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I recently did an interview with Worldfocus on Iran’s ‘Twitter Revolution’. The Skype video didn’t really work, so they have posted the transcript of the interview instead.

It is a little too stream of consciousness, but capture my views on what tools like Twitter and Facebook can or cannot do in an international crisis situation like the Iran protest or the Mumbai terrorist attacks.

Here is the full text of the interview –

Iran’s “Twitter Revolution” — myth or reality?

The Iranian government has restricted all journalists working for foreign news organizations from reporting on the streets of Tehran, where thousands have been gathering to protest the country’s disputed presidential election. What’s been harder to control is social media tools like Twitter, where thousands of users post and share information worldwide.

Gaurav Mishra is the co-founder of social media research and analytics company 20:20 Web Tech and a 2009 Fellow at the Society for New Communications Research. He previously taught social media at Georgetown University and co-founded Vote Report India. He joined Worldfocus to discuss the role of Twitter in the aftermath of Iran’s election.  Read More

(This guest post is written by Freddie Benjamin (Twitter).)

On May 20, 2009 Brave New Films (BNF) – the media firm behind Walmart: The High Cost of Low Price – stretched the limits of digital activism as it declared war on Starbucks. Its battle cry: “Twitter bombs away!”

Twitter turned into a battleground when media campaigns from BNF and Starbucks collided on the same day. Brave New Film’s newest project “Stop Starbucks” is aimed at raising awareness of Starbucks’ anti-union position and its murky past in dealing with union employees. It was a co-incidence that its YouTube launch coincided with Starbucks’ ad campaign asking people to take pictures of Starbucks posters in six major cities across the US and post them on Twitter. The very next day a post on Brave New Film’s blog urged people to take pictures of themselves in front of a Starbucks holding signs protesting Starbucks’ anti-union stance and to post them to twitter – and hence started an ‘anti-campaign’. The stand-out feature that turned this affair into a twitter-war was BNF urging people to use the same hashtags (#top3percent and #starbucks) that Starbucks had decided upon for its promotional campaign.  Read More

One of the main themes of my research on digital activism is that social technologies are value-agnostic.

At each of the four levels of Content, Collaboration, Community and Collective Intelligence, social technologies can lead to both good and bad outcomes.

I have written before about Shiv Sena’s militant approach towards Orkut communities critical of the party, its leader Bal Thakeray, or its Hindutva ideology. Caste-based communities on Orkut are another disturbing example of online communities mirroring the dysfunctions in Indian society.

For instance, there are more than 1000 communities for Brahmins on Orkut. There are 461 Brahmin communities listed under culture and community, 591 under religion and beliefs, 87 under activities and 117 under others.

One of the most popular Brahmin community, with 28, 726 members, randomly claims: “we r clever & hardworking .no one can fool us…” The Brahmans community with 41952 members and the Brahmins of India community with 30588 members are also very popular. Another group, Brahmin Culture and Tradition, with 5579 members, is “dedicated to the purpose of uniting Brahmins to revive, preserve, protect and propagate the Brahmin culture to descendants without intimidation or dilution from anti-Brahminical forces.”  Read More

(This is a guest post from Naman Sarawagi (Twitter). Naman is a web 2.0 enthusiast. He has worked with Onyomo.com and Adbhai.com in the past, and now works as a copywriter at Webchutney Studios.)

ZooZoos are advertisement characters promoted by Vodafone during the Indian Premier League Season 2 (IPL). Zoozoos are white, ghost-like creatures with ballooned bodies and egg heads who are used to promote various value added services of Vodafone. These ads though look animated are actually real humans in the Zoozoo costumes. The ads were created by Ogilvy & Mather, an agency that handles Vodafone advertisements and the films were shot by Bangalore based Nirvana Films in Cape Town, South Africa.

Here is an analysis of the various social media tools used in the campaign –

- YouTube: In just one month the channel became 24th most Subscribed Channel (All Time- India) with 1,741 subscribers. The number is pretty low but given the low penetration of high speed internet in India this is appreciable. The channel has 129 in-links coming from various blogs. Most viewed ad and also the public favourite in conversations was Vodafone Busy Message generating a total of 197,837 views. We must consider that multiple copies of this video are available on YouTube and other video sharing sites so the real no. of views is pretty high.  Read More

Tamara Palamakumbura at DigiActive has a great interview with Dr. Awab Alvi, one of the organizers of Pakistan’s 2009 Long March on the use od social media tools to organize and report on the protest –

The campaign mixed old and familiar tools such as Twitter and Facebook, with new and customized tools. Twitter was augmented by See ‘n’ Report. Like Twitter, See ‘n’ Report collated emails but also SMS and MMS updates whilst providing a campaigners front page, compromising a geographical view, multimedia feeds, SMS feeds, twitter feeds and beautifully compiled video footage using Flowplayer (a video player for the web).

All of which was collated through CoveritLive to provide live coverage of the event. CoveritLive is a viewer that can be embedded on a blog or website to link a combination of Twitter accounts and hashtags (upto 12 twitter accounts and 6 hashtags), reader comments, multimedia and live blogs (through iPhones, Blackberries etc).

Activity was monitored through Cligs which provides analytical tools on traffic going through a site.

As Tamara says, the breadth and depth of the use of social media in the Long March is truly impressive. Rezwan at Global Voices also has a great post on the Long March.

Byron Acohido in USA Today delves into the dark world of social networking viruses and for-hire human captcha solvers —

Koobface — a cockeyed spelling of Facebook — targeted MySpace and Facebook. It initiated messages that duped victims into clicking on a Web link to view a funny YouTube video.

Clicking on the link led to instructions to download a Flash Player update required to view the video. Clicking on the video player update downloaded a copy of the worm, which instantly searched out the victim’s friend lists on Facebook and MySpace and sent copies of itself to everyone on the list. So, subsequent victims received a message that actually arrived from the account of a trusted friend.

Authoritarian governments paying astroturfers to spread propaganda in social media conversations, hacktivists using social media to recruit computers into botnets, and now viruses using for-hire captcha breakers to infiltrate social networking side — we are just beginning to see the dark side of social media.

NYT reports on the paradox of high growth with low profit potential that web 2.0 companies have to deal with in international markets –

Web companies that rely on advertising are enjoying some of their most vibrant growth in developing countries. But those are also the same places where it can be the most expensive to operate, since Web companies often need more servers to make content available to parts of the world with limited bandwidth. And in those countries, online display advertising is least likely to translate into results.

This intractable contradiction has become a serious drag on the bottom lines of photo-sharing sites, social networks and video distributors like YouTube. It is also threatening the fervent idealism of Internet entrepreneurs, who hoped to unite the world in a single online village but are increasingly finding that the economics of that vision just do not work.

Perhaps, a lighter version of the service in bandwith-starved Asia and Africa is not such a bad thing. Perhaps, Asia and Africa should build their own web 2.0 companies that are designed for low bandwidth.

I have written before about the brilliant Pink Chaddi Campaign and highlighted the important role played by Facebook in helping the campaign go viral.

Briefly, journalist Nisha Susan set up The Consortium of Pubgoing, Loose, and Forward Women on Facebook and urged women to gift pink panties to Pramod Mutalik, the head of the ultra-conservative Hindu group Shri Ram Sena, in order to shame him into backing down from his threats to disrupt Valentine’s Day celebrations.

The campaign has become one of the best Indian examples of how a grassroots community can come together, collaborate and take collective action using social media tools.

The Pink Chaddi Facebook Group has been getting hacked throughout last month, and, instead of dealing with the hackers, Facebook suspended both the group and Nisha’s account last week.

Before the group was suspended, the hackers changed the name of the group to ‘A Good Bong is a Dead Bong’ and posted vulgar and violent messages on the group. Over the month, the hackers had used names like ‘Nathuram Godse Appreciation Society’, ‘Dara Singh Appreciation Group’ and other vulgar names.

In an open letter to Facebook posted on Kafila, Nisha wondered if the first rule of Facebook activism is to not use Facebook.  Read More

I’m starting off the Global Voices special coverage on the 2009 Indian general elections by analyzing how internet and mobile technologies are transforming election campaigning in India.

Politics in India is essentially local and India’s voters elect their representatives based on small local and regional issues, instead of the big national issues. As a result, election rallies and door-to-door canvassing, supplemented by local hoardings and print ads in the vernacular languages have traditionally been at the core of election campaigning in India.

In 2004, the incumbent BJP broke away from this pattern with its aggressive nation-wide ‘India Shining’ campaign. It recruited advertising and PR agencies to manage its campaign, focused on the urban first time voter, advertised heavily on print and television, and allocated 5% of its campaign budget to an e-campaign, for revamping its campaign website, pushing out text messages, pre-recorded voice clips and emails to its database of 20 million email users and 20 million phone users, and offering campaign-related mobile ringtones for download (BBC/ BBC/ Rediff/ Hindu). The ‘India Shining’ campaign didn’t work eventually, and Sonia Gandhi led Congress to a surprise victory, once again reaffirming the almost magical appeal of the Nehru-Gandhi family amongst India’s voters. Many observers even attributed BJP’s loss to its “elitist” ‘India Shining’ campaign (Live Mint).  Read More

As I wrote my analysis of the Valentine’s Day Pink Chaddi Campaign, I realized that it only appealed to the small minority of well-to-do, urban, English-speaking men and women in India who are amused by the irony of a woman being called ‘Pubgoing, Loose, and Forward’ in the same sentence. It also self-consciously distanced itself from the Indian mainstream which still wants its Bollywood heroines to be virginal and associates ‘Pubgoing, Loose, and Forward Women’ with the Bollywood vamps of yesteryears. The choice of sending pink panties to Shri Ram Sena further reinforced this self-consciously us versus them positioning.

I had earlier done a roundup of the discussions on the Pink Chaddi Campaign in the English language news media and the English blogosphere in India. To prove my hypothesis, I decided to test the limits of my Hindi and do a roundup of the discussions on the Pink Chaddi Campaign in the Hindi language news media and the Hindi blogosphere in India. I haven’t been able to search for Hindi news stories on the campaign, but the discussion on Hindi blogs did support my hypothesis.  Read More

Introduction: The Pink Chaddi Campaign as a case study of online citizen activism in India.

Last week, I wrote a longish roundup of the discussions in Indian mainstream and participatory media around the controversial Pink Chaddi Campaign.

Briefly, journalist Nisha Susan set up The Consortium of Pubgoing, Loose, and Forward Women on Facebook and urged women to gift pink panties to Pramod Mutalik, the head of the ultra-conservative Hindu group Shri Ram Sena, in order to shame him into backing down from his threats to disrupt Valentine’s Day celebrations.

The campaign has become one of the best Indian examples of how a grassroots community can come together, collaborate and take collective action using social media tools.

I have written before that managing collaboration in an online community is a cloud problem (irregular and unpredictable) rather than a clock problem.

We know the boundary conditions which are necessary for a vibrant community, but we also know that these conditions are not sufficient. So, most social media “initiatives” are trial and error affairs. Most websites fail to become vibrant communities. Most communities fail to collaborate towards a shared objective. Most collaboration fails to produce collective action. Most collective action fails to achieve the desired results.  Read More

Update: You should also see my post on Three Lessons Activists and Marketers Can Learn From India’s Valentine’s Day Pink Panty Campaign

The Pink Chaddi Campaign — organized on Valentines Day by The Consortium of Pubgoing, Loose, and Forward Women to protest against the right wing Hindu group Shri Ram Sena — has become one of the best Indian examples of how a grassroots community can come together, collaborate and take collective action using social media tools.

It all started on January 24th when a group of 40 activists of the Shri Ram Sena (also spelled as Sri Ram Sena, Shri Rama Sena, Sri Rama Sena, Sri Ram Sene, Shri Ram Sene and Sriram Sena) barged into a Mangalore pub and beat up a group of young women and men, claiming that the women were violating traditional Indian values by wearing Western clothes and drinking alcohol with men (Wikipedia). The video of the incident was repeatedly shown on Indian TV channels and widely shared online and became the focal point of a nationwide outrage against the incident (Global Voices) –  Read More

According to a Comscore report on social networking sites in India, visits to the site category increased 51 percent from the previous year to more than 19 million visitors in December 2008.

Orkut is still a strong #1 with 12.8 million visitors and a 81% growth over December 2007. Facebook is far behind with 4.0 million visitors, in spite of its impressive 150% growth. BharatStudent is a surprising #3 with 3.3 million visitors and a 88% growth.

Other international social networking sites Hi5, MySpace and LinkedIn also did well at #4, #6 and #7 with 2.0 million, 0.7 million and 0.5 million visitors and growths of 182%, 110% and 71% respectively.

The Indian social networking websites Ibibo and BigAdda, however, didn’t do well and fell down by 50% and 25% to 1.0 million and 0.4 million visitors respectively.

I’ll look at the Comscore data with suspicion because it excludes traffic from cyber cafes, an important venue for internet access in India.  Read More

Samantha M. Shapiro has a fascinating piece in New York Times on Egyptian youth using Facebook as a platform to organize anti-establishment protests.

She uses the protests during the Israel-Palestine Gaza crisis as a starting point to outline a history of online activism in Egypt and specifically looks at how Facebook — the third most-visited website in Egypt with almost 800,000 members, almost a tenth of Egypt’s online population — has become the center of anti-Mubarak dissent in the country.

As background, Egypt has been ruled since 1981 by Hosni Mubarak’s National Democratic Party under a permanent state-of-emergency law which severely limits freedom of expression and the right to assemble. As a result, some of the most prominent Islamic (Abdel Monem Mahmoud) and liberal (Wael Abbas and Nora Younis) activists in Egypt have turned to the internet to spread their message and organize their protests.

The April 6 Youth Movement Facebook Group, which has more than 700000 members, is especially noteworthy. It was started last Spring by Esraa Rashid and Ahmad Maher to support the workers in Mahalla al-Kobra, an industrial town, who were planning to strike on April 6.  Read More

Patrick May at San Jose Mercury News expects Barack Obama’s inauguration ceremony on Tuesday to be “the most socially networked moment in political history”.

Facebook and Twitter expect traffic to skyrocket, observers expect people to simultaneously “engage with” the ceremony on TV, computer screens and mobile phones, and Andrew Bleeker, New Media Director for the Presidential Inaugural Committee, promises an open and participatory inauguration –

The goal for us is to make the inauguration as inclusive, accessible and open as possible… This time, they’ll not just be watching the event — they’ll be participating in it.

I still haven’t decided if I’ll survive the eight hours at the mall in sub-zero cold, but if I decide to stay indoors, here are the websites that I’ll switch between throughout the inauguration — Everything Obama at Joost, CNN-Facebook Inauguration Live With Your Friends, Current Twitters the Inauguration, and CNN-Photosynth The Moment (via Andrew Nusca at ZDNet and Rick Turoczy at ReadWriteWeb).

What about you? What will you be doing on inauguration?

By the way, here’s the most hilarious line I have ever read in a newspaper (and I have read a few) –  Read More

Rajiv Dingra at WATBlog has a great recap of the social networking space in India in 2008.

The highlight, for me, is the war for the #1 spot between Facebook and Orkut. Orkut introduced the OpenSocial applications platform and replicated several Facebook features, offered themes, and provided regional language and mobile support. Facebook also added key features like chat that are likely to become popular in India. As I showed in my analysis of search trends for social networking sites in India, interest in Orkut is stagnant, while interest in Facebook is growing, even though the gap between the two is still significant.

The other social networking sites in India positioned themselves on content, instead of social networking features. BigAdda and Ibibo focused on entertainment and positioned themselves as quasi blogging platforms by getting celebrities like Amitabh Bachchan and Ravi Shastri to blog for them. However, as I showed in my analysis of search trends for blogging platforms in India, unlike blogging platforms like Wordpress and Blogger/ Blogspot, which have shown slow but consistent growth, the interest in Ibibo and BigAdda has fluctuated significantly, probably based on whether they were running big ad campaigns at the time.  Read More

Gabe Riviera at Techmeme puts together a list of the 50 biggest stories of 2008 and it’s all about Google, Yahoo. Microsoft, Facebook and Apple.

I didn’t blog about even one of these stories, and, in retrospect, I would have blogged about only one story: Google indexing its one trillionth URL.

I’m not saying that these aren’t important stories, just that they are too mainstream to be of interest to me. I want a Techmeme for stories about how social media and mobile are changing media, business, government and development. Does anybody know where to look?

Here’s some interesting data on search trends for social networking sites in India using Google Insights for Search data for 2008.

Orkut is way ahead at #1, but stagnant, Facebook is #2 and rising, while Hi5, Ibibo and MySpace are far behind.

The data is consistent with Alexa traffic data for India which ranks Orkut at #4, Facebook at #11, Hi5 at #37, Ibibo at #58 and MySpace #73.

Looking at data from 2004 shows that Orkut suffered serious setbacks in mid 2007, when facebook started to take off.

The statewise search data shows that Orkut has spread even to the most remote parts of India. Facebook, Hi5 and Ibibo also have almost full reach, but they are more concentrated in specific states. MySpace is still to breakthrough into the Hindi heartland of India.

Also see my analysis of search trends for group SMS and microblogging services in India using Google Insights for Search data.

I know that it reminds you of yourself, but it’s a parody.

Priyanka Joshi in Business Standard –

Around 20 million internet users actively use the social media sites in India. According to market research firm IDC, the use of social networking sites will continue to grow, but advertising may not necessarily expand along with it. The result is that Indian start-ups like Ibibo and BigAdda are innovating to get brands onto their networks. 2009 might turn out to be the year when marketers will realise the potential of cross-promoting their media buys on the social networking websites.

“Local marketers are becoming familiar with the best ways to promote their businesses and by crossing online and offline campaigns, they are getting more bang for their buck,” said Shivanandan Pare, COO, BigAdda, that commenced operations 15 months back. The brands that are promoting themselves on BigAdda include Nokia, Lenovo, Sony Ericsson and Intel among others.

Ibibo, which calls itself a ‘talent based social networking site’, is willing to bet that 2009 would be the year when targeting consumer on social sites will have a far bigger payout than any other media. Ashish Kashyap, CEO, Ibibo, has built traction for his site among the 14-28 year olds by running talent-based contests since its inception.  Read More