Canada blogs for success in Beijing
When the Chinese government announced civil servants would be required to use modest, domestic cars instead of flashier imports, a Canadian diplomat claimed credit.
Months earlier, Canadian Ambassador David Mulroney had posted on Chinese social media a photo of his silver Toyota Camry, a hybrid car that was much less expensive than the models driven by his peers in Beijing.
Mulroney’s posting on Weibo, the Twitter-style micro-blogging site that’s hugely popular in China, stoked debate about government spending and the privileges of apparatchiks.
Canadian diplomat Mark McDowell noted in a report to Ottawa that, “while we cannot prove the causal link, we can safely say that we influenced the policy discussion by disseminating Canadian best practices about good governance.”
McDowell’s remarks are included in a cache of reports and emails released under the Access to Information Act that provide a behind-the-scenes glimpse of Canada’s efforts to establish a higher profile in China’s social media landscape.
The documents detail reflections by Canadian staff, such as the importance of responding to reader comments, and show how social media has become more important than tradi- tional press releases. The Weibo experience, one official noted, may prove a blueprint for how Canadian missions around the world engage locals.
“Having a microblog in the Chinese context is more important than issuing press releases and in fact more important than having a website ever was in this media market,” wrote McDowell, a counsellor in the Canadian Embassy’s public diplomacy section, in a report following Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s visit to China in February 2012. “It provides a rare opportunity to influence, to some degree, content in a setting where almost all media outlets are closely directed by a heavy state hand.”
In the summer of 2011, Canadian officials in Beijing opened an account on Weibo, which has at least 300 million users. Two months after its startup, the Weibo account had 50,000 followers.
“The most popular items we have posted have been those that deal with travel, food and study in Canada,” McDowell wrote. “We’re surprised to find that tweets dealing with Canadian events in China do not get anywhere near as much traction.”
McDowell wrote that officials with the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) should forget about highlighting the “grip and grin” photos that are a hallmark of politicians’ visits to a foreign country.
“The DFAIT staple of Canadian VIP plus local counterpart shaking hands in formal settings is the one image guaranteed to elicit mocking comments,” McDowell wrote in an August 2011 report that detailed lessons learned by staff.
“Our tweets about visiting Canadian officials have indeed been cautious and generic and generate comments like ‘why don’t you tell us anything?’ ”
The number of users following the Canadian embassy’s Weibo account rose to 103,000 by November 2011after features such as news on travel visas and bulletins on proactive disclosure were added.
“Experience shows us that a single response by embassy staff tends to improve the tone of subsequent comments on a tweet,” McDowell wrote. “The crankiest voice can lead to a comment thread, but when it is obvious that the embassy is participating that is less likely to happen.”