Take It to the Streets: Using Social Media for Activism

One of social media’s most talked about benefits is the ability for individuals across the globe to organize and accomplish tremendous things, particularly at the grassroots level. DigiActive, an organization dedicated to aiding grassroots activists use technology to increase their impact, recently created two excellent reference guides for individuals and organizations: An Activist’s Guide to Twitter and An Activist’s Guide to Facebook. The guides are quick to read, succinct, and basic enough for new technology users to understand.

In addition to providing a basic description of the Internet tools, each guide provides an outline of steps in organizing activist campaigns, emphasizing the use of either Twitter or Facebook. What I found most interesting and important is that the first step for both is understanding the intentions of the campaign. An activist online campaign should be treated like any other strategic campaign: before any action can occur, there has to be an understanding of the overall goals and objectives as well as established messages and target audiences. While Twitter and Facebook reach millions of individuals around the globe, not having a clear purpose and direction makes the use of these tools – or any tool for that matter – irrelevant.

The other notable step in their recommendations, besides creating Twitter or Facebook accounts and reaching out to key individuals, is remembering to expand out across multiple channels and platforms. Although it is important to build up a base of supporters and fellow activists on Twitter or Facebook, there also has to be integration with offline actions and activities as well as other websites such as blogs, YouTube, or sites of partnering organizations in order to truly reach a key audience. Activists and organizations have to understand that people seek out information in many places and won’t trust information if it’s coming from solely one source; however, if people hear the same messages repeated from key influentials from multiple areas are sharing the same messages, it gains credibility and traction.

One of the readings that Prof. Rosenblatt assigned this week was a post from his own blog entitled, “Organizing on the Social Web: A Cold Blast from the Past.” The bulk of the blog post is actually a reprint of an essay written by Milton John Kleim called, “On Tactics and Strategies for USENET.” USENET was an early social network on the Internet – one that was dedicated to the Aryan Resistance. In his essay, Kleim outlines a number of strategies for promoting the Aryan message. While frightening in content, Kleim makes multiple salient points that are essential to online organization today: the need to spread core messages across multiple channels; creating clear, brief, and interesting points that can be easily forwarded to others; and the importance of including key themes in every method of communication. It was disconcerting to read the essay and know what the activists were striving for, but at the same time, it was fascinating to see that Kleim understood core principles of social networking and online organizing years before some of today’s leading experts. It goes to show that these principles can be used for a variety of purposes, both good and bad, and it puts more responsibility in the hands of activists and their audiences to recognize and promote efforts that are truly good for the world.