMS pool, where you SMS "OR" answer to " what are you doing? "; BUT everyone can see it, and reply back. It is a compilation of thoughts, news, information, and advertising all together. Tweets as public SMS is like searching for tweets in your area. Twi...

Many comments are to be written about the new President to be, most of which far better than my own, IMHO, I believe that U.S.A. has proved that "if you will it, it is no dream". U.S. citizens voted for a man who is progressive in principle and patriotic at heart. His presidential campaign is a beacon of sound communication strategies; but most of all excellent organization and human resource management. Will analyze my views on "Online Communications Strategies" in later posts.

I want to say a big thank you to everybody that came to my book launch last Thursday. My deepest regards to my close friends who supported me throughout the drafting of my 1st book. The Dictionary of Corruption presents 270 words and expressions that are commonly used by citizens talking about political and business life issues. Corrupt politicians, corrupt businesses, most of all, corrupt citizens. The words people use indicate deep and inherit characteristics, and at the same time, represent the lack of progressiveness in our society and sometimes economic backwardness. Corruption is a social characteristic. It is neither good nor bad; it is a social phenomenon, and needs to be handled as such in order to be eradicated form political, business and everyday life.