The Ethical Optimist

I recently did a conference call with a local executive women’s networking group and suggested they use Twitter to alert members to upcoming events, articles about women in business etc., and was shot down. One of the group’s members thought Twitter was all hype (welcome to backwoods NJ, folks). Her exact words were, “I don’t really think many people use it.”

Ha! I bet Iran’s President (or is that Dictator) Ahmadinejad wishes it were so.

Just in case you’ve been living under a rock, Twitter is making news this week because of its role in the flow of information regarding the Iranian elections. According to Time:

The U.S. State Department doesn’t usually take an interest in the maintenance schedules of dotcom start-ups. But over the weekend, officials there reached out to Twitter and asked them to delay a network upgrade that was scheduled for Monday night. The reason? To protect the interests of Iranians using the service to protest the presidential election that took place on June 12. Twitter moved the upgrade to 2 p.m. P.T. Tuesday afternoon — or 1:30 a.m. Tehran time.

The article notes that because Twitter is mobile, fast, easy and personal, it’s the ideal medium for today’s modern protester. (Imagine if our founding fathers had Twitter?)

This makes Twitter practically ideal for a mass protest movement, both very easy for the average citizen to use and very hard for any central authority to control. The same might be true of e-mail and Facebook, but those media aren’t public. They don’t broadcast, as Twitter does. On June 13, when protests started to escalate, and the Iranian government moved to suppress dissent both on- and off-line, the Twitterverse exploded with tweets from people who weren’t having it, both in English and in Farsi. While the front pages of Iranian newspapers were full of blank space where censors had whited-out news stories, Twitter was delivering information from street level, in real time.

What interested me most about this story are the ramifications wrought by these new media technologies. In many countries where censorship abounds, citizens now have a voice and source of information. Governments are being forced to deal with real time transparency. It reminds me of Thomas Friedman’s books the Lexus and the Olive Tree and The World is Flat. Once people have access to information, it’s hard to put a lid on spreading it. That said, these new information channels also have their issues in that you don’t know who’s really tweeting and it is hard to verify the information. Numerous reports noted that the Iranian government was using Twitter to distort the truth or misinform, but there is no way to tell who’s on it and what side they are truly on.

Businesses take note…the next consumer revolution may be right outside your virtual doors! Are you ready?

The Iranian government tried to shut down key websites and IP addresses to freeze the flow of information. (I’d like to see an American business try it…not gonna happen). Apparently, they were not terribly successful because information continued to flow.

The article summarized it nicely, and I’d like to share it because it relates not only to the election in Iran, but it also relates to corporate crisis communication and there is a lesson to be learned:

Twitter didn’t start the protests in Iran, nor did it make them possible. But there’s no question that it has emboldened the protesters, reinforced their conviction that they are not alone and engaged populations outside Iran in an emotional, immediate way that was never possible before. President Ahmadinejad — who happened to visit Russia on Tuesday — now finds himself in a court of world opinion where even Khrushchev never had to stand trial. Totalitarian governments rule by brute force, and because they control the consensus worldview of those they rule. Tyranny, in other words, is a monologue. But as long as Twitter is up and running, there’s no such thing.