Can Digital Media Save Israel?

Our friend Jon (whose job title at Digitas is "Emerging Channels Specialist", so he actually knows this stuff a bit) posits that this is the first digital social war:

In a war, everyone has a story to tell. For the first time ever, we are witnessing the first true digital social war.

The Israeli Government and friends of Israel are working tirelessly to share, inform, converse, gather, socialize, advocate and persuade. While diplomatic channels may be closed, the web is always open.

From a marketers perspective, war is the ultimate PR nightmare.

Israel the brand looks to be gearing up to face this head on.

While certainly every war translates into PR battles all over, and Israel has always had its difficulty fighting this battle with a world seemingly bent on being against Israel, new media may be allowing Israel to show its side of the story - unfiltered by major media outlets or foreign governments. While it was Hezbollah who took better of advantage of devices such as YouTube a couple years ago to quickly put up videos of wounded from an Israeli airstrike, Israel is now doing the same (if not better) to put those airstrikes into context - whether by showing rockets being loaded on a truck in a residential neighborhood or the secondary explosions from an ammunition depot in the heart of a Gazan town. Israel has long been ahead of the Palestinians in power and with its moral standards; if they can stay ahead in public relations, perhaps they can actually win a war.