Israeli politicians joined criticism of Apple on Thursday over a new phone application of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious early-20th-century anti-Semitic forgery, recently made available on its iTunes store. Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs Minister Yuli Edelstein called on the electronics giant to ban the app, arguing it perpetuated the canard of a Jewish international conspiracy to take over the world.

The agency is using social media to circumvent established news outlets in order to take its stories straight to an eager audience. That’s especially important at a moment when the general perception is that U.S. budget troubles, friendly relations with former space-race foes, and the Space Shuttle’s retirement have left the agency struggling for a new raison d’être.

While still evolving at incredible speed, the current use of social media is a dramatic step in the right direction that can help make the counterinsurgent successful at providing truthful information to the public before the insurgent can distort the perception of the event.

Part 1 of this post can be found here. 

Leveraging Social Media When the Shooting Starts

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.”

After insurgents launched multiple, simultaneous attacks inside Kabul’s government and diplomatic areas on April 15, many in the media were quick to label the attacks as a “Taliban Tet Offensive”. The media’s reference was to the 1968 Tet Offensive, which involved tens of thousands of North Vietnamese regulars and thousands of Viet Cong irregulars. The communist guerillas attacked the length and breadth of South Vietnam from Hue in the north, to the Mekong Delta to the American Embassy in Saigon (Garamone, 2012).

There is a power shift taking place at the forefront of customer relations and hard power in the face of globalisation and information revolution proves to be experiencing less favour. Harvard Business School experts suggest that the relative role of soft power to hard power is likely to increase.