Social media is an integral part of US diplomacy in China, said the US Ambassador to China Gary Locke on Friday during a townhall meeting with the employees of China's most popular search engine Baidu. He said that he was generally learning that Chinese citizens are "wanting more accountability, transparency, ethics in government."

“The slow pace of adaptation to e-diplomacy by many foreign ministries suggests there is a degree of uncertainty over what e-diplomacy is all about, what it can do and how pervasive its influence is going to be."

In the new information environment world leaders are finding that they must communicate with multiple audiences. This panel considers the range of approaches governments are using to meet this public diplomacy imperative as well as the diverse objectives behind these efforts.

The co-founder of Wikipedia says the languages of Yoruba in West Africa and Swahili in East Africa are the most popular among the several African languages being used on the online encyclopedia..."For a long time there was this sort of cultural concern...

Public diplomacy has been the norm in the US and European countries for a long time, but in China this concept has yet to be understood and accepted widely. Government efforts at communicating with the public both home and overseas are often criticized as insensitive and opaque.

Yesterday, there was a tweet that a senior official at the State Department described public diplomacy as like “old-school American propaganda.”  This resonated with many because it seemed to affirm a discrimination at State against public diplomacy and bureaucratic cannibalism.

It was a sign of how hard it can be to foresee the advantages of new technologies, but also the cultural resistance they face in traditional organisations. More than 100 years later, here in Australia, our Foreign Ministry is grappling with the latest wave of technological innovation, and so far it has been a very tough struggle.

In the United States, diplomats are transforming the way they work using social media, and, according to a report released today by the Lowy Institute, the contrast with Australia is huge. The US State Department now has 600 social media platforms with a global audience of more than 8 million people.