8 Social Media Lessons From #iranelection

This afternoon, I had the privilege of sitting in on a panel at the 2009 Personal Democracy Forum that discussed the social media lessons we have learned as a result of the Iranian Elections (or #iranelection on Twitter). Here is a list that was presented on the panel of 8 social media lessons we have learned from #iranelection, according to techPresident's Nancy Scola:

1. Old media and traditional media need to find a way to complement each other. I alluded to this in CNN's response to the Iran Election in an earlier blog post.
2. Social media does not have a good system for establishing meta-tags to our content leaving our social media followers/fans/readers with little context to what we are talking about.
3. Retweeting on Twitter doesn't have the ability to link back to the original tweet. This could become a problem in the future.
4. With the emergence of live-blogging, it is becoming increasingly difficult to link to content internally. For example, if I was to tweet something along the lines of "When I said earlier today..." there would be no way to direct my followers to what I said earlier in the day.
5. We need to teach social media literacy.
6. It is worth asking ourselves whether or not we are applying our energies for causes in the best possible format. For example, during the #iranelection protests, everyone (including myself) changed their Twitter profile icons to have a green background. Was that the best use of social energy?
7. Learned from #iranelection that if something is "trending" on Twitter people assume that issue or cause is progressive which may not always be the case in the future.
8. Connecting people via the internet is a political act - even when you don't realize it. For years, Iran has established themselves as one of the blogging capitols of the world. What may not have been clear to the Iranian people years ago when they were beginning to use these tools is how the tools would eventually be leveraged for political action.
   

In addition to this list, I found the following tidbits of information particularly fascinating and insightful:

• With the Iran Election news on Twitter, it was a very small portion of the Twitterverse who was actually breaking significant pieces of news. Most use of 3iranelection came from people retweeting that content. Scola quoted Robert Mackey of the New York Times : "Retweeting is reporting."
• According to Olivia Ma with YouTube, since the protests in Iran, YouTube has only seen roughly 10% of their normal traffic from Iran.
• Ma called #iranelection the establishment of the "Citizen powered news bureau."
• Traditional media are now using "crowd-sourced fact checking" when trying to confirm news broken by social media.