Social Media and the Worldwide Occupy Movement

Occupy Campaign

What started out as a 1,000 person protest on Wall Street in New York City, the Occupy campaign became a global movement within a month. Thousands of people in over 900 cities around the world have staged similar protests. World-wide the message of the protests is rather loose, speaking generally to corporate greed and dissatisfaction at the growing disparity between rich and poor, and messages at each event seemed to also be localized to speak to handling of affairs related to the global economic recession by their respective governments. In North America people rallied around the catchphrase “we are the 99 per cent.”

Social media seems to be the catalyst in mobilizing so many people so quickly to gain consensus and stage a worldwide protest on one day - October 15 - only one month after the

Occupy Wall Street

event. It started with a hashtag #OccupyWallStreet. The campaign used other social media tools as well, including facebook and YouTube and all these channels had a LOT of activity. For example, in only 2 weeks, there were hundreds of facebook pages created in support of the cause and the audience grew to 1.2 million.  It seems the strategy in the use of social media was to mobilize people to attend the rallies, but also connect the protestors to make their voices even louder. Social media helped the movement spread quickly and be replicated in other parts of the world. There are tons of videos on YouTube encouraging participation, official or unofficial it is not clear, with some even tailored to target specific groups of people.

Spurred a kind of online revolution Protestors responded by attending the October 15 rallies. Social media also gave the movement legs to continue discussing of the issues and continue the revolution online.  Protestors documented and posted the demonstrations to social media as they happened, providing real time news updates. People are blogging and commenting online about the events and there are also many videos on YouTube created by random citizens voicing their support of the cause. Location based servers were used by some protestors to help find one another at the protests.

What is the message?

Millions were mobilized and the key messages of the campaign are somewhat lost due to lack of effective community management for the multitude of sub communities that formed around various messages of dissatisfaction. The “we are the 99%” was the consensus, but it was a platform for MANY different messages of opposition that were expressed by millions of protestors using social media. So many protestors used social media to document the events and voice their own opinions as to what the movement stands for that the main message for Occupy is diluted. With so many sub communities formed on the issues, it requires a lot of community management that does not appear to be there. Further, the organizers are an obscure grassroots group who is rarely mentioned in the coverage I’ve seen.  The lack of ownership, the lack of key messages, and lack of control over the messages makes this movement chaotic. Now that the 99% are engaged, what happens after the rallies are over? Who is listening to whom? Who is influencing whom? The movement therefore, might just be a campaign that will lose momentum due to the lack of community management.

Related reading: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/17/us-wallstreet-protests-social-idUSTRE79G6E420111017