Twitter Call

By now, most are familiar with how the use of Twitter publicized actions in Iran and the contested election. In this case, the use of Twitter as a medium of communication was rather organic. Major news outets were left in the dust as the the real news of the election got to people virally over the web.

There are a few other coordinated campaings that try to bring attention via Twitter to a certain cause.

One is a move to get Microsoft to abide by current email standards in their new release of Outlook 2010. The website, fixoutlook.com, calls upon twitters to mention the url in order to get the attention of Microsoft. The campaign resulted in a response from the company as well as became on of the trending topics on Twitter.

Another similar use, is the site blamedrewscancer.com. While the site is more about being light-hearted in the face of cancer, there is also a fund raising element. With each mention on Twitter a dollar will be donated to fight cancer.

I expect to see more creative uses of twitter, and hash tags in the future. The immediacy and power of Twitter was clear after the Iran election and many will try a similar thing for their causes.

Welcome

The idea of search protest comes from watching things like google trends and buzz feeds. With the tracking and social promotion of items published via the web, its easy to see what everyone is looking at and reading. It also takes a page from the flash mob playbook.

If enough people put in a search term on a particular topic or promote a certain blog or article, its possible to draw attention to a single cause or idea.

The aim of a search protest would be to calibrate users via social communities to search for set key words on a specific day or hour in hopes to draw attention to a cause.
It is also possible to drive users to manipulate other types of feeds, most emailed, or most searched list.

I'll mainly post a few examples, and hopefully come up with a search protest to experiment with soon.