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News from the Future of Public Media
Blogging from the PDF 2009: Twitter as a promising tool to increase social action
email discuss Posted by Nina Keim on Jul 1, 2009 at 10:44 AM
At this year’s Personal Democracy Forum more than 1,000 opinion makers, political practitioners, technologists and journalists gathered together for the sixth time to discuss how technology is changing politics. Having witnessed how Barack Obama found innovative ways to leverage modern media tools to advance the campaign, the PDF is now focused on identifying how much the Internet and technology tools are changing the environment.
Two panels I attended specifically looked at how the micro-blogging portal Twitter allows a wide public to actively engage in campaigns and advocacy work. Crowd-sourced projects, Twitter-based community organizing and fundraising are three promising methods to motivate a large public and actively bring people on board of a project.
Twitter has many advantages over other social media tools: It is mobile, easy to understand and has a certain "cool factor" at the moment. Compared to e-mail as an organizing tool, Twitter increases the interactivity to a whole new level, given that following and being followed allow tracking conversations more easily.
However, there are certain tips that project coordinators need to be aware of in order to make Twitter projects work. First of all, Twitter is a crowded place and cannot work unless people use the same hashtags (ex. #pdf09) to attribute the tweets to a certain issue. Predefining and communicating what tags to use helps to group the contributions. Second, it is important to realize that social change is not happening entirely online. Organizing online can serve as a starting point but offline meetings are required in order to succeed. Lastly, similar to other social media, Twitter is not a broadcast medium. Anything can go viral at any time, but anticipating what takes off and what fails is nearly impossible. Therefore, setting quantitative goals such as tracking the number of followers or direct messages upfront can end in disappointment.
Despite the obstacles, the power of social media remains the high potential to influence civic engagement. For a long time organizers were not able to ask the public to do meaningful things while at the same time forwarding the ownership to the public. This is no longer the case. Social media like Twitter engage the public in a way that makes every action taken more meaningful to every single individual.
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