Let Us Now Praise @Colleen_Graffy

While the final hours of the Bush administration tick away, it’s time to note that Colleen Graffy’s tenure as Deputy Assistant Secretary in the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs ends too.

If you know her at all, it’s as the “Twittering Diplomat.” Operating as @colleen_graffy, she sent a regular stream of messages updating the world–or, to be fair, about 800 followers–on her travels and activities as a Bush administration foot soldier representing the United States. the range of her updates is illustrated by these two successive Tweets from the evening of January 3 to the morning of January 4:

Preparing for the Smith-Mundt Symposium on Jan 13. Reading comments on MountainRunner’s blog (just google it).

Apple Store 1 to 1 lessons v cool. thx all 4 encouraging me to get a Mac. Love it. Who is yr best blog model in case i learn how to do that?

Others have strong ideas about whether her Tweetery had diplomatic value. You’ll find a superb summary of the public discussion of Graffy’s Twittering on the personal blog of State Department webbist Darren Krape. [More links below.]

But from where I sit, Graffy’s contribution goes far beyond whatever goodwill she generated with the people of Armenia. Intentionally or not, she has done more to demonstrate how new media is transforming the world than a conference hall full of 2.0-vangelists.

Some numbers suggest that between 4 and 5 million people use Twitter. Maybe. But it’s still largely an early adopter phenomenon, and I suspect that at least a plurality of users operates in the worlds of media and marketing. They use Twitter to promote their blogs, their businesses, themselves and–alley oop!–their own expertise at “leveraging” Twitter.

[Let me rush to confess I am one of these very people, just as wide-eyed and opportunistic about social media as the rest of 'em. To ensure you don't fall completely under our sway, watch this brief video about New Media Douchebags.]

But by putting Twitter in play to support U.S. diplomacy, Graffy has forced Twitter under the noses of people involved with geopolitics and foreign policy–serious-minded, often intelligent people who, for worse or better, play a significant role in determining who gets what around the globe.

For all its annoyances and fatuities, Twitter demonstrates better than anything else the continuous, real-time, global, egalitarian, inclusive, transparent and completely uncontrollable nature of communications today. Nobody who uses Twitter for a few weeks can doubt that the world of top-down media [or government] speaking to a passive, ignorant audience is over.

Whenever there’s no turning back from something, people often say “You can’t put toothpaste back in the tube.” In social media circles we like to say “You can’t drain the pee from the swimming pool.” [Sorry, I forget who to attribute that to.]

Whatever. The point is there’s no turning back, and the people who [not to put too fine a point on it] sort of control the world now understand this. I have no idea what else Colleen Graffy accomplished during her tenure. But I’m guessing her Twittering will prove to be her biggest.

More Links

Graffy’s Washington Post op-ed on her Twittering

Graffy’s response to a blog entry critical of her Twittering

Graffy’s Twitter profile