Public diplomacy is a term much used but seldom subjected to rigorous analysis. This article-which draws heavily on a report commissioned by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office in the spring of 2007-sets out a simple taxonomy of public diplomacy's components and their interrelationships. These components are (1) listening, (2) advocacy, (3) cultural diplomacy, (4) exchange, and (5) international broadcasting. It examines five successful and five unsuccessful uses of each individual component drawing from the history of U.S., Franco-German, Swiss, and British diplomatic practice. The failures arise chiefly from a discrepancy between rhetoric and reality. The final section applies the author's taxonomy to the challenges of contemporary public diplomacy and places special emphasis on the need to conceptualize the task of the public diplomat as that of the creator and disseminator of "memes" (ideas capable of being spread from one person to another across a social network) and as a creator and facilitator of networks and relationships.

This article examines the history of public diplomacy and identifi es seven lessons from that history. These are: (1) public diplomacy begins with listening; (2) public diplomacy must be connected to policy; (3) public diplomacy is not a performance for domestic consumption; (4) effective public diplomacy requires credibility, but this has implications for the bureaucratic structure around the activity; (5) sometimes the most credible voice in public diplomacy is not one ' s own; (6) public diplomacy is not ' always about you ' ; and (7) public diplomacy is everyone ' s business. The article considers the relevance of these lessons for ' the new public diplomacy ' , which have emerged over the last decade. Cull concludes that this new public diplomacy era has opened up fresh possibilities, but has not erased the relevance of the history of public diplomacy. On the contrary, the lessons of the past seem even more relevant in an age in which communications play an unprecedented role.

The United States has a long history of deploying new technology as a mechanism for public diplomacy (the conduct of foreign policy by engagement with foreign publics) but it was relatively slow to make full use of the on‐line technologies known as Web 2.0. This essay reviews the early work of the US Information Agency (1953–1999) in the field of computer and on‐line communications, noting the compatibility of a networking approach to USIA's institutional culture. The essay then traces the story forward into the work of the units within the US Department of State which took over public diplomacy functions in 1999. The article argues that this transition deserves a large part of the blame for the difficulty which the risk‐averse State Department displayed in embracing first the web and then the full range of qualities associated with Web 2.0. The State Department has emphasized one‐way broadcast media rather than two‐way relational media and functions connected with listening and exchange diplomacy were subordinated to advocacy. The essay also notes the challenge of a non‐diplomatic agency—the Department of Defense—playing a dominant role in digital and other forms of outreach at some points in the process. The essay ends by noting the recent evolution of the State Department's approach to digital media and the emergence of a non‐governmental model for American digital outreach (known by the acronym SAGE) which may overcome many of the institutional limits experienced thus far and provide a way to bring together the relational priorities of the New Public Diplomacy with the relational capacities of Web 2.0 technology.