It’s a revolution, Jim, but not as we know it; social media makes a difference

Last Friday evening,  I was at the gym, half watching CNN’s coverage of the Mubarak resignation, when a local pundit came on air tearfully to thank Mark Zuckerberg – founder of Facebook – for making the Egyptian revolution happen.

Other than our emotional Egyptian pundit, perhaps, no one else is arguing that social media was the cause of the deep public dissatisfaction in Egypt and Tunisia which ultimately forced their Presidents to step down.   (While Zuckerberg has never seemed the most modest of men, I suspect even he would feel a little sheepish about taking all the credit for that one.)  There is a little more debate over how far social media activity materially influenced the coverage of the uprisings in the traditional media such as newspapers, radio and TV…although as virtually all newspapers, radio and TV in north Africa and the Middle East are censored, and one could argue that the UK media is pretty irrelevant to the outcome, that seems a bit of a moot point.

But one thing is very clear about the last few weeks in Egypt and Tunisia.  Social media tools can play huge role in accelerating change.
-          We saw incredibly fast information sharing: real time casualty figures from streets and hospitals posted on Twitter, a set of Flickr photos showing minutes-old propaganda SMS messages sent by the Egyptian government, and hours- old YouTube video footage of the military clashing with protesters.
-          We also saw information reaching far more people.  While much was still shared by word of mouth on the streets of Tunisian and Egyptian cities, social media played a crucial role in keeping the people in remoter locations and overseas up to date on what was going on.   New stats from Chartbeat show that 71% of the huge traffic to Al Jazeera’s English language site immediately following Mubarak’s resignation announcement was coming from social media sites – the vast majority from Twitter.
-          We also saw networking and coordination taking place through social media.   Grass roots activists, who had never before met, found each other through Facebook and Twitter.  New leaders emerged, and demonstrations and protests began to be organised – far faster and more efficiently than if people had relied on leaflets, noticeboards, face to face meetings or even just phone calls and emails.
-          And it seems there was one final accelerating effect of social media during the protests: that of mobilizing ordinary people to act, by giving everyone a voice, making them feel informed and involved and crucially, not alone but part of something much bigger.

I wouldn’t presume to liken even the most burning corporate platform (no, not even Nokia’s) to the Tunisian or Egyptian regimes, nor the most radical internal change programme to the subsequent revolutions.  But it is impossible not to be inspired by the way we’ve all seen social media tools help to bring about previously unthinkable change so quickly, simply and cheaply.   Could it do the same in your organisation?

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers

 Ta- dah for the annual BCS MP Web awards - taking place, after a year long election hiatus, next month at the House of Commons.  Having (mind-bogglingly) reviewed every single MP's website, the team at the Chartered Institute of Technology have come up with a shortlist of 77 digital-political paragons.  These will be whittled down to the final list of winners by a panel consisting of Quentin Letts of the Daily Mail,  politics professor Rachel Gibson, Mark Say of Government Computing magazine and Matthew Windle of the UK Youth Parliament.   The judges say they are looking for sites which are not only navigable and accessible and ""use social media", but also "engage, excite, provide information" and "encourage two-way communication between MPs and their constituents".

My strong hunch is that this final criteria - "two-way communication" - will sort the men and women from the boys and girls.    Most MPs and councillors would be in favour of flying purple turtles if they would broadcast their name and mugshot for minimum effort and cost - and for that not-very-well-disguised-reason, many MPs have duly added Facebook bells and Flickr whistles to their web presence.  But even the most digitally-competent of our elected representatives have yet to get the message that social media is NOT just another broadcast channel to share pictures of themselves making a "royal visit" to the local school or hospital, or to boom out their strident opinions on Trident.

Social media is about having two-way conversations with people who care about the same things you do, in the (online) places where they spend time: an incredibly powerful idea with the potential to transform the very distant, opaque and slightly cynical relationship that most people have with their MP.  Sadly, for the vast majority of MPs, the prospect of opening doors to these conversations is still a  horrifying one, which is a great shame for themselves, their constituents, and democracy.   For that reason I hope this year's BCS winners won't be the usual suspect celebrity bloggers, but the band of brave and few MPs who are daring to engage genuinely with us online.

My own interactive MP favourites:
Andrea Leadsom MP and Charlie Elphicke MP: clean sites by Politics Web that showcase innovative chat maps

Grant Shapps MP and Barry Gardiner MP  very unusually for MPs, have discussion forums on their websites. Shapps has vastly more traffic - partly because he makes more effort with social media (one of most followed MPs on Twitter) but mainly because his forum is at the very centre of his site and it's focused on the local community.
Alec Shelbrooke MP combines blogging and polling nicely to invite feedback on specific bills before he debates and votes
Alison McGovern MP:  has a Twitter feed on her site, and crucially, uses it to invite opinion, not just broadcast it.
Kevin Brennan MP:  puts reader comments and tweets right at the centre of his homepage
Mark Reckless MP, who manages to regularly update a dazzling array of social media sites (blogger, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and Flickr), although they could be better integrated

Lynn Featherstone MP and Damian Collins MP:  just for being lifestreamers, though there could be more evidence of reader interaction on their sites.
Finally: Mark Pritchard MP, whose website isnt remotely interactive but is the most incredibly regularly updated.

The secret diary of a new media dodger, by M.P. aged 44 and a half

Just come back from a fascinating few days as a fly on the wall (watching, listening and tweeting...) at a party conference.  I went to understand how digital and social media is currently being used in the democratic process; where the government and elected representatives still need to do more work to connect and engage with people: particularly Gen Y millenials (those born after 1980); and what all this could mean in the context of the "Big Society".

Among the most encouraging things was meeting a vanguard of really savvy MPs and Assembly Members, who've managed to fund and create imaginative, informative websites incorporating bang up to date social media tools.  Even better, they are personally generating regular blogs and tweets and responding to comments, giving all their voters a better opportunity to get to know and interact with their elected representatives.  (See these two great Tory and LibDem examples!)

There are also encouraging signs from central and local government leaders of a new attitude to consulting tax payers, service users and employeees: using digital crowdsourcing tools such as Delib (used for HMT's recent Spending Challenge) and Counter Context to gather and evaluate new ideas, rather than carrying out a prescriptive box ticking exercises.    I also heard many inspiring stories from councils, companies and charities using new media to engage and motivate young people in their communities - such as ITV's www.itvfixers.com - and I think we'll see a lot more of this under the Big Society agenda.

More frustratingly are those MPs, MEPs and Councillors still stuck in the Stone Age:  either avoiding new media entirely or possibly worse still, regarding it as just another channel for broadcasting their name and opinions.  Expenses fallout is partly to blame, but is not a good enough excuse.  Greater transparency and visibility is the medicine to recover from that, not less.

Other excuses given by MPs during the week included:
the boring:  "I don't have time", "I have too many Blackberries",
the verbose:  "I can't say anything in less than 140 characters",
the narcississtic: "I won't start tweeting because if I stopped the media would demand to know why"
....and the disarmingly honest: "I'm afraid I'd get drunk and tweet something by accident".