Social Media - it Feels True

by Vadim Kagan, President

Jul. 3, 2009 - Many people managed to downplay the implications of the impact of non-traditional media of the last two US elections.  Indeed, as social media has slowly crept into our lives, we use it every day for mundane tasks without thinking about the power it can wield.

If there were any doubts that social media have arrived, they went the way of the Kodachrome over the last several weeks. No longer a mere pastime for geeks with no life looking for free videos and obsessively friend- and de-friending teenagers, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter and Facebook have demonstrated what social media can do during the days of post-election unrest in Iran. With the Reuters correspondents and CNN camera crews banned from the streets of Tehran, has the camera phone become the new press accreditation card?

To a large extent, this phenomenon is a demonstration of the laws of supply and demand. Old news is not news, and we want our news now. Nielsen, in an article (actually, a blog post ) titled “The Iran Election and Social Media: The New News Revolution” (http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/global/the-iran-election-and-social-media-the-new-news-revolution)

provides an interesting series of snapshots, demonstrating how “news by people for people” is fulfilling the need brought about by our ever-growing thirst for more information.  When traditional channels don’t provide up- to-the-minute updates, people will find ones that do.  One of the more intriguing aspects of this phenomenon is that social media is often serves as leads to “real” news stories, which is great for everyone.  The most sensational “misinformed”  (whoops!) story we found was one in which two reporters posted on their Facebook pages that defeated candidate  Mir Hossein Mousavi had been arrested, and reputable journalists repeated the story with such frequency and intensity that and it became a “top news story” on  www.Balatrin.com.

See http://tehranbroadcast.com/What-s-the-hurry-Mousavi-has-been.html for how this happened.

In a way, this is a natural progression of the “always-on-instant-access” model the world seems to have evolved into. From “goods” (newspapers, TV, radio) via “services” (customized newsletters, video clips on remand) we have arrived to the “information” stage, where each and every one of us can be - is - an active node in the global news net. Extremely low cost of entry (what can possibly beat a free model?) and broad availability of the “tools of trade” (and who does not have a cell phone?) make social media accessible to all. Ironically, developing countries where mobile phone networks have taken place of a more traditional “old world” copper wire infrastructure, are better prepared to take advantage of this newfound “brave new world” of citizen news.

Of course, “tweeting” or posting something on Facebook doesn’t mean that anyone will see it.  You need to have either influence or knowledge how to help people find it.  With the proliferation of “how to” articles, this is quickly becoming a non-issue.  I recommend the following:

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/track-iran-election-protests-online-social-media-search/11274/,

http://mashable.com/2009/06/14/new-media-iran/

Working for a sentiment analysis company, I am naturally interested in tracking the opinions expressed in and catalyzed by this new global data source. There are many efforts in this area (http://tweetsentiments.com is using openAmplify service, and Twitter’s own Summize is probably the engine behind http://search.twitter.com/sentiment)

While there are obvious issues of scale (does anyone know how many posts total were there on the events in Iran?) to me the most interesting issue is the one of the credibility. There were well publicized cases of inaccurate (or at least rather subjective) reporting during the Iran unrest; we found at least five false Twitter profiles for Iran’s Mr. Ahmadinejad without spending too much time on the task.  How does one tell if a tweet is to be believed?   This is not a new problem. Wikipedia had to go through similar issues, for example. Reputation matters, and that’s one why Google search results are, in general, trustworthy. In the case of news from Iran, an excellent site http://balatarin.com/  is using a similar approach, one’s credibility score needs to be high for the posts to make it to the top.  Of course, in a sensational story such as Mousavi’s arrest (which was not the case) even reputable social media sites can be overwhelmed with rumors that “seem true”.

In retrospect, we can assess what has happened, and that’s largely because we have had time on our side and tools to separate the information wheat from the chaff.  As the election was happening, we were limited, because social media allowed information to flow freely and we did not know what was truth, what was fiction, and who was actually saying what.  But real-time sentiment analysis can help discern what people find affinity with, or believe.  It’s an early indicator of change, and coupled with social and traditional media, we can have our finger on the pulse of a nation.

In the meantime, let me leave you with this thought:  http://www.cartoonistgroup.com/store/add.php?iid=35734

Tags: iran

This entry was posted on Friday, July 3rd, 2009 at %I:%M %p and is filed under From the SentiMetrix team, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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