What Iran tells us about Twitter

The role of social networking service Twitter in the post-election protests in Iran sends important messages to corporate communicators around the world, says David Bowen.

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At the recent Bowen Craggs web effectiveness conference I asked how many people there thought Twitter, the social networking and micro-blogging service, was a flash in the pan. A third of the delegates put up their hands.

As I have tried to keep up with the main Twitter feeds on the protests in Iran following the disputed outcome of its presidential election (go to twitter.com and search for #iranelection), I have wondered how many delegate hands would go up now.

On the day of the first huge demonstration in Tehran, I was looking at a page of tweets and after a few seconds a note appeared at the top: ‘35 more results since you started searching’. I left for a couple of minutes and returned to 270. This was a flood pouring onto my screen. By the weekend, when I left my screen for a couple of hours I missed 20,000 new posts.

It’s not just Twitter. Facebook and YouTube have been busy too. A Facebook page called I (heart) Iran buzzes with posts and links. Many are to YouTube, where videos of the protests taken with mobile cameras are gathered on a page.

But Twitter is the big one – the sheer volume of activity shows that. There has been a huge amount of comment about its importance in Iran. But what can we learn about its nature and future? How will it affect people trying to manage the online activities of large organisations?

Proof of significance

First, the publicity must be good for anyone who makes their living from the internet. I have been watching and writing about how it has been used to cover dramatic events since 1997. The war in Sierra Leone was an early one, then there was 9/11, the Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, several conflicts in the Middle East and so on.
Fascinating for me, but it was a lonely business. I could see the potential and wrote about it, but I also knew it wasn’t a mass thing; the internet wasn’t going to change anything. Usually, my job was to report how under-exploited it was.

It’s all changed now. This piece is not about how the internet is being used in Iran, because that it is a mainstream story elsewhere, for example on the BBC. But bizarrely the main issue for web people in large organisations is still, often, to get their bosses and colleagues to take the internet seriously. Publicity like this is their best friend.

Critical mass

Second, in Iran Twitter is playing to its strengths. It is a many-to-many broadcasting system. A mass e-mail shot is many-to-many, too, but you have to get the addresses first: here people can tune in. Maybe CB radio is the nearest thing. But this is on a much larger scale than anything truckers could dream off.

Here, thousands – maybe tens of thousands – of people are broadcasting. No one except a dedicated team (like the BBC’s) could read all the tweets in the #iranelection stream. I was fishing randomly in the flood and found many posts linked to videos, some giving instructions on how to get round Iran’s censors by using ‘proxies’, others messages of support or pleas for help.

The point lies in the sheer numbers. The Tehran government may be able to ignore Twitter, but the US and other governments cannot. A web petition to keep Twitter going through the night was set up early on, but it wasn’t really necessary – a ‘hashtag’ (search filter) called ‘nomaintenance’ was set up and turned Twitter itself into a giant petition. Beautifully simple.

Mass protest

Third – because it is also a flaw with Twitter – its volume. Iran is a very special situation. It is the numbers that matter, so the unmanageable tide of posts is not an issue. But it is for most of us living our less-dramatic lives. I follow Twitterers who I think will tell me useful or interesting things – I choose them because I know they have knowledge and contacts I value. I pick up useful things sometimes– so why have I ‘unfollowed’ (what are we doing to our language?) most of them? Because they insist on telling me about their private lives, about utterly trivial things, and I just can’t find the wheat among the chaff.

I know that some guidelines for Twitter say you should mix in private posts, to somehow make you seem more human. Please don’t – have a separate private stream if you wish, but let me share your professional wisdom, not the detail of your breakfast. And, even then, keep the volumes down: I can’t and won’t read someone who is sending out a tweet every few minutes. It’s an invasion, like junk mail, and I will turn it off even though it means I will miss the odd gold-encrusted nugget.

I know, too, that it is possible to filter posts by keyword or hashtags. Fine. But I read columnists because they tell me about things I don’t know about; and usually I don’t know I don’t know about them, so any filter would deny the point. What a sterile mind I would have if I read only about subjects I have chosen. Don’t make me.

Instant witness statements

Fourth, Twitter‘s other great strength is its speed and spontaneity. It takes only a few moments to tap in a Twitter message – brilliant for spreading a thought, a link, a plea. A story that Khomeini’s shrine had been bombed was flying around Twitter two hours before the mainstream media sites published it. The service provides an outlet that turns everyone with a computer into a reporter or commentator. No other medium can match it.

Truth a potential victim

Fifth, another problem. As Andrew Gowers, former editor of the Financial Times , said at our conference, “The web is a vast edifice of comment built on a narrow foundation of fact… a damaging view in one country can easily become received opinion worldwide”. The Khomeini shrine story went unpublished by mainstream media not because they did not know it (they read tweets too), but because they were trying to check it. It is on the BBC now, but as an ‘unconfirmed report’. How many tweets put out, and repeated over and again, are just plain wrong?

What happens if a story comes out that one of your factories is polluting the environment? That a product is contaminated? Unlikely the BBC will even notice it; so it circulates and re-circulates, and maybe becomes ‘fact’. The risks to organisations at the wrong end of such rumours are obvious.

Use culture

So where are we? Iran shows that Twitter is incredibly powerful when it is playing to its strengths. But its strengths here are to do with quantity not quality. They may be relevant to corporations or organisations – but only negatively, when they are the targets of mass protest.

Twitter should also be a useful device for picking up ideas, links, whatever from people whose views we value. But only if those people stop mixing them with their cornflakes.

Is it a flash in the pan? Much less likely than it was a week ago. But unless tweeters learn to cut the blather, many of us will tune Twitter out of our day-to-day lives. We can always tune back in when another drama pours onto our screens.

First published on 24 June, 2009