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.

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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.

NATO has a public diplomacy department staffed with smart and dedicated people, but it became apparent at a conference on “The Power of Soft Power,” held recently in Brussels, that this contingent is increasingly lonely.

BRUSSELS --- Since its founding in 1949, NATO has been a bastion of hard power, first as an alliance arrayed against the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies, and more recently as a manifestation of Western muscle in conflicts such as Kosovo in 1999 and Libya in 2011. Coming off its decisive performance in helping to end the rule of Muammar Qaddafi, NATO seems to be happily basking in macho glory.

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.