The majority of U.S. embassies now use Twitter, a sign of the aggressive push by the State Department to bring diplomacy into the social media age. According to a new analysis from the Sunlight Foundation, 121 U.S. embassies have Twitter accounts and 54 do not.

The innovation team is using technology in support of an agenda Clinton calls 21st Century Statecraft. When Clinton arrived at the State Department in 2009, Scott recently told members of the Association of Opinion Journalists, she asked her staff two questions: “How is the Internet changing … international relations and the conduct of foreign policy? … More importantly, what are we doing about it?”

This issue also adds a layer of complexity for foreign governments with digital diplomacy and public diplomacy programs that use social media. They will need to develop an understanding of the meanings and context of hashtags as they evolve and to understand how words may be played with and what the use of former colonial languages may be signalling, if anything.

The US State Department and the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) are perhaps the most engaged Western governments when it comes to social media. Following them is Sweden and Australia....Does it make sense in this new area called Digital Diplomacy? Very much so and public diplomacy is nothing new. It’s been going on for hundreds of years.

Time and again, though, critics and analysts bring up the same question: What has this accomplished? And how do you even measure accomplishment online in the first place? A new report from the Lowy Institute, an Australian international policy think tank, delivers a remarkably detailed look behind the scenes of State's digital democracy efforts, and ends with precisely that query.

So what does digital diplomacy even mean? In short, it means a government putting out it’s foreign policy messages via social media channels, looking to engage in dialogue with the target countries. It’s not without some controversy and there are those who suggest it’s just a form of cultural export…

This new tool will enable us to improve our communication with Arab-speaking audiences and will complement the France Diplomatie website in Arabic as well as the websites of our embassies and consulates in the countries of the region.

The Senate report, " Latin American Governments Need to 'Friend' Social Media and Technology " was written at the request of U.S. Senator Richard G. Lugar (R-IN) in order to assess the U.S. Department of State's use of digital diplomacy.