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Iran's Twitter Devolution: A Textbook Example of Hype Dynamics
Over the years, there's been a slightly tired joke around our office, that comes up when we hear from a client that someone in a position of authority at their organization wants them to have a "social media" strategy. Does it mean that they're ready to invest in the relationships between their stakeholders and leverage the networks they're a part of? Nope. Does it mean they realize the Internet itself is a social medium and it's time for their organization to grow past using it as a broadcast tool? Probably not that either. No, it means that someone at the top said: "Gotta get us some o' that Twitter!" Sometimes that's as far as it goes. Sometimes they cite irrelevant statistics. Sometimes they cite surveys showing how people think it's important. Sometimes they cite examples. Now, the people who engage us are usually people of vision and we are all of us easily seduced by the self-referential echo-chambers that drive the hype cycle for various easily branded "new" trends. But, whether or not the particular tool or strategy is a good idea for the organization (and it often is), there's no question that these conversations are triggered by hype. Few examples serve better to show what I mean than the frenetic, self-congratulatory conversations that went on during the post-election protests in Iran in 2009. In The Twitter Devolution, Golnaz Esfandiari takes apart the claim that Iranians used Twitter to organize and coordinate their protests following Ahmadinejad's apparent theft of the elections. I tend to think the attention Iran received on Twitter and elsewhere in the West was, overall, a good thing. But it's pretty clear that Twitter was not so much used by Iranians to talk to Iranians about Iran, but for Westerners to talk to Westerners, often about Twitter. We're dealing with smaller versions of this in organizations all the time.