The United Macedonian Diaspora (UMD) is pleased to release a report on the “State of Macedonian Digital Diplomacy Compared to the Rest of the Western Balkans, Greece, Estonia, and the V-4,” authored by UMD International Policy and Diplomacy Fellow Austin Doehler. Click HERE to download the full report.
From October-December 2017, Doehler researched and compiled a report on the current state of the Macedonian Foreign Ministry’s digital diplomacy presence. The purpose of this report is to determine how effective Macedonia’s Foreign Ministry is in communicating its message to a wider audience and to what extent it can improve. This report compared the Macedonian Foreign Ministry’s social media presence to those of over a dozen other European nations.
This report drew multiple conclusions. One of these conclusions is that the Macedonian Foreign Ministry ought to maintain Facebook and Twitter accounts for every diplomatic mission it has around the world and for every employee in these missions. Another conclusion of this report is that the Foreign Ministry must maintain a higher level of activity on its social media accounts, which would entail posting content every day, multiple times a day. In addition, the report also notes that the Macedonian Foreign Ministry’s website ought to be made more user-friendly and that there are multiple pages on the English version of the website that are not yet translated from Macedonian into English, a situation that should be rectified immediately.
UMD hopes that the Foreign Ministry will adopt the recommendations of this report and revamp its digital diplomatic efforts so as to ensure clear, consistent, and effective communications of the Macedonian cause and our homeland’s values around the globe.