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I was recently quoted in AJC in a story on Iran’s ‘Twitter Revolution’ –

Some, however, think the importance of Twitter is being overblown. Among them is social media blogger Gaurav Mishra. He wrote last week that the actual number of Twitter users in Iran was small, and that Twitter reports, rather than being an organizing tool for the protesters, mainly helped focus international media attention on the protests.

I have previously written about why the term Twitter Revolution is already a cliche, after Moldova and Iran.

Here is the full text of the story –

‘Net effect: Social media aid uprising

Staff and news services

Sunday, June 21, 2009

Media control

Iran’s government controls its traditional media: newspapers, radio and television. Atop the government are the Islamic clerics of the Guardian Council and the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameini, who supports incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The government also controls access to the country by foreign media.

I had the great pleasure of spending a week with Dave Evans, the best-selling author of “Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day”, as we traveled across the country to conduct three full-day social media marketing workshops in Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai.

The workshops were organized by my partner Sunil Agarwal’s public relations firm 20:20 Media. We had a full house at all the three workshops and it was the perfect setting to launch our new social media company 20:20 WebTech.

Sunil started off the workshops with an overview of what to expect and I briefly talked about my 4Cs social media framework. Then, Dave took over and gave a great conceptual and practical perspective on how to use social media technologies, in strategic and tactical ways, to achieve business objectives.

The workshops were attended by communications, public relations, advertising and marketing professionals, including some Chief Marketing Officers.

Several attendees live-tweeted the workshop and said good things about us –

- In Delhi: @aakriti, @_anshul, @naukri, @smrite, @srivastavanitin, @palinn, @arushsogani, @shrutigupta7, @vidhithakur

- In Bangalore: @jessie_paul, @hardrockk, @zeitgeisthuntin, @dhempe @meher_taj, @rahkulk, @ashw1n, @santoshmaharshi, @vidder911

- In Mumbai: @primaveron, @swatidwivedi, @mysti, @gitaagarwal, @krushant

I was recently interviewed by Elisabeth Eaves at Forbes on a story on why there is no ‘Twitter Revolution’ in Iran –

In Iran, too, Twitter is probably much less useful as an initial planning tool than are private channels like e-mail, text messaging and voice telephone calls. The social media site certainly doesn’t account for getting everyone into the streets–going into the election there were only about 10,000 Iranian Twitter users, by Mishra’s estimate, whereas since then hundreds of thousands of people have protested each day.

What Twitter and Facebook can do is spread information to large groups. In any crisis, that’s important, both to the participants and to the outside world. But what is the true value of Iranian tweets? On one hand, they are more valuable than crisis tweets would be in a country with a free press, because they are one of the few sources of information the government has not found a way to control. During the terrorist attack on Mumbai hotels in 2008, plenty of Indians tweeted about the events. But, Mishra observes, “in India people were actually watching news on television, not Twitter. In Iran … social media are the only things you have.”

My 20:20 WebTech partner Sunil Agarwal’s public relations firm 20:20 Media is organizing a series of full-day social media marketing workshops in Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai on June 22, 24 and 26 respectively.

The hands-on workshops are designed for communications, public relations, advertising and marketing professionals who want to use social media technologies, in strategic and tactical ways, to achieve their business objectives.

Here’s a brief outline of the sessions –

8:30-8:45 am - Outline
8:45-9:45 am -Understanding Social Media
9:45-10:45 am -Social Media Channels
10:45-11:00 am -BREAK
11:00-12:00 pm -Social Media Metrics
12:00-1:00 pm -LUNCH
1:15-1:30 pm -Course Review
1:30-2:00 pm -Social Media Monitoring
2:00-2:30 pm -Creating Your Framework
2:30-2:45 pm -BREAK
2:45-4:00 pm -Creating Your Framework (continued)
4:00-5:00 pm -Wrap-up and Review Session

The workshops will be conducted by Dave Evans, the best-selling author of “Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day”.

I have seen Dave’s training material and he does a really good job of putting together both the conceptual and practical aspects of social media marketing, from developing a strategy based on business objectives, to implementing the campaign, and measuring results.

I was interviewed recently by Homeland Security Today for a article on the use of social media and mobile technologies in crisis situations.

I talked about how technology is agnostic and can be used by both good guys and bad guys. We specifically talked about how both victims and terrorists were using mobile phones during the Mumbai terrorist attack.

I also pointed out that, often, the difference between the good guys (activists) and the bad guys (troublemakers) isn’t obvious. So, governments should assume that terrorists and dissidents will use these technologies, but refrain from trying to control, block or monitor these technologies too broadly.

Here is the full text of the article –

Social Media Opens Communications for Terrorists, Victims
by Mickey McCarter
Wednesday, 20 May 2009

Experts relate how terrorists, victims have been using Twitter and text messaging in crisis situations
The general public has very recently embraced the use of new social media applications like Twitter. Oprah Winfrey, for example, turned her fanbase onto the Web site last month. Traditional newspapers have lit up with stories about how blogs and tweets are changing the world.

Manuel Maqueda of Periodismo Ciudadano tracks development in the citizen journalism space from around the world on his wonderful Spanish language blog. He has just posted an interview with me, which we recorded during the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco –

We talked about Vote Report India and how platforms like Ushahidi are useful to make meaning from citizen reporting in a crisis situation.

We also talked about the important role of curators and connectors to make sense of the stream of citizen reporting during a crisis situation. When people ask me how to make sense of a fast emerging crisis situation, I tell them that the first thing they need to ask is: who should I follow?

Sometimes, it’s easy to find bloggers who understand local dynamics and have strong connections to the outside world. These bloggers can then curate mainstream and citizen media reports related to the crisis, and add cultural and other context, to help outsiders make sense of the situation. During the Mumbai terrorist attack, Dina and I, amongst others, played that role.

Sometimes, it’s not easy to find such connectors and outsiders don’t know whom to trust. This happened during the Russia-Georgia and Isreal-Gaza conflicts when it was almost impossible to differentiate between citizen journalism and propaganda.

An article I had submitted sometime back appeared in Hindustan Times today. It’s a reflection on whether digital initiatives by civil society organizations have worked in the 2009 Indian elections.

Here is the full text of the article –

E-lection fever

The successful online poll initiatives and blogs may help India 2014 do a US 2008

Gaurav Mishra

One of the ironies of Indian politics is that while the urban middle class complains about corrupt politicians, it neither steps out to contest elections or even cast its vote.

Mumbaikars proved this right on April 30, when the city registered its lowest voter turnout since 1977 despite the hullabaloo the elite had created post-26/11. Since then, the content and the tone of conversations of the Indian online community have changed. Well to-do youngsters, who earlier shied away from political debates, now seem to thrive on it.

For the first time in India, online voter-registration campaigns and initiatives have channelled the zeitgeist into constructive conversations and created an online space for civic engagement. It’s because of this groundswell that unlikely candidates like author Shashi Tharoor and danseuse Mallika Sarabhai have stepped out to contest the elections.Even political parties, which often speak to the lowest common denominator, upped the ante and reached out to millions of first time voters through blogs and social networking websites.

Photo courtesy Chhavi Sachdev

In the last two days, three different journalists have asked me why the voter turnout in Mumbai has decreased to 43% in spite of voter registration initiatives like Jaago Re and transparency initiatives like Vote Report India.

I have been shocked by the low voter turnout myself and will be reflecting on it over several posts. Here’s my first attempt to answer that question, partly through the Vote Report India lens.

We have had 170 odd reports so far on Vote Report India whereas I was expecting close to a thousand reports by now.

Also, most of the reports are web reports, which is surprising given that we had a SMS short code and users could report incidents by sending a SMS starting with VoteReport to 5676785.

In terms of the content of the reports, most reports reference a news report. Election Commission Interventions is the most popular category, followed by Voter Bribing, Violence and Inflammatory Speech. The categories with first-hand experience — Forged Vote, Voting Machine Problems, Voter Name Missing and What Went Well — have had few reports.

I’m speaking tomorrow on a panel at Georgetown University on social media implications for the defense community. Here is a summary of what I’ll be talking about.

The defense community needs to understand the social media phenomenon in order to do five things well: listen, understand, engage, defend, and collaborate.

The interesting thing to note is that the diplomatic community also needs to understand social media for the same reasons, and there is great value in the two communities working together in their use of social media tools.

The other thing to note is that I’m only discussing the public part of the social web. I don’t research, and have no expertise in, traditional cyber security concerns like critical infrastructure security, viral warfare, or the surveillance of private email or phone conversations.

My research is focused on how business and civil society organizations use social media, and the pointers here are rooted in that understanding.

Greory Lent and I don’t always agree and the subject of citizen journalism in the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack has always been a source of disagreement between us.

If tweets could trample, my god. People proud of themselves acting as “citizen journalists” twittering the uninformed rubbish of tv newsreaders to the waiting world as if it were gospel truth. And then “shouting” (ok, twittering) at other “citizen journalists” about how they had it all wrong. If you were reading that #mumbai thread you could not avoid a headache, and the certain knowledge that nobody knew what the hell they were talking about.

A month later, what do we have? Scholarly papers on the birth of “citizen journalism” in India. God save us from “citizen journalists” and the academics who extol them.

Yes, there was noise in #mumbai but there was signal too, for those who knew how to separate signal from noise.

You could follow specific Twitter users who were curating the #mumbai Twitterstream. You could filter the #mumbai feed so that you only saw tweets from users who lived in Mumbai, or tweets that contained a link. If you tried to follow the unfiltered #mumbai Twitterstream, it’s not surprising that you ended up with a headache.