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What Happens to Social Media After a Twitter Revolution?

Two years after the Arab Spring, questions still remain as to how much social media actually helped fuel and drive the uprisings that arose in Tunisia and swept across the region. But regardless of what happened during those Twitter-fueled revolutions, what's happened afterward?

That's what social media analytics firm Crimson Hexagon and Sanitas International wanted to find out when it decided to analyze tweets coming out of Egypt, Libya and even Syria, where there still is a war going on. The results of its 3-month study, which will be discussed in a panel at SXSW on Sunday, underscore the changes these countries are undergoing.

Nobody has really talked about what happens when people put their flags away and go home.

Crimson Hexagon turned to Twitter and crafted specific keywords to analyze the tweets. That's how the authors of the study were able to have an idea about what the population of these countries we're talking about online, according to Elizabeth Breese, an analyst at Crimson Hexagon.

The main discovery of the study is that after the uprisings brought down decades-old regimes, "citizens in Egypt and Libya use social media to talk about revolution and state-building in two distinct registers: instrumental and interpretative," the study's abstract says.

In Egypt, that means that citizens are both expressing their opinions and views of the current political atmosphere and talking about the new institutions and how to build a new government. Spanning from February 2011 to June 2012, the study analyzed around 12 million tweets in Arabic and more than one million in English. The results underline how the population shifted its focus from looking back and reflecting on the revolution, to looking forward and focusing on new state institutions and the elections.

Before the election period, from February 2011 until November of the same year, 54% of the tweets analyzed were "reflections on the revolution." After that, and until mid-January 2012, only 26% of tweets were about the uprising, and the rest were about the elections and state institutions. From February until June, tweets about revolutionary activities dropped to 10%, according to the study abstract.

The picture in Libya is significantly different, according to the data. After the death of Gaddafi, in October 2011 and until December of the same year, depending on the language of the tweets, the people were talking about different things. In English more tweets were about military clashes, while in Arabic most of the conversations were about state-building.

Most interestingly, Libyan people seemed to struggle to move on more than Egyptians. Even months after Gaddafi's death, more than one-third of of conversation in both languages were about "the punishment and fate of Gaddafi's family," and "the crimes of the Gaddafi era," according to the abstract.

Sanitas and Crimson Hexagon decided to analyze tweets from Syria too, even though the country is still at war. Unsurprisingly, most tweets (more than 60% in both Arabic and English) in Syria are about war clashes, violence and coping with death. Perhaps unexpectedly, only 7% of tweets in English and 4% in Arabic criticize the U.N. and call for international intervention.

Check out the Infographic below to see some of the results of the study:

Why collaborative education model needs social networks?

Recently in a stunning announcement Atos, the European consulting firm announced that they would be moving away from corporate emails. So in the next three years Atos would officially sunset its email clients across its global locations.

I do remember my days as a B-school student where most of my time was spent mailing reports and research reports across my study group. I remember that I did almost 20-30 mails a day to the same set of people.

Collaborative efforts like research do require a lot of information exchange among members of the group. As this exchange is in the form of huge documents e-mail was the chosen form of transfer. But those were the days before the advent of social networks.

Connecting - Young Users via Social Media V/s
Older users via Email

Today our Toastmasters club uses Facebook extensively to transfer documents like training materials and members list across the club. All a member has to do is to log into the Facebook page of the club to access all materials.

Again these documents are regularly updated with the latest training material and any additions there of. A similar approach is developing across research organizations who prefer to use their internal social network tools to good effect.

But I personally feel that we have not not even scratched the surface. I would like to hear from you, as to how things have changed in the research and collaboration field due to advent of social media?

Why Research needs Social Media?

Research has often put excessive demands on the virtual infrastructure of any organization. If we look at the significant innovations that have come out in the last decade most of them were created because of the need for the research community to collaborate. Tim Berners Lee who is the father of world wide web (www) created the network so that research scientists at CERN could share information.

Similarly Google came out of the need for Stanford Research scientists to have access to all research data.

In the current context Social media could very well be the next step. This will not only encourage greater collaboration between scientists across the globe but also lead to cross functional participation in a particular activity.

One can imagine the possibilities if engineers, Ecologists, Chemical Engineers and designers could collaborate across continents on a new automobile technology.
Not only the knowledge sharing would be fast, it will also be real time and all the scientists require is internet connection. This will also help scientists to not to depend on large and expensive infrastructure.

Secondly activities like market research can be carried out on social media in real time as well. Most networks like LinkedIn already have the facility of setting up polls on the sites. A more advanced application like survey Monkey can be sued to create a questionnaire and it can circulated among the target cohort. Also as some social networks have logical grouping like Google Plus which has circles, this activity is less time consuming.

But there are some barriers to extensive use of Social Media for research

1) Security- Data Security and Data Integrity remains the biggest challenge. All Social Networks have security measures but they are not adequate to protect the integrity of scientific data.

2) Volume - If the volume of data to be exchanged is huge, social networks again could not be used for the activity. Some of the scientific data runs into Terra bytes and would require dedicated servers of their own.

There could be other challenges and this is something that may require a collaborative discussion.

So I would like to hear your views on the same. How can social Networks be best leveraged for research work?

Dr Vikram Venkateswaran is a marketing professional with almost 10 years of experience. He can be followed on twitter @drvikram. He also blogs at www.doctersoccer.blogspot.com