The Kremlin website offers its english language visitors the opportunity to subscribe to 5 separate RSS/Atom feeds. As all of you know, I thought it might be beneficial if Russia Watchers could subscribe to these RSS feeds through the mobile SMS platform of Twitter.com.
So I created the Twitter account called Kremlin_ru_eng and used the service from Twitterfeed.com to convert the items in each RSS feed into individual and automated tweets. However, it I noticed that 2 of the RSS feeds have not been working since Saturday the 17th of January.
I’ve gone into Twitterfeed.com and using the W3C RSS feed validator checked what’s the problem. See for yourself the results of the validator. The two feeds that are currently not working are the Speeches feed and the Unified feed. This is not good!
Unfortunately, these feed validation issues are not unique to the Kremlin website. As I have been saying for some time, the Prime Minister’s website’s single english language RSS feed is not validating at all. I created a Twitter account for Prime Minister Putin’s website at Twitter.com/premier_gov_ru but I haven’t been able to promote it because the broken feed means it doesn’t have any material.
The result of such technical snafus may seem trivial to most of you but I would suggest that when the Kremlin and Putin are able to communicate themselves directly with the West the results are much better than when they rely on the Western media to convey and filter the information. What’s great about today is that there are so many different social media tools available. It’s time Putin and Medvedev got their staffs to focus heavily on these tools so that they can influence the dialogue not simply complain that the Western media sucks (which it kind of does).
We all saw how critical it is for the Russian government to use the same tools as those who seek to smear it with unfair propoganda. In August, Georgia perhaps spent more time focused on using social media tools than it did in actually fighting the war itself. What was impressive was that despite the utter indefensible nature of Saakashvili’s position, he was able for months to convince the world that he was correct. The reason? Saakashvili has surounded himself with young people who use these social media tools, like Facebook, Odnoklassniki, vKontakte, Skype, Digg, Google Groups, Twitter, ConstantContact, Qik, ICQ, iPhone, Blackberry, LinkedIn, Flickr, Photobucket, iTunes, YouTube, etc.
Therefore, it is critical that their RSS feeds work.
With that being said, I do commend President Medvedev’s web staff for introducing comments on their video blog but I think they stopped short of where they might have. Specifically, with today’s Google Translate technology it is quite easy to translate comments from dozens of languages into Russian and vice-versa. Why didn’t the Kremlin webstaff use the available tools. It ain’t rocket science and no, I don’t think it has anything to do with freedom of speech.
My suspicion is that it’s a matter of priorities and that the PR firms the Kremlin hired in the past, such as Ketchum, have little on-the-ground experience with social media tools. The only way the Russian government is going to change people’s minds is by focusing on opening up lines of communications and have open dialogues with people.
Therfore, it should be mandatory for every Russian Ministry website to have a wordpress blog which is updated often. Again, as a start, just publish the Russian language posts but use the Google Translate widget in the sidebar. See Fred Wilson’s blog for an example of the Google Translate widget.
Why isn’t the kremlin putting Medvedev’s video blog posts up on a custom branded YouTube.com channel? In fact, every time Medvedev’s speaks publicly and there’s video available it should be posted on the kremlin YouTube channel. Hell, they’re spending millions a year on “old media” Russia Today when you could take a quarter of the money and have 3 times the impact.
The problem with Russia Today is that it’s considered a mouthpiece for the Kremlin. It lacks authenticity. Authenticity is the currency of the internet. There’s only one way for the Kremlin to gain authenticity and that’s to it officials throughout the government to have constant dialogues with different constituencies.
Fortunately, despite what many Russophobes may believe, the Russian government has nothing to hide and should be proud of its record. The issues of Georgia and Ukraine prove definitively that the more open and accessible the president and Prime Minister make themselves the better the result.
I’ll have some more thoughts tomorrow on what Putin might do next week when he attends Davos. Hint, hint: get him a Twitter.com account
In the meantime, would somebody please give me a call so we can figure out how to make sure that the Kremlin’s and the Premier.gov.ru/eng feeds validate. It’s not that hard for us to create a feedburner account and use it to distribute all the RSS items.
