What does Anna Hazare, Occupy
Wall Street and protests in Spain have in common with the Arab Spring?
Apparently unrelated, they were similar in the way the social media space was
used to channel public angst against certain perceived enemies. What lessons do
they have to offer to social media marketers? Plenty, to put things mildly.
In each of the cases, the “civil
society”, which is used to traditional media dishing it news and reports went
ballistic and took part in the actual process of creating and disseminating
news as they saw it happen. Thanks to smart phones, they could stream live
images and footages, which they did to their heart’s content – their chosen
weapon of mass communication being Twitter. Their tweets becoming faster and meaner
than even the “Breaking News” items on mainline television.
How did these tweets go viral?
Who were the people who fed these feeds? How do people in the fringes get drawn
in to such movements? What points of crowd psychology were at play? Potent
questions that have been studied in depth and should be discussed, so as to not
only understand the mechanics involved, but also to use the knowledge for more
productive purposes in the future.
There are two primary issues
involved: one, the spreading of information and two, the “activating” people
who were not central to such information spreading activity in the first place.
Let me explain in the context of
Anna’s first appearance in the Ram Leela Maidan. I was getting tweets and was
seeing entries in FB – but as always, they were sporadic with messages that
failed to hide neither their political undertones nor the political patronage
of the senders. But the moment Sunaina Barotra (*) a noted socialite announced
on FB that she will be wearing a specially crafted white khadi ensemble created
by ace designer Nimish Malhotra and will catch some Mc Aloo Tikki’s before
attending the fast in protest against corruption, and tweeted to that effect,
it went viral.
What is important is not how many
people were following the sender, but how well connected, or “central” they were.
In the case of Sunanina, her immediate social circle – iPhone wielding social
butterflies, desperate to grab a page 3 mention and bored to boot, reached out
across platforms (facebook, tweeter, linked-in, etc. etc) and networks to turn
Anna into an instant Android Angry Bird.
One of the many reasons why Anna
failed too was the instant gratification that this crowd thrives for. Their
flickering interest was lost the moment they faced the prospect of having dirt
on their pedicured feet in the sweltering heat of the Maidan and moved on to
flash their smiling faces in the air-conditioned confines of the next Suzzette
Dubey show.
Suinaina also proved another
vital point. That, local networks hold the key. Her tweets converted even those
who were not concerned, urging them to re-tweet to their networks in a “me-too”,
peer pressured campaign that took the form of a flash flood.
As a hundred manicured fingers
tapped their support for Anna on their touch-screens, the sudden burst that
occurred – a bombardment – took the recipients by storm, an effect that would
not have happened if the same hundred messages had been received over a period
of time, leading to “recruitment bursts.”
Why did it all fail then? Apart
from a core team that completely misread the writing on the wall (the tweets in
this case) and had hidden agenda’s to boot, the moment the so-called civil society
had saturated its network and needed to connect to the man on the street, the
connections snapped.
It is not about how many
followers you have; it is about reaching out to third parties – connections of
your connections and more that matters. And for doing that, you have to have
content that touches their souls and enough punch to make them throw in their
hats (turbans, whatever).
With the current density of smart
phones, it is unlike that social media will be a political game-changer in
India. But the day is not far away. If you were to ask me, it will be done by a
political party - a rag tag circus ushering in change, is a bit farfetched even
by emerging media standards.
(*) name changed
- Chawm Ganguly
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