Alec Ross

I've had an interesting and busy couple of days to start off my week.

Alec Ross, who is the Secretary's Senior Advisor for Innovation came in yesterday for a whirlwind visit to Tallinn (1.5 days) before he jetted off to other locales, hopefully to tell them how awesome we are!

This was not my first time meeting Alec...that happened back when I was in the Public Affairs Front Office. But this was first (and second) time I heard him speak. First was at the Estonian Policy institute at the MFA. The auditorium was pretty packed and they asked some great questions. I live tweeted his talk and some of the answers. This is something I hope to do with some of the Ambassador's future speeches.

I tweeted on the Embassy Tallinn's twitter account. But something he said has me thinking...people prefer to follow people rather than institutions. So I need to think about whether I should have a twitter account as PAO (we all know Digger has one) or just keep things as is (with the Ambassador having a twitter account in addition to the Embassy account. I'm not sure yet.

At any rate, before yesterday's talk, we held a country team meeting to tell him some of the things we are up to here in Tallinn, and I think he liked a lot of our ideas and approaches. After yesterday's talk, he did some interviews and met with some folks at the MFA before heading to dinner with at the Ambassador's. I wasn't there, so I'll have to assume it was awesome.

This morning, I live tweeted Alec again at the e-Governance Academy's Social Media Seminar. The guy is seriously tweetable. I told him so, and he took it as the compliment it was intended.

By the time you read this, he will be well on his way to his next stop. But I was impressed with his presentations and I feel more than ever that we are on a good path with Social Media.