Social Media and Warfare

Social media is radically changing all that we know, from communication, marketing, even warfare. Today it’s all being done through social media. In this post I will take a look at the role social media in warfare in the 21^st century.

Let’s go back to 2010-2011 in what we all know as the Arab spring. During this short time period we saw one leader after another toppled over in the Middle Eastern Arab world. Through Facebook and Twitter the citizens of those countries were able to organize and coordinate large crowds containing thousands of people to protest against the unjust acts of their government. Through social media people were able to express their thoughts and complaints and their desire for change (freedom, democracy). Without the tool of social media, such actions would most surely result in death. But through slacktivism via social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter, thousands of people got the courage to make their desires known to the world. But could social media be used more menacingly to cause disruption of governments by other political powers. I can already foresee it happening.

The 2009 elections in Iran saw Iranians taking to Twitter in protest against the government. Based on data analyzed from Twitter during this period, we saw that many of those who were taking to Twitter in Tehran were not even located in Iran (Gaffney, 2010). Many individuals simply changed their profile information to Iran’s and were protesting as if from within Iran. Maybe they were doing so to give courage to those within Iran who were protesting. But can this be abused? What if an enemy through social media organizes and coordinates the people of a country to rise up against their government? All they need is an incident with the country and a change of IP or location to incite the citizens to spark off a protest. I am just thinking of the evil possibilities afforded through social media to incite war. Need I saw more. It is indeed something to think about.

What if?

References

Gaffney, D. (2010). # iranElection: quantifying online activism.

Collaboration on Twitter

Hey world, in 140 characters here’s what I’m up to. This is the typical language of a Twitter message. But can the micro blogging platform be used as a tool for conversation and collaboration. And if so, what type of collaboration can it be used for?

To investigate this, Courtenay Honeycutt and Susan Herring scrapped hundreds of tweets from Twitter in a 12 hour timeframe and analyzed those tweets. In spite of the fact that Twitter was designed for answering the question “What are you doing?” their work showed that people are actually utilizing for much more than this.

The research showed that Twitter can be used for conversation and collaboration, but in order to successfully accomplish these tasks certain techniques must be utilized. The most popular of these included using the @ sign for addressivity. Since twitter is a very noisy platform which does not differentiate between conversation dialogs, users have to use the @ sign to direct messages to a desired individual.

It’s good to know that Twitter can be used for collaboration, but the work done through collaboration on Twitter will depend on its importance, nature and sensitivity. Sure there is the direct messaging option, but that would somewhat defeat the purpose because this is similar to traditional email except in character count. But irrespective of this, we’ve seen collaboration through Twitter on a massive scale as was demonstrated in the Arab Spring revolutions, the occupy Wall Street movements and the 2009 Iran election protests.

I think that Twitter as a good collaboration platform for public activities. Since it is such an open platform and anyone who decides to follow you can see your posts, one needs to be more careful about using the platform for more sensitive activities. But for a quick non sensitive collaboration in achieving some objective, as Honeycutt and Herring reported, Twitter can serve a very valuable role.

References

Honey, C., & Herring, S. C. (2009, January). Beyond microblogging: Conversation and collaboration via Twitter. In System Sciences, 2009. HICSS’09. 42nd Hawaii International Conference on (pp. 1-10). IEEE.

Advertising? Where? Tell me why I should!!

Tim Worstall recently wrote an interesting article on twitter which in effect summed up my thoughts on the social media platform. Here are my though on the aricle.
Tim seem to think that Twitter does not have enough real users to make it valuable to advertisers. Not valuable, whatever does he mean? Doesn’t Twitter claim a user base of approximately 281 million users? Though substantially less than Facebook’s, this is however larger than LinkedIn’s, right? So why would Mr. Worstall believe that Twitter lack monetary value?

Well according to a Forbes article, “Twitter makes 39 cents for every dollar Facebook gets out a user and 30 cents compared to a similar dollar LinkedIn makes on a user.” On this statistic alone, I can see why the author would think so. So in effect, advertisers are reluctant on using the micro blogging platform because it won’t make them enough money. They seem to think that it does not contain a big enough audience. Well in fact, they just may be correct right.

The 281 million accounts Twitter claimed to have are not individual users but accounts. So it would be more correct to say that Twitter has 281 million accounts. Out of these accounts, an individual may have more than one. Hey, don’t I have 2 twitter accounts, one for which I’ve forgotten the password? I wonder whether it is still active, Hmmmm?

Are you getting my point here? But wait, it gets more interesting. Haven’t you ever seen a Tweeter user starts following you, but when you do visit his/her profile all you can see on the timeline is a bunch of links pointing to a product or service? What are the chances that there is an actual individual sending out those tweets every 20-30 minutes? Also what are the chances that the individual running this bot have more than one account similar to this one? Even without any calculations, we can probably estimate the total Twitter user count to be a lot less than the acclaimed 281 million. So Tim Worstall’s article title that “there maybe aren’t enough real people on Twitter to make it valuable” may just be right! Why would advertisers pay to get thousands of ad impressions from a bunch bots that for sure aren’t there to buy squat?

This reminds me of MySpace in their dying days when they claimed to have millions of registered accounts, only a few of which were active. How do I know? Well it is because I attempted to run a cost per impression advertising campaign, which was discontinued by MySpace because it was just not getting enough impressions. That’s how I knew there was no one on MySpace anymore. Then again I may have not bid enough money to have my ads shown. But then again, I seriously that this was the case.

Now don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that the micro blogging platform is headed down a one-way track leading to the end of their existence. I am just saying that they need to clean up their platform and find a way to increase their actual active real user count, and soon enough they may just be knocking heads and matching dollar for dollar with Facebook and LinkedIn.