In this blog series we will discuss the role of social media and traditional media in shaping Social Movements. Social Movements of the kind witnessed in the recent past such as anti-government protests in the Middle East and North Africa, occupy Wall street protests in the US and Anna Hazare movement in India have all been built upon groundswell support. One common characteristic of these social movements is that they have all leveraged the power of Internet and social media to galvanise their actions for maximum effect. The activists leveraged social media destinations such as Twitter, Youtube, Facebook and various blogging platforms for publicizing protests and mobilizing fellow supporters and dissidents. Protesters used these platforms for coordinating across distributed protest groups, scheduling and organizing protests as well as informing the world about these protests. While social movements were gathering momentum across geographies, the role of traditional media such as television and print was not just restricted to reporting the social movements via their conventional channels. Traditional media extensively leveraged the very same social media destinations used by protesters and dissidents, not just to report news, but also to exert their influence on these social movements. This has interesting implications for social movements, online interest group formation, role of social media as well as role of traditional media. Understanding the active role played by traditional media in influencing social movements by leveraging social media would help to establish the extent of influence of various entities on the success or failure of groundswell social movements and marketing campaigns. This blog series is a preview of our forthcoming research paper which attempts to analyze the role of traditional media in leveraging social media particularly during the Anna Hazare movement in India. We analyse the archived Tweet feeds, Google Trends data as well as media coverage of protest movements and explore the reasons as to how and why traditional media amplified the sentiments of protesters by leveraging social media and their role in influencing the pace of social movements. We applied Social Network Analysis techniques to better understand the role of various entities involved in the movement. The results provide interesting insights into the interplay between social movements, social media and traditional media. In this first blog, we list the data sources, methodology and metrics used for the analysis. This will be followed by the next blog where we examine the role of key entities/nodes in the network. This final blog will wrap the discussion with key insights and implications of the analysis for social movements and the parallels we can draw for marketing campaigns and organisational implications.
The Anna Hazare movement was Tweeted with two prominent hashtags #annahazare and #janlokpal. The data used for our Social Network Analysis included Tweets with the hashtag #annahazare. We analysed about 25,000 tweets between Aug 24 2011 and Oct 08 2011. The final data used for analysis had 7365 nodes and 14,666 edges. The network analysis and visualization program Gephi, the open-source graph visualization and manipulation software was used to derive the below network graph. Each node in the graph represents a Twitter id and the edges or the connections represent the interaction pattern across these nodes. In the next blog we will discuss more network statistic and the roles played by various entities in the protest movement.
