Social media is especially useful for IT SMEs as their customers, partners and employees are likely to be early adopters of social media tools. My recommendation is that IT SMEs should use social media first to listen to conversations in their industry, then to participate in those conversations and finaly to build thought leadership in their industry. Given the natures of most IT SMEs, even ten new business relationships established via social media can be critical.

Here is the full text of the story –

Small and medium IT firms reap benefits of online networking sites

Sruthi Krishnan

“There is a culture today that respects an online connection”

CHENNAI: While looking up the profile of a prospective client on LinkedIn, a business networking site, the salesperson of a small and medium IT firm found that he had a Twitter account. The salesperson followed the client on Twitter, an online messaging service, and messaged him about the company. On a working day, in 15 minutes, the salesperson got a response: “Get back in touch with me.”

“There is a culture today that respects an online connection,” says Narasimhan Mandyam, CEO, PK4 Software, a Bangalore-based firm that deals with on-demand CRM (customer relationship management) solutions, narrating this incident. One way small and medium (SME) IT companies can benefit from this culture is to get into the social media space for marketing. Given the current economic scene, the online space is a cheaper marketing option. But despite the cost advantage, there is a debate on whether to latch on to the social media bandwagon or not.
Understanding lacking

Many SME IT firms do not have a clear understanding of what online marketing is, says Mr. Mandyam. “We believe in an equation – pay X amount of money for an advertisement and get Y returns. But, the value of a discussion in blogs, online forums, or Twitter has to be understood in a larger context.”

Marketing on social media is different from traditional media as it follows a “pull model rather than a push model,” says Suresh Sambandam, founder and CEO, Orangescape, a software product firm. Rather than selling your company, you share ideas and knowledge, and people come to you if they find the information useful. This, in turn, benefits the company.

To see these benefits, you have to cultivate relationships. There is value in looking beyond your work, and providing thought leadership in your area of work, says Gaurav Mishra, CEO and Founder, 20:20 Web Tech, a social media research and analytics firm. “When you form a readership in that area, you can make connections with more people.” For a small services company, to be able to build relationships with 10 potential customers is huge, he adds.

Being honest about what you and your company stand for is important, says Mr. Mandyam. “You cannot create an image that is not you or your company.” This is something which many SME IT firms have difficulty understanding.

If companies are apprehensive about the uncontrolled flow of information, they could have guidelines for social media in place, says Arvind Muthukrishnan, manager-business development, UST Global, an IT services firm, who is also a social media consultant. It is also important not to spread negative information about your competitors; it could backfire. But, for SME IT companies, rather than controlling information, a better strategy would be to evolve an open culture, says Mr. Mandyam, tying it back to his stress on the need for honesty online.

Marketing through social media is measurable, says Mr. Muthukrishnan. There are a variety of tools and metrics. But, to use these metrics, companies need to define first, what their objective is.
Word of caution

There are some notes of caution too. “If people are not responding, there is a problem,” says Mr. Mishra. More importantly, you need to listen to what others are saying about you. These platforms provide a tool to listen, probably much more than tools to talk, he says.

I am co-founder of social media research and analytics company 20:20 Web Tech. In my previous avatars, I have done marketing at the Tata Group, taught social media at Georgetown University, and co-founded Vote Report India. Do consider interviewing me, inviting me to speak, or working with 20:20 WebTech. I am gauravonomics @ Twitter/ FriendFeed/ Skype/ GTalk/ GMail.

In February 2008, Lancashire detective constable Richard Horton started writing the anonymous NightJack blog, which shared an insider’s perspective on policing and politics in a small English town. By January 2009, he had a daily readership of about 1500, but grew tired of the blog and stopped writing. Then NightJack won the prestigious Orwell Prize in March 2009 and his readership went up to half a million visitors a week.

When Times reporter Patrick Foster found his true identity by triangulating the digital trail he had left behind, Richard Horton deleted his blog and asked for an injunction to prevent the Times from revealing it. Justice Eady rejected the plea. The Times revealed Richard Horton’s identity in an expose and Richard Hortonhimself wrote a piece in The Times explaining why he had started and deleted the blog.

For more details see Daily Mail, Financial Times, BBC1 and BBC2.

It’s important that we begin by trying to understand the complex moral ambiguity in the curious case of NightJack Richard Horton.

On one hand, there’s the moral ambiguity of a police officer anonymously blogging about his cases and making controversial statements about policing and politics. On the other hand, there’s the moral ambiguity of a leading newspaper revealing the identity of an award-winning blogger, even as it fights to protect its right not to reveal the identity of its anonymous sources.

So, even as we question the motivations of The Times, and criticize its hypocrisy, we should also consider the unreasonable nature of Richard Horton’s plea: to stop The Times from revealing his identity because 1) it will cause damage to his police department and force it to take action against him and 2) it will be a setback to blogger privacy worldwide. The first concern is inconsequential and the second concern is an overstatement.

In rejecting Richar Horton’s plea, Justice Eady is only saying that  1) bloggers should be willing to take responsibility for what they write and 2) bloggers should take responsibility maintaining their anonymity, if they wish to remain anonymous. That’s it.

So, bloggers are still allowed to blog anonymously, except in countries like South Korea where your online accounts need to be linked to a real world ID. The judgment doesn’t mean that bloggers will be forced to reveal their identities.

Only a handful of anonymous bloggers in India, who write about controversial topics and have large followings, would be affected by this judgement. Most anonymous bloggers write about personal topics and have rather small followings and needn’t worry about such sting operations. Even these bloggers can use anonymizing tools like Psiphon and Tor to protect their identities, so the judgement doesn’t really affect them either.

The whole “end of blogger anonymity” story is hyped up by bloggers and journalists who don’t really understand what’s happening here. The judgment will have absolutely no impact on how many people start new blogs, how many bloggers write anonymously, or how many readers read anonymous blogs.

The bigger threat is legislation in free, democratic countries like India, UK and South Korea which 1) empowers police officials to seek personal details about bloggers from ISPs and platform providers like Google & Yahoo! and 2) seeks to link internet access to real world identity. It’s surprising that such legislation that threatens blogger privacy hardly hit the front page.

For more perspectives on the story see: Frances Gobbs at The Times, Oliver Kamm at The Times, Peter Robins at The Guardian, Afua Hirsch at The Guardian, Jean Seatton at The Guardian, Damian Thompson at The Telegraph, Becky Hogge at The Guardian, Gawker, Abby Lee and Tom Reynolds.

BBC, Global Voices, Paul Bradshaw, and Journalism.co.uk also have nice roundups on the controversy.

I talked about why we should distrust all information on Twitter, especially in Iran where only Mousavi supporters are represented on the service. I also talked about why the term Twitter Revolution is already a cliche, after Moldova and Iran.

Here’s the full text of the BBC blog post about the talk show –

Who do you trust to tell you what’s happening in Iran ?

The true and undisputed winners of the Iranian elections have emerged - Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and You Tube have been bathing in the limelight. Here’s the BBC’s breakdown on social media in Iran. The Iranian government’s blocking of traditional media outlets has meant that microblogging has been our main source of information.

Microblogging of course cannot always be verified. So, have the events in Iran just been exaggerated or has our access to social media been a valuable insight to what’s really happening on the ground?

”I think the idea of a Twitter revolution is very suspect,” says Gaurav Mishra from 20:20 Webtech. “The amount of people who use these tools in Iran is very small and could not support protests that size.”

But with increased restrictions on reporting inside Iran should we not just accept that social media is our best bet of getting continuing coverage on the events right now? We at WHYS have struggled to get voices out of Iran, and any we have managed to get on air have been thanks to the internet. Here’s a more detailed interview with Gaurav on Iran and Twitter. Worth a read.

Despite concerns, we’ve relied on online citizen journalism to be our primary source of information.I had an email exchange with an Iranian yesterday who wrote “you may think you are just doing your job, but you are helping to change the lives of Iranians.” There’s no doubt that many are clinging onto the internet as a lifeline and conveniently, you can’t pull the plug on the net either. But do we even know who these citizen journalists are? One thing’s for sure – they’re young, they’re tech savvy and more likely than not – pro Mousavi and middle class. We don’t even know if they are voices from inside the country.

Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty write ”Much commentary has portrayed Iranian youth and the Internet as harbingers of change in this election. But our poll found that only a third of Iranians even have access to the Internet, while 18-to-24-year-olds comprised the strongest voting bloc for Ahmadinejad of all age groups.”

And on the other side , the Iranian authorities jammed BBC services  (and other foreign broadcasters), stopped text messages and net access in the days after the result came out, and currently reporters there – again including ours – are working under restrictions.

So it’s not as if it’s just one side trying to “control the message”.

So is it hard to get to the truth in Iran?

I am co-founder of social media research and analytics company 20:20 Web Tech. In my previous avatars, I have done marketing at the Tata Group, taught social media at Georgetown University, and co-founded Vote Report India. Do consider interviewing me, inviting me to speak, or working with 20:20 WebTech. I am gauravonomics @ Twitter/ FriendFeed/ Skype/ GTalk/ GMail.

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.

As the presidential campaign unfolded, supporters of reform candidates Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi turned to Internet-driven social media such as Twitter, Facebook and Flickr to get out their messages and to organize. Ahmadinejad was considered a prohibitive favorite for re-election, but as polls showed Mousavi gaining support, the government temporarily shut down access to the social networking sites.

After the June 12 election’s disputed result, the social media network again came into play as supporters of Mousavi and Karroubi used it to transmit images and reports about voting disputes and what they said was violent police suppression of demonstrations.

Via the Internet and cable and satellite television networks, the world has seen and heard firsthand accounts of the massive protests, even when foreign reporters were not present to document them.

Technology spreads

It wasn’t the first time Iranians had clashed with their ayatollah-led government. In 1999, students in Tehran erupted after a reformist newspaper was shut down. But a decade ago, the concept of social media was years away and Iraq’s nascent cellphone network was small and easily controlled. The revolt quickly disappeared from the airwaves, and only later could it be confirmed that dissidents had been imprisoned, tortured and even killed.

Since then, use of the Internet and wireless technology has become much more widespread among Iran’s young and affluent city dwellers —- the bulk of the reform candidates’ supporters.

“It’s being used to try to demonstrate that the official view of events from authorities is not the real view of events,” Christopher Waddell, associate director of the school of journalism and communications at Ottawa’s Carleton University, told CanWest News Service.

Exaggerated effect?

With foreign reporters unable to travel freely in Iran, major international news organizations have quoted widely from online postings, and cable news networks, including CNN, have shown clips from Web-posted videos of the demonstrations. Twitter has been especially prominent because its ability to quickly relay brief reports lends itself to the fast-moving, chaotic situation. At its peak Tuesday, Twitter reported it had 221,744 “tweets” mentioning Iran in a single hour, and the U.S. government asked the San Francisco-based company to postpone a planned shutdown for maintenance so users in Iran would not be cut off.

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.

Another concern is that there is no way to verify the source of postings —- a caution CNN repeatedly cited as it nevertheless showed videos and cited messages obtained from them. In addition, the information they provide is disorganized, providing a fragmented and often confusing account.

“The problem with this is that it’s so unfiltered, it’s like being in a blizzard sometimes, and it’s very hard to judge what’s true and what’s not,” James Topham, a Twitter user and communications director for War Child Canada, told CanWest.

But Timothy O’Brien, a blogger for new technology blog O’Reilly Radar, wrote that while he, like Mishra, thought Twitter’s impact had been exaggerated, the overall role of social media in Iran could not be overstated: “These protests are facilitated by an entire technology stack which includes Twitter, cellphones with cameras, Facebook, (text messaging), YouTube, Google … . Iranian colleagues have told me directly that Web 2.0 technologies are allowing them to communicate with other Iranians in ways that were impossible a few years ago.”

Feeling threatened

Could social media, by undermining state control of media outlets, help topple regimes such as Iran’s? The German-based International Society for Human Rights is promoting that idea, circulating an image showing Ahmadinejad cowering on a chair as a computer mouse snakes toward him. Other versions depict former Cuban President Fidel Castro and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in similar poses.

Actions by some less-than-Democratic governments would suggest they see social media as a threat. China closed access to such sites before the recent 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square uprising, and there were reports that Facebook was blocked in Moldova after an April demonstration against the election of a Communist parliament.

Iran’s government issued a stern warning Thursday, via the Iran Daily newspaper, that its Center for Cyber Crime would seek out “those inciting violence and spreading rumors in cyberspace,” who “could face grave consequences.” It lumped the Internet in with its customary enemies as it alleged that dissident Web sites were backed by Western interests.

Whether they result in regime change or a massive crackdown on dissent, the Iranian election and the protests that followed are being called the “Twitter Revolution.”Sunday Nation/World Editor Bill Steiden compiled this article.

Sunday Nation/World EditorBill Steiden compiled this article.

I am co-founder of social media research and analytics company 20:20 Web Tech. In my previous avatars, I have done marketing at the Tata Group, taught social media at Georgetown University, and co-founded Vote Report India. Do consider interviewing me, inviting me to speak, or working with 20:20 WebTech. I am gauravonomics @ Twitter/ FriendFeed/ Skype/ GTalk/ GMail.

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

Palin Ningthoujam did a great Q&A with Dave on eight tricky social media marketing questions asked by clients. The Empowered SEO team also wrote a great post on the workshop. Mid Day, Deccan Herald and Exchange4Media also wrote about the workshop and NDTV Profit is doing a program on it.

We are thankful to everyone for the great response to the workshop and hope that the workshops will seed some interesting conversations on social media marketing in India.

Cross-posted at the 20:20 Social Media Analytics Blog.

I am co-founder of social media research and analytics company 20:20 Web Tech. In my previous avatars, I have done marketing at the Tata Group, taught social media at Georgetown University, and co-founded Vote Report India. Do consider interviewing me, inviting me to speak, or working with 20:20 WebTech. I am gauravonomics @ Twitter/ FriendFeed/ Skype/ GTalk/ GMail.

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.”

I am co-founder of social media research and analytics company 20:20 Web Tech. In my previous avatars, I have done marketing at the Tata Group, taught social media at Georgetown University, and co-founded Vote Report India. Do consider interviewing me, inviting me to speak, or working with 20:20 WebTech. I am gauravonomics @ Twitter/ FriendFeed/ Skype/ GTalk/ GMail.

In fact, there’s a danger in giving too much emphasis to the role played by online media in Iran’s political crisis, said Gaurav Mishra, co-founder of 20:20 Web Tech, a social media research and analytics company.

“Calling what’s happening in Iran a ‘Twitter Revolution’ is not only distracting but also dangerous,” he wrote on his blog, “because it reduces a legitimate broad-based grassroots movement to what’s quickly becoming a cliche.”

I am co-founder of social media research and analytics company 20:20 Web Tech. In my previous avatars, I have done marketing at the Tata Group, taught social media at Georgetown University, and co-founded Vote Report India. Do consider interviewing me, inviting me to speak, or working with 20:20 WebTech. I am gauravonomics @ Twitter/ FriendFeed/ Skype/ GTalk/ GMail.

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.

Worldfocus: What role has Twitter played in the aftermath of Iran’s election? Has there been a “Twitter Revolution”?

Gaurav Mishra: The story which I’m reading in the media is that of the “Twitter Revolution.” And the story is that Twitter is one of the key things used to organize these protests, and the State Department is contacting Twitter to make sure it doesn’t go down, and so on and so forth. That’s the wrong story — it’s the wrong story in Iran, it was the wrong story in Moldova. There is no “Twitter Revolution.” We haven’t seen a “Twitter Revolution,” and I don’t think we’ll ever see a “Twitter Revolution.”

The revolution in Iran is not about Twitter. It’s about Iranian people protesting against perceived irregularities in the election. It’s a grassroots movement, and we’re abusing it in many ways by calling it a Twitter Revolution. It’s a big country with one of the biggest elections around the world, and clearly Mousavi supporters and Ahmadinejad supporters — all of them — have huge offline networks who are getting people to mobilize, getting support and getting people to come out and protest. We are underestimating the value of that network in a country like Iran or a country like India or China — that is a network which culturally matters. Even in the U.S., that is a network that matters. So we’re really underestimating the value of that network by saying this is a “Twitter Revolution.”

On a scale of one (1) to 10, if 10 means it is a legitimate revolution, I would say Twitter as an organizing tool is at five or six.

Twitter does play a very important role in some other areas. It has played an extremely important role in fixing the world’s attention on the crisis, both in terms of getting individuals like you and me to focus on the crisis, and also in getting the attention of the international media and making sure this crisis gets the amount of coverage it deserves to get. The #cnnfail meme on Saturday, which basically asked why the protests were not on the front page of CNN — that’s a very clear example that the activists know what they’re doing. They’re using Twitter to focus international attention on Iran, and to put this on the media’s agenda.

It’s very interesting — I see different stories happening. First is the story of the protest itself, and that’s a very big, legitimate story in itself. Then there’s the story about how Twitter and Facebook are being used to organize the protests. I think that’s a fake story. It distracts from the real issue, from the real story of these protests happening in Iran, which are the biggest protests since the 1970s. And it’s dangerous — we are telling them this is an organizing tool; that you can use this tool to organize protests. That’s not the case, because in countries like India or Iran, only single-digit percentages of people use Twitter. Clearly it’s not an organizing tool.

The mobile phone is an organizing tool and e-mail is an organizing tool, because everybody has mobile phones in these countries. And the first thing you do if you want to organize a protest is send a text message to everybody in your address book. That’s how these protests are being organized in all likelihood, not via Twitter.

Worldfocus: How have traditional blogs fared in Iran compared to micro-blogging tools like Twitter?

Gaurav Mishra: We’ve seen that in all types of crisis situations — whether it’s the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, the China earthquake, or the Moldova protests, or elections in India or Iran — in all these kinds of big events, Twitter is great at giving alerts. You’re seeing a news cycle emerge where at first, stories are reported on Twitter. Then, blogs pick them up, they aggregate these stories and expand on these stories. They’re the first slightly detailed sense of what’s happening. And then the news organizations come in, and they write the 30-second piece on this, or do a deep story on it. And then we go into the context phase, where people add context to it and reference old stories — and this again happens both in the mainstream media and on blogs.

And finally it goes through that news cycle, and after that context and analysis happens, people start reacting to these stories, in mainstream media and blogs — and again, the reaction happens on Twitter. So if you go through the whole news cycle, what’s happening is that in the alert stage, and in the conversation stage, Twitter plays a very important role. But in the stage of developing the story, giving it context, giving it analysis, blogs and mainstream media still play a very important role. Twitter very clearly doesn’t have a role in developing the story, giving it context and analyzing why is it important.

Worldfocus: Why is it seemingly more difficult for the Iranian government to control Twitter compared to blogs and Facebook?

Gaurav Mishra: Here’s the interesting thing about censorship and control. Typically how governments censor Web content is to ban specific URLs or specific IP addresses. So they would ban the Facebook IP address or the Twitter IP address or the blogger.com IP address or the wordpress.com IP address.

In countries where most of the bloggers are on blogger.com, once you’ve blocked blogger.com, you’ve basically blocked all the blogs in that country. However, people like me host blogs on our own URLs and on our own servers. Therefore, unless the government has a database of all the blogs which are self-hosted, they can’t really block all blogs. You can block a blogging platform easily, but it’s very difficult to block individual blogs which are self-hosted. Facebook is fairly easy to block because most people who use Facebook actually go to Facebook and use it there.

Twitter is interesting because most people who use Twitter don’t actually go to the twitter.com Web site. Most people who use Twitter go to something like TweetDeck, which is a desktop application, or one of the thousands of desktop applications to use Twitter. Or they use it via text messages. So even though you can block the twitter.com Web site, you can’t really block Twitter usage, because people can send and receive text messages, people can get tweets and send tweets on applications and it’s very difficult to block.

On all these things, whether it’s blogs, social networking sites, news Web sites, Twitter, of course there are fairly simple ways to go around the censorship. People who are technically sophisticated find it trivial to go around censorship using circumvention tools.

Worldfocus: Some Twitter users outside Iran have begun a campaign to change their profile location to Tehran, in order to shield Iranian Twitterers from government detection. Do Twitter users in Iran need this protection? And has it impeded or confused the flow of information from on the ground?

Gaurav Mishra: I think they do need this protection, because what’s happening in Iran is that a lot of people are joining Twitter, because they’re hearing about this. I saw some stats — a large number of people, some hundred, are joining every hour. The number of Twitter users in Iran is low, less than 10,000. Which means that when Twitter users join from Iran, it’s very easy to track them. Sometimes people don’t understand the complexity of this, and they reveal their location information. Then it becomes easy to profile them. I think it comes from a good place, this movement to change your Twitter location/handle to Iran to confuse Iranian authorities who might be looking to profile people.

I do think the Iranian government has more important things to do. I’m sure they have a very sophisticated database of known dissenters, and they will first go after these people. These people who are joining Twitter — they are pretty low on the list of the Iranian government in terms of cracking down on them.

I think it’s overkill, but comes from a good place. Of course it harms the information flow. The only way you can make sense of the Iran feed right now, the #iranelection feed, is filtering by location. This misguided movement precludes the possibility of making any sense of what is happening now. It also precludes the possibility for academics to go back and make sense of it after it has happened. In the Moldova “Twitter Revolution,” a lot of people went back and saw all the tweets related to Moldova. They found that of the 700 people who were tweeting about Moldova, only 200 people were actually from Moldova. So it becomes very difficult for people to do that kind of analysis when the location information itself is misguiding. It’s harmful to do this in a way, because it breaks the validity of information and introduces more noise. But I think it comes from a good place, so I’m not criticizing the people who are trying to do this. Different people have different perspectives on what is important.

Worldfocus: We’ve seen a lot of mainstream media sources quoting Twitter users in recent days. Are traditional media outlets embracing Twitter more so than in the past?

Gaurav Mishra: News organizations can’t hope to break stories anymore, in the same way you’re used to breaking stories, because you have limited bureaus outside the U.S., and there are millions of people with mobile phones out there who become accidental reporters, who just happen to be at the right place at the right time and happen to take a photo or a video or send a text message. What news organizations can do is hire people who understand these tools, who actively identify bloggers and Twitter users. The only way news organizations can catch up is by having these curators, who highlight news and the unconfirmed reports, and then who go back and try and verify these reports and add context to them, saying “This news came from somebody on Twitter, but this is what it means, and we verified it.”

What’s happening in Iran is nothing new. We’ve seen this happen before, we’ve seen this happen in multiple locations. We should stop calling these things “Twitter Revolutions.” Again and again we call these things “Twitter Revolutions,” and Twitter is not at the center of revolution.

Not only do citizens use it, but also political parties use it. In a country like India or Iran where most people are not on the Internet, political parties — especially the challengers, the incumbents don’t use it so much. Ahmadinejad did not usually use these tools, the Republicans in the U.S. didn’t really use these tools — but Democrats used it, Mousavi used it. These are great levelers that allow you to level the playing field with people in control of traditional media. I’ve seen this work in election campaigning, I’ve seen this work in protests — it’s the same dynamics happening in different situations, used by different kinds of people. We should start looking at it realistically and stop being surprised every time this happens.

I am co-founder of social media research and analytics company 20:20 Web Tech. In my previous avatars, I have done marketing at the Tata Group, taught social media at Georgetown University, and co-founded Vote Report India. Do consider interviewing me, inviting me to speak, or working with 20:20 WebTech. I am gauravonomics @ Twitter/ FriendFeed/ Skype/ GTalk/ GMail.

Gaurav Mishra, the 2008-09 Yahoo Fellow at Georgetown University, said he hasn’t seen any evidence in past events such as the Moldova elections that Twitter was the dominant way people are organizing.

“It’s sometimes difficult to differentiate the hype from the media,” he said. “Just because people are tweeting about something doesn’t mean that there’s actually coordination involved.”

The story was also reproduced in The Guardian, The Independent, The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, CBS News, Forbes, Huffington Post and Boston Globe.

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

I am co-founder of social media research and analytics company 20:20 Web Tech. In my previous avatars, I have done marketing at the Tata Group, taught social media at Georgetown University, and co-founded Vote Report India. Do consider interviewing me, inviting me to speak, or working with 20:20 WebTech. I am gauravonomics @ Twitter/ FriendFeed/ Skype/ GTalk/ GMail.

“I think the idea of a Twitter revolution is very suspect,” says Gaurav Mishra, co-founder of 20:20 WebTech, a company that analyzes the effects of social media. “The amount of people who use these tools in Iran is very small and could not support protests that size.”

Mishra, who has organized social media activism campaigns for elections in India, says the main reason to use the tools is the attention it generates in the international media. Indeed, one of Twitter’s primary contributions in the Iranian elections has been to raise awareness of the issue among tech-savvy users outside the country.

“Political organizers use these tools because they create a multiplier effect—not only do you get a story about the campaign but then you also get a story about the fact they are using social-networking tools,” Mishra says. “So you get two stories for the price of one. The international media loves [the] social-networking world. But in India or in Iran, their use is still somewhat limited.”

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 –

Iran’s Twitter Revolution? Maybe Not Yet

Some Iranian election protesters used Twitter to get people on the streets, but most of the organizing happened the old-fashioned way

By Joel Schectman

Media across the globe have been focusing on a “Twitter Revolution” in Iran as hundreds of thousands of street protestors purportedly mobilized their demonstrations using the microblogging service. So great has the notion of Twitter’s role in the Iranian protests become that the U.S. State Dept. reportedly asked the company to defer some maintenance. Twitter says it rescheduled maintenance work from June 15 to later the next day, or about 1:30 a.m. in Iran. “It made sense for Twitter…to keep services active during this highly visible global event,” the San Francisco company said on its blog.

However, Iran experts and social networking activists say that while Iranian election protesters have certainly used social media tools, no particular technology has been instrumental to organizers’ ability to get people on the street. Indeed, most of the organizing has occurred through far more mundane means: SMS text messages and word of mouth. Sysomos, a Toronto-based Web analytics company that researches social media, says there are only about 8,600 Twitter users whose profiles indicate they are from Iran.

“I think the idea of a Twitter revolution is very suspect,” says Gaurav Mishra, co-founder of 20:20 WebTech, a company that analyzes the effects of social media. “The amount of people who use these tools in Iran is very small and could not support protests that size.”

And with the government blocking the Twitter site, that small group becomes even smaller. Tech-savvy netizens can use proxy addresses such as Tor or Proxy.org to bypass the government block of certain IP addresses. But for many users, circumnavigating the government’s blockage is too big a hurdle, and organizing in more conventional ways, such as over the phone or by knocking on doors, can be both quicker and easier. Moreover, Twitter does not support the Farsi language, which limits its utility, particularly in more rural areas of the country.

Raising Awareness Elsewhere

Mishra, who has organized social media activism campaigns for elections in India, says the main reason to use the tools is the attention it generates in the international media. Indeed, one of Twitter’s primary contributions in the Iranian elections has been to raise awareness of the issue among tech-savvy users outside the country.

“Political organizers use these tools because they create a multiplier effect—not only do you get a story about the campaign but then you also get a story about the fact they are using social-networking tools,” Mishra says. “So you get two stories for the price of one. The international media loves [the] social-networking world. But in India or in Iran, their use is still somewhat limited.”

Another reason for the hype surrounding Twitter’s role in these protests is the lack of good access for reporters in Iran and the difficulty of covering the story of the protested elections. Iran’s religious leadership declared incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the winner on June 12 with 63% of the vote a mere two hours after polls had closed. The opposition, which had largely supported Mir Hussein Mousavi, took to the streets of Tehran to protest; bloody crackdowns by police and militia followed. At least six people have died and many more have been injured, according to reports.

For now, these tools represent the best chance the demonstrations have of getting continued coverage. “Social media is not at all a prime mover of what is happening on the ground,” says Ethan Zuckerman, a senior researcher at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. “The reason social media is so interesting [for the press] is that the international media doesn’t have its members on the ground.”

Twitter in Moldova?

Zuckerman analyzed protests in Moldova this past April, which were also labeled a “Twitter Revolution,” and found the vast majority of tweets, or Twitter postings, during the protests were coming from outside the country, either Moldovan expats or just people sympathetic to the movement.

“Of the 700 people who were twittering on the Moldovan protests, less than 200 were in Moldova at the time,” Zuckerman said. “Social media are helpful in exposing what’s happening to the outside world, but it’s a mistake to think that these protests [in Iran] are because of social media. It’s more conventional things like word-of-mouth and phone calls that really bring massive numbers of people into the streets.”

A study by Mike Edwards, a social network researcher at Parsons The New School for Design, examined 79,000 tweets related to the Iran protests, and found that one-third are repostings of other tweets. The general ratio of reposts to posts is 1-to-20, and even in other fast-breaking global news events, when reposting might be more common, such as the swine flu outbreak, Edwards says he has seen the number go only as high as 1 in 5. This could indicate the amount of information deployed by protestors in Iran is small compared to the amount recirculated by outsiders, although Edwards cautions there are other possible explanations.

“There is this romantic notion that the people tweeting are the ones in the streets, but that is not what is happening,” Edwards says. “The hubs are generally not people on the ground, and many are not in the country.”
Exaggerating the News?

One analyst cautioned that while Twitter or Facebook may keep the outside world’s attention trained on Iranian protests, there was also a danger such tools could exaggerate the movement’s momentum. “You can get the notion that Ahmadinejad is very unpopular and that Mousavi has this groundswell of support, but we don’t have data that shows that,” says Reva Bhalla, director of analysis for Austin (Tex.)-based Stratfor, a strategic intelligence and forecasting company. “Ahmadinejad has real support, but his supporters don’t have smartphones. There is a real risk of amplifying [one side].” Ahmadinejad is thought to have a greater base of support in rural areas, while Mousavi is popular with urbanites.

Still, regardless of how much a mover social media may be in the protests, Iran watchers agree that the tools do represent a step forward. “Governments like Iran, Syria, and Egypt are really struggling with how to continue limiting information,” Bhalla said. “No matter how hard these governments try to block communication, now there is always going to be a hole. This really is a case study in how technology can affect closed societies.”

Mousavi introduced the use of social-networking tools to his campaign last month, Iran experts say, because he didn’t have the access to state-run television and newspapers Ahmadinejad enjoys. “They needed an alternative means to campaign and get their message across,” said Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council. But Parsi, like others, acknowledges that Facebook and Twitter were important mainly for letting people outside the country follow events, and text messages and phone calls were the primary mover of people in Iran’s protests. “The people I know mainly tell me they hear about these protests from friends or by SMS,” Parsi says.

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Schectman is a reporter for BusinessWeek in New York

This quote was also reproduced in Information Week and Christian Science Monitor.

I am co-founder of social media research and analytics company 20:20 Web Tech. In my previous avatars, I have done marketing at the Tata Group, taught social media at Georgetown University, and co-founded Vote Report India. Do consider interviewing me, inviting me to speak, or working with 20:20 WebTech. I am gauravonomics @ Twitter/ FriendFeed/ Skype/ GTalk/ GMail.