It’s all over the news how Iran’s use of Twitter during the election process and the protests has been very successful. With real time updates, some more descriptive than others, Twitter enabled Iranians to give the world a glimpse of their daily life. The TIME article from last week titled “Iran’s Protests: Twitter, the Medium of the Movement” was very well written.
Twitter continues to evolve at an alarming rate since its founders brought it alive in 2006. With its exceptional mobility and popularity, the 140-characters-or-less concept allows for constant newsflashes. We don’t know how Twitter will transform in the next few months, but it is great to see the application being used for useful purposes other than posting junk. Iran has done a good job to use Twitter effectively.
The lesson learned from a PR perspective is that we constantly owe it to ourselves and our clients to filter information, scan followers and updates in order to get to the core of this vehicle’s value as a social network.
Tags: politics and twitter, twitter and iran, twitter pr tool
Thank you Didi for the wide range of topics you cover in this blog, for broadening our horizon and illustrating how PR is present in many more fields than we imagine!
This “Twitter Revolution” in Iran - as it is referred to by the Medias now - is a great example of how politics and social medias can combine. It reminds me of how blogs and forums enhanced the debate of the last presidential campaign in the US, and other political campaigns in the world. I remember reading an article about it, described as “Viral politics”.
Yes. The combination of Twitter and mobile phone access has really changed the dynamics of political revolution. Poor Iran, they weren’t smart enough to keep their people poor and illiterate like North Korea. Once you have a reasonably well educated populace and instant access to conversation through your cell phone (as well as those pesky cameras on the back of all of our phones) its awfully hard to quell a rebellion.
There is no doubt that social medias are a huge step up throughout the Internet. They are huge tools for publicists and journalists (like me!). But as they can be used to inform people about certain events that haven’t media coverage, they can also be used to misinform, manipulate and misguide. And assuming you were not told to do so, in the end you will end up with a bad reputation or worse, fired. Sooner or later the truth always comes out, so a journalist or a PR executive should be very careful how he or she uses them. Didi writes above: “and most of us know that all we really have in this life is our name”, I will simply replace the word “life” with “job”…