By Donna Miles
American Forces Press Service
TAMPA, Fla., July 24, 2013 – Check out a U.S. Central Command
posting on one of some 120 social media sites, and you are as likely to
see an image of Istanbul’s Blue Mosque or a favorite family recipe as a
mention of a U.S. military operation in the region.
It’s a formula that’s connecting Centcom with more than 100,000
people from the Middle East and Central Asia every week, occasionally
hitting the half-million mark with a particularly compelling posting,
reported Army Col. J.R. Robinson, the command’s public affairs officer.
Centcom has a dedicated digital engagement team, made up of about a
dozen people who were born in or spent considerable time within the
command’s 20-nation area of responsibility, Robinson said. Applying
their understanding of the region’s various cultures and languages, the
team members spend their days surfing popular social media platforms and
engaging in seven different languages: Farsi, Urdu, Pashtu, Dari,
Arabic, Russian and English.
The nature of their blogs, tweets
and Facebook and other social media postings has changed significantly
since Centcom uploaded its first blog in 2009, Robinson said.
The
command’s initial foray into social media was directed primarily at
intellectual and academic sites, typically to refute unintentional
mistakes or flagrant misinformation about the United States and its
activities, he said.
More often than not, the tone of the
rebuttals was insistent and even argumentative -- “more ‘in-your-face’
than it should have been,” Robinson acknowledged. The risk, he said, was
losing the audience the command was hoping to cultivate.
“We are
not trying to win arguments. We are trying to win relationships,”
Robinson said. “At the end of the day, if we win the argument but they
stop listening to us because they don’t enjoy having a conversation with
us, we haven’t improved our access to the theater. We haven’t won
anything.”
Centcom officials called in a cultural advisor to
assess their efforts and get them on a more productive track. Today, the
command’s digital engagement team leverages the power of social media
to engage in a very different way with an ever-expanding audience.
“The tone has become much more measured,” Robinson said. “The idea is
not to tell people what to do or to coach them, but to try to lead them
to a better answer in a way that is not controversial.”
Rather
than directly countering a negative or adversarial message, for example,
a team member might respond: “‘That’s an interesting perspective, but
how about this way of thinking about it?’ or ‘Thank you. I have never
heard it said in those terms. In the U.S., we approach it from this
direction,’” Robinson explained.
“Their mission became one of not giving into an argument, as opposed to winning an argument,” he said.
The team realized another thing: Bombarding their audience with Centcom announcements wasn’t gaining them readers.
“This is not a tool for flooding people with your message. That is the
fastest way to get tuned out on social media,” Robinson said. “If you
want to increase your fan base, you have to appeal to the interests of
your audience and recognize that the heart of social media is being
social.”
So instead of blasting out information press-release
style, the team began engaging in conversations with their audience, he
explained. They made it a strict policy always to respond to questions
from their followers.
“With so many sites out there, when someone
asks questions, nobody responds. So what’s the point?” Robinson said.
“People ask questions because they want to talk to you, so the last
thing you want to do is ignore them.
“We want to create venues
that invite people to ask questions and talk to us,” he said. “And when
they talk to us, we answer back.”
The digital engagement team
also began posting items one wouldn’t typically expect to find on a
military site. They linked to interesting articles or photos and
occasionally shared fond memories of their personal experience in the
Middle East.
“This is not about trying to establish U.S. culture
in the Centcom theater,” Robinson said. “This is about establishing
credibility and making a connection. This is about making a
relationship, because the heart of communication is really
relationships.”
Those relationships help to give Centcom a credible voice with an audience it might not otherwise have, he explained.
“The value of this for the command is that a certain point in time,
when we have something that the command needs to communicate, we can do
that across a large audience in seven different languages,” he said.
About once a week the digital engagement team posts information about a
U.S. exercise, deployment or other Centcom-related activity in the
region.
“You have to be careful. You can’t come at the same
audience every day, or you will lose it,” Robinson said. “If every day
you are publishing information about you -- U.S. Central Command and
what the commander wants to say -- you lose your audience.”
One
of the most effective approaches, Robinson said, is when the team
forwards a link from another source, then asks readers to comment on it.
Centcom’s first experiment with that approach was in February, when a
Yemeni-led operation with support from the United States seized an
Iranian dhow that was smuggling weapons to insurgents in Yemen. The
international media publicized the successful mission, spelling out what
had been seized and pointing the finger squarely at Iran.
Rather than generating their own message, Centcom’s digital engagement team posted a link to one of those stories.
“What we did in the DET was take one particular story and amplify it
across seven different audiences,” Robinson said. “We provided the story
and asked our audiences, ‘Are you aware of this?’ ‘Have you seen this
story?’”
The responses ran the gamut, from outright denial and
charges of American propaganda in some corners to acknowledgment from
others that the Iranians have been conducting similar activities for
quite some time.
As the discussion continued, Centcom’s social media audience temporarily skyrocketed 400 percent, Robinson said.
“By honoring the culture first and then talking about what we wanted to
talk about, the readers of our forums went like that,” he said, his
hand gesturing skyward.
Centcom’s digital engagement team
continues to use social media to promote a better understanding of
events unfolding in the region, and Centcom’s role in addressing
destabilizing activities there, he said.
The team successfully
used social media to steer readers to a U.S. Naval Forces Central
Command news release about an international countermine exercise last
spring in the Persian Gulf, issued in part in response to the Iranian
government’s attempts to discredit the mission, Robinson reported.
They also generated conversation and debate earlier this year by asking
the audience’s views on Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei’s
claim that it’s acceptable for the Iranian military to “engineer”
elections there.
“The responses were pretty varied,” Robinson
said. “The real value for us was that viewership of the story made a big
upward climb. Even if they weren’t commenting, they were reading the
story. And that is the intent: Let’s make people aware.”
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