The Political Power of Social Media

Ok, I stole this great title from an article Clay Shirky wrote in Foreign Policy that I thought was both insightful and innovative - he took a fresh look at what social media's role is in politics and made some recommendations to governments, particularly the U.S. government, on how it can use social media to foster democratic change and transition.

This article was written in 2010 - but it came in handy just in time for the unprecedented Arab Spring revolutions spreading across the Middle East in the early part of 2011. Also lucky timing for me, since I am in the process of writing my masters thesis on social media's role in this revolution. Did you hear that an Egyptian man named his newborn daughter "Facebook" in deference to the role Facebook played in helping to organize the revolutions that ousted Hosni Mubarak?

While we know that social media had SOMETHING to do with these revolutions - everybody is talking about it, including the media - we don't actually have any evidence to prove its impact. This is the challenge I am encountering as I write my thesis. Nobody has yet qualitatively or quantitatively looked at the impact of social media on political events, on civic action, or political change. There is scant research on the power and in the influence of the Internet as a new form of communication, and other research available on the similarities between traditional media and new media in terms of their agenda-setting effect and their power to shape public perception and opinion, but nothing on how, or most importantly WHY social media has the power to influence politics. Is it because humans understand that information on social media is peer to peer and not filitered by gatekeepers or other forms of state, government or corporate controls as social media is? Is it because the Internet and digital world has increased our consumption of information and social media provides a way to aggregate a lot of information quickly, and tailored to one's needs?

All very interesting and the current analysis and research are just the tip of the iceberg....

I'm taking two classes this semester at Johns Hopkins - International Public Diplomacy and Public Relations in the Age of Digital Influence. This weekend, I've been immersed in Emanuel Rosen's book, "The Anatomy of Buzz Revisited," in what seems like the first moment of quiet I've had to just read and think in ages (thanks, blizzard!). I realized that a concept was beginning to emerge that was important, if not vital, to success in both public diplomacy and social media strategies: listening. Yep, listening.

A concept that seems so native to us is so difficult to put into practice. Listening is the silver lining of the successful case-studies that Rosen presents; the companies that listened to what their audiences wanted, whether it was to solve their grievances, answer questions, or even just to provide a way to easily contact the organization, were successful in their attempts to control the message they wanted to deliver to their audiences. Listening is the elusive task that any corporation wanting to make the most of word of mouth marketing or take advantage of the social media groundswell needs to master in order to craft a successful marketing strategy. But no one really does it.

My organization is a prime example of this. We set up both Facebook and Twitter pages just to be "involved" in the social media groundswell, without really listening to what our users wanted from us on these networks. How were these networks different from our website? Would they offer new, original content, or would they simply serve to expand the reach of the content on our website? Did our users expect us to talk to them, to engage them, to interact act with them, or to just pump out information? What did they want to know about us? Was social media important enough for us to allocate staff time and resources to it? Not having the answers to these questions is costing us to miss a prime opportunity to generate buzz around our organization using these incredibly powerful tools, especially in light of our new headquarters project that is beginning to become a visible part of the national mall's landscape.

Because of this, we can't quite call our presence on these sites a success yet, because we haven't even begun to do the initial listening and research. Stephen Colbert, the host of this year's Grammy's, asked his daughter several times during the show, "am I cool now?" She kept shaking her head. And I keep shaking mine because just having a presence on these sites, just like being present at the Grammy's, does in no way make us "cool." We have to actually do something - interact, become part of the the community, and give our users what they're looking for, just like how an artist at the Grammy's who performs something or wins something engages audiences and gives them something to talk about, to have a successful presence.

Similarly, listening is a vital, yet underused tool in public diplomacy. So many campaigns fail because they don't address what people want, or don't answer the questions people are looking for. Take the State Department's failed Shared Values campaign, for example. The undersecretary of public diplomacy commissioned a series of videos showing Muslims happily living in America. The videos were shown to Muslim audiences abroad in an effort to help combat growing anti-American sentiment. In the end, the campaign was deemed a failure. Anti-American sentiment was growing out of a dislike of U.S. foreign policies, and not out of a dislike of American culture or Muslims living in America. State department officials had failed to listen, and therefore, failed to address the root of a growing international problem.

Listening is essential to any marketing strategy. And because the Internet is identified as an important facilitator of buzz, companies and organizations should use the myriad of tools available to them online - RSS readers, search engines, newsletters, forums, etc - to listen to what their audiences are discussing and how they are doing it before attempting a strategy. Listening will help organizations identify what triggers conversation, what people are reacting to positively and negatively, and what the best ways are to engage audiences online and will help ensure an organization's success. We also shouldn't forget what Rosen points out in his book: listening is just the first part of a process. It must be in tandem with some type of action for it to be successful.

New Semester, New Books!

I'm excited to take social media to another level this semester with my Public Relations in the Age of Digital Influence class at Hopkins.

Especially excited about the reading list, which includes books that I've wanted to read for a while now:

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies
Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff (Hardcover – April 21, 2008)

Influence: Science and Practice (5th edition)
Robert B. Cialdini (Paperback – Aug 11, 2008)

The Anatomy of Buzz Revisited: Real-life Lessons in Word of Mouth Marketing
Emanuel Rosen (Paperback – Feb 24, 2009)

The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff
Clara Shih (Paperback – Mar 22, 2009)

Unleashing the Power of PR: A Contrarian’s Guide to Marketing and Communications
Mark Weiner (Hardcover – June 23, 2006)

Designing for the Social Web: Voices that Matter
Joshua Porter (Paperback – May 4, 2008)