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International News Title: How Free Explains Israel’s Flotilla FAIL The organizers of the “Free Gaza” flotilla spent almost nothing on their campaign. The government of Israel poured millions into its botched raid on the ships — and now is in a worse position than when the flotilla launched. How did it happen? Part of the problem is that the Israeli government never bothered to read Wired. Israeli commandos may not have known that members of the Free Gaza flotilla were carrying knives, guns and metal bars. But they should have known that many in the incoming flotilla were armed with cameras, cellphones, blogs and Twitter accounts. For a country so technologically advanced, and with such acute public diplomacy challenges, to fail so miserably at preparing a communications offensive over new media is a failure of strategic proportions. And it was all so utterly predictable. In his book Free, Wired editor Chris Anderson lays out a new media model that foreshadowed the flotilla meltdown. It’s now clear that practically everything Web technology touches starts down the path to gratis, at least as far as we consumers are concerned. Storage (unlimited email storage) now joins bandwidth (YouTube: free) and processing power (Google: free) in the race to the bottom. There’s never been a more competitive market than the Internet, and every day the marginal cost of digital information comes closer to nothing. How much money did it cost the organizers of the Free Gaza flotilla to get their message out across the world? Answer: Almost nothing. Turkish TV placed a camera on one of the flotilla ships and kept it on all the time to livestream events on the boat, while constantly placing activists in front of the camera to speak about their cause. The costs of a camera, some other technical equipment, and hosting of a website are negligible. The original sites that were established to livestream the events from the flotilla, like www.witnessgaza.com and www.livestream.com/insaniyardim were quickly mimicked and their numbers mushroomed. The live streams and accompanying video, text and photos were twittered, Facebooked, Flickred and YouTubed without any additional costs. How much did it cost the activists on some of the flotilla ships to tweet updates, messages and video from the boats? Answer: Nothing. It’s free. All they had to do was put a # sign before the word “flotilla,” or “freedomflotilla” and everyone that follows them on Twitter automatically sees it, and can re-tweet and reply to the original message if they so wish. In the days leading up to the Free Gaza raid, #Flotilla, #Gazaflotilla, and #Freedomflotilla rose dramatically in Twitter’s popularity ranks. Now, with the added element of violence and death, and the increased media attention to the story, these Twitter trends are only spiking further. On Monday, when flotilla activists felt there was a lack of coverage in the U.K. media of their story, they started twittering about it, and for a few hours, that became the discussion: Why are the BBC and others not reporting on the mission to #BreakTheSiege by the #FreedomFlotilla? After several hours of this sustained campaign, dozens of bloggers and twitterers claimed success, saying that U.K. news websites were starting to devote more attention to the story. Conversely, how much money did it cost the Israeli government to cancel all vacations for Navy personnel, have them all on standby, keep several surveillance planes in the air to watch the flotilla, keep destroyers ready to intercept the incoming flotilla, intercept the boats, set up a holding and transit facility at Ashdod to process all the activists brought there, put all the activists on planes and buy them tickets back to their countries of origin? Answer: Millions of shekels. And now after the fact, how much money is it costing Israel to bolster security at embassies and consulates across the world; to send out thousands of police across the country to quell riots; to treat all the foreign wounded at our hospitals? How costly will the worsening relations with much of the international community be? Answer: This is hard to quantify, but it won’t be cheap. The asymmetry in money spent and effect achieved between the two sides is staggering. Call it the # sign versus the $ sign. The flotilla organizers spent almost nothing and won the day; Israel spent huge amounts of money and ended up with egg on its face. The narrative that navy commandos were attacked with metal bars, knives and possibly guns, while trying to take over a flotilla meant to break the naval blockade on Gaza — after Israel offered to transfer humanitarian aid — was drowned out on the social media networks by charges of an unprovoked massacre of peaceful activists on a humanitarian mission to besieged Gaza. In events like these, the traditional media take their cue from social media, whose “reporters” are on the scene. TV stations use images and sounds they find posted on Twitter, not the other way round. This is also good for them because it means they don’t have to spend money on sending crews on site. But why is Twitter so important? And does it have any real-world impact? Just ask the Iranian regime, who pulled out all the stops, and the generators, to try shut down the social networking site just this year when the popular uprising against Ahmadinejad’s stolen re-election relied heavily on Twitter to organize rallies and smuggle out photos and videos of regime suppression. Here again, traditional media relied on material smuggled out through the social networks. Social media is cheap and is antithetical to centralized bodies and subverts their authority. It is, so far, proving to be one of the asymmetrical weapons of choice for grassroots activists. At the other end of the spectrum, Israeli officials, especially those in the Foreign Ministry, the Information Directorate of the Prime Minister’s Office, Minister for Public Diplomacy Yuli Edelstein, the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit and others, decry the lack of money and resources that Israel spends on its public diplomacy, on its hasbara. They point out that the MFA’s PR budget is smaller than the advertising budget for one of Israel’s yogurt companies. For instance, one of the ideas bandied about in recent years has been the establishment of an “Israeli Al-Jazeera” to pump out Israel’s message 24 hours a day on satellite TV. (And no, it wouldn’t feature videos this like this.) There have even been serious attempts to find the vast amount of money to do this, with the finances mostly coming from Jewish philanthropists in the United States. But these attempts have come to naught. Other attempts to re-brand Israel away from its image as a land of conflict and occupation, such as creating “Tel-Aviv beaches” in Vienna, Manhattan and several other locations have failed abysmally. Each “beach” cost the state more than $100,000 — with the sand, the money and their purpose scattered by the first wind. It is becoming increasingly clear that money is not the only issue, and that the people charged with disseminating Israel’s message still don’t get it. Setting aside the obvious issue of real diplomatic progress with the Palestinians and other Arab states, and the effect that would have on Israel’s image, the tiny, brainy and resourceful Jewish state is light-years away from its adversaries on communicating its message. Money is not the answer: forward-looking and creative use of traditional and new media is of urgent importance. Wired’s Anderson writes: “The Web is all about scale, finding ways to attract the most users for centralized resources, spreading those costs over larger and larger audiences as the technology gets more and more capable.” While Israel is justifiably known as the world’s “Start-up Nation” for its technological dynamism and entrepreneurship, we are being beaten hands down on the PR uses of this new technology. We may be a start up nation, but we are bricks and mortar communicators. Our adversaries have cntrl-alt-deleted us.
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#1. To: Brian S (#0)
Sadly, it is us who are paying for this...
#67. To: war (#48) Keep hiding behind the bozo, bozo. (laughing) You've always been a world class pussy. Badeye posted on 2010-01-14 16:12:48 ET Reply Trace
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