Wael Ghonim, a marketing manager for Google, played a key role in organizing the January 25 protest by reaching out to Egyptian youths on Facebook. Ghonim was arrested in Cairo and imprisoned for 12 days. After his release he talked to CNN and he said social media was responsible for Egyptian uprising. He thanked Facebook for the same. Here is an excerpt from his interview

“I want to meet Mark Zuckerberg one day and thank him. I’m talking on behalf of Egypt. This revolution started online. This revolution started on Facebook. This revolution started in June 2010 when hundreds of thousands of Egyptians started collaborating content. We would post a video on Facebook that would be shared by 60,000 people on their walls within a few hours. I’ve always said that if you want to liberate a society just give them the Internet.”

Yes, this is the power of Internet. And, social media as a new tool on internet is getting maximum momentum to collaborate and show the power of masses. It’s not just applicable to brands and products but even politics are run on social media.

Social Media Election

Election is like a war. It is fought on ground, locally, internationally; in person, on the news and now also on social media. Barack Obama’s presidential bid in 2008 is one of such examples. The recently held British General Election is termed as the first social media election. Check out this article which talks about “first British general election in the social media age – what difference has it made?” The article narrates

“This is the one campaign where it might have a specific role, where we can concentrate on it specifically. Next time it will just be part of every political correspondent’s job. By the next election, social media will be woven into our daily lives – and probably we’ll have not just general polls, but indicators of how our constituencies’ mood is changing. Are we ready for that? We may have to be.”

Role of ContextMine

As we see the radical impact we know that social media strategy is going to be one of the key strategies for any political campaign. To derive that strategy, execute that and monitor that would require a tool which can deal with huge amount of contextual data added with customized business intelligence solutions. ContextMine fits to that requirement.

• Listen – The first and foremost strategy on social media could be to listen, listen the buzz it is creating, listen the trend it is setting and listen the way it is moving. Unless you get the messages and understand views you can’t develop a good strategy to utilize it. ContextMine helps to filter out social media messages based on your need. You can create a context and the tool will take care of filtering the millions of messages floating on hundreds of different channels.
• Engage – Once you have the relevant messages and details of people who are generating those messages, you would like to engage them. ContextMine helps in engaging content generators. It helps to identify active people and influential people. The strategy to engage them could be different. You may like to target most influential people first as they are the people who are influencing others to join forces. They are the opinion leaders of the society. The collaborative environment provide by ContextMine is the best dashboard to engage your opinion leaders and others who are creating the buzz.
• Optimize – Social Media is a collection of many different platforms and correcting one will not cover the entire media. You have to listen all of them. You have to engage people at every corner and you will have to optimize your resources to quickly glance into all the major channels and all the major updates. One of the major USPs of ContextMine is to provide you a bird’s eye view on top messages from almost all popular channels. You can quickly glance through them and if needed act on them in real-time.

Social Media is not changing the way democracy functions, not as of yet. But, it is surely changing the way people collaborate to take major decisions. Egypt is just one success story, there are many more to come. ContextMine as a product will help you to optimize your efforts and see the stories folding in real-time.