Don't Let Iran's 'Twitter Revolution' Make You Stupid

Posted by Mitch Wagner on June 19, 2009 05:54 PM

In two short years, Twitter has gone from a startup to celebrity plaything. Now, in the case of the election demonstrations in Tehran, it's apparently a serious tool of U.S. foreign policy. This leaves IT managers in government and business with the important role of steering their organizations between the twin dangers that face any fashionable emerging technology: Irrational exuberance on the one hand, and excessive skepticism on the other.

The voice of irrational exuberance says: Twitter is revolutionary! It'll change everything! Throw away all the old rules, Twitter is here! It's the biggest thing since ... well .. the last big thing we were really, really excited about last year.

The voice of excessive skepticism says: Twitter is stupid. It's just a waste of time. I don't care what a bunch of losers have for breakfast. Also: Get off my lawn.

Twitter became government business Monday when Jared Cohen, a U.S. State Department official, emailed Twitter to ask them to postpone scheduled maintenance of its global network "which would have cut off service while Iranians were using Twitter to swap information and inform the outside world about the mushrooming protests around Tehran." Secretary of Defense Robert Gates subsequently called Twitter a huge strategic asset.

Now that Twitter has gained such prominence, we're going to see government and business using Twitter and other social media tools more often. Now is the time when IT managers need to understand Twitter's usefulness and limitations.

In particular, we need to remember that what's going on Iran is not a Twitter Revolution. It is a revolution of people -- courageous, inspiring young people who are putting their frail bodies in front of bullets and tear gas.

Moreover, Twitter isn't all that popular among protesters:

Iran experts and social networking activists say that while Iranian election protesters have certainly used social media tools, no particular technology has been instrumental to organizers' ability to get people on the street. Indeed, most of the organizing has occurred through far more mundane means: SMS text messages and word of mouth. Sysomos, a Toronto-based Web analytics company that researches social media, says there are only about 8,600 Twitter users whose profiles indicate they are from Iran.

"I think the idea of a Twitter revolution is very suspect," says Gaurav Mishra, co-founder of 20:20 WebTech, a company that analyzes the effects of social media. "The amount of people who use these tools in Iran is very small and could not support protests that size."

(Note that you'll probably find a lot more than 8,600 Twitter users whose profiles indicate they're from Iran now, many Twitter users changed their location to "Tehran" to show support for the protests, and to confuse the Iranian authorities, who were reportedly searching for protesters by searching on their Twitter profiles.)

Other social media tools are also playing a role in the revolution, most notably YouTube for distributing video, and Facebook, which opposition candidate Hussein Mousavi used to organize when the Iranian authorities blocked him from traditional media.

So the main task of the IT manager at this part of the hype cycle is to put the brakes on runaway enthusiasm. Twitter isn't a magic wand that you can wave over any problem and make it go away. "We need to get on Twitter!" isn't the answer to anything, any more than "We need to get a Web site!" was in 1995, or "We need an island in Second Life!" was in 2006. Twitter (and the Web and Second Life) needs to be part of a comprehensive communications strategy.

Equally important: IT managers need to guard against the inevitable Twitter backlash. The people who think that Twitter is useless and for losers are in hiding now, but they'll be back. As I write this -- 1:45 pm PDT Friday, June 19 -- Twitter is at the peak of its hype cycle, and the backlash will begin ... well, probably before supper actually.

And some of the backlash will be justified. Most of the people who sign up for Twitter don't even use it. Twitter isn't profitable and doesn't have a business model. It could go the way of PointCast or Friendster: Fast-climbing technology companies that crash even more quickly.

And yet the real value of Twitter isn't in the specific platform or company, it's in a style of communication: Short messages that anyone can read, broadcast in realtime, like a single chatroom the size of the whole world, with the ability for users to subscribe to other individual users, and to filter for keywords, so that the users can easily filter the conversations they want from the noise of millions of other people. Twitter is like blogging, but it's easier to set up and use, which makes it extremely easy to participate.

That style of communication is powerful, it's being adopted by other companies -- most notably Facebook -- and it's not going anywhere soon.

While Twitter isn't key to the protests going on in Iran, it's an important part of the protesters' toolsets. It gets the protesters visibility and support around the world, when the government has effectively cracked down on international journalism. And that's something that IT managers have to keep front-and-center: Twitter isn't a magic wand that can be waved at problems to make them go away, and it's not garbage either. It's just a tool -- but it's a powerful one.



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