As of 2010, there were 200 social media websites with billions of users worldwide. It is important to note that for some time now, the private sector has been capitalizing on social media, deploying the best and brightest to link branding, marketing and advertising campaigns and sales of products and services to social media users, applications, and websites.

Last week, the American Center in New Delhi organized an interactive session for a young group of professionals and students from India with Ms. Heather Smith, President of the American non-profit, Rock the Vote. This was a unique opportunity for the participants to interact via digital video conferencing with Ms.

The mass and velocity of tweets, Facebook posts and even blog posts surrounding the Olympics have been extraordinarily high. But, if you analyze the content, you'll see that the high volume conversations are focused mostly on interesting stories.

The North Vietnamese victory was largely made possible by the United States failing to provide timely and accurate reports to the media. “Even worse,” writes Hammes, “the government had squandered its credibility with the press and through them, with the U.S. public.”

“We entered the world of weibo with an open mind, and have often been surprised by what we have found,” said a note by the embassy’s public diplomacy head weeks after the first status updates hit the “Canadaweibo” account on Chinese Internet portal Sina.com.

Diplomats in all parts of Canada's Beijing embassy are being encouraged to learn how to use China's version of Twitter. The embassy launched a "weibo" microblog account on Chinese Internet portal Sina.com in June 2011. But internal Foreign Affairs documents show that not all Canadian diplomats rushed to type out 140-Chinese character updates when the account went up.

Is it really possible to explain in 140 characters or less the policies of an institution with 19,000 employees, a $27-billion budget, and 250 locations worldwide? Sure, says Victoria Esser ’94, the first-ever deputy assistant secretary of public affairs for digital strategy for the U.S. Department of State.

"If somebody thinks that 140 characters is the diplomatic solution to solving the world’s problems then we’ve got a big problem. Twitter really wasn't created for diplomacy. Twitter’s not even created to have a conversation," he said.