Individuals and authority groups (reference groups)

If you can align yourself with individuals and groups in social networks who attract other people, the road ahead will be simpler. This is important when we recall previous chapters, where we saw that the majority of people in social networks are followers, rejecting or accepting others’ opinions but not acting as leaders themselves. This is a positive point for governments wishing to direct this great energy towards their goals. Although technology has changed the views of Iranian and Arab people concerning the clergy somewhat, they can also act as authority groups. However, there is a serious problem. For instance, in Iran, the clerics simply do not take part in social networks because they have rejected technology and have fought against it; their presence in the media will therefore prompt different reactions. Hence the need for them to make changes in their views on the technology and to be present in these networks is very pressing in the networks and the issue is vital, as it could be argued that an unnecessary battle between religion and technology will lead to the destruction of theocracy. On the other hand, since the social media in Arab countries and Iran are devoid of religious and governmental forces, things have been easy for their opponents. Another point that was again neglected by governments is that it is not necessary for these authorities or nodes in social networks to be real people, but different tools can be deployed in order to become such a node. However, to what extent these people can influence others in times of crisis is unclear, and thus using the people who are influential in the real world can be associated with a higher degree of confidence. Another issue in the Arab countries and Iran is that throughout history, individualism as well as the failure of most parties has made prominent people in these countries responsible for attracting others, whereas this task is carried out by the parties themselves in many developed countries and represents another potential opportunity for forming groups and authoritative voices in social media. Any dynamic society sees a movement in groups and authority figures during its lifetime and changes in influential groups in different communities can over a period of time easily be observed, investigated and a conclusion reached whether at present the group has a positive effect on changes.

Information literacy and media literacy

As mentioned in previous chapters, a good index can predict people’s behaviour in a web environment. If indicators such as literacy and or level of education were used in a traditional segmentation of the target market, the current degree of reaction to a message in social media is a direct function of people’s information and media literacies. This is related to some degree to individuals’ educational levels; however, there are several instances where people with little education have shown media literacy. Just as being a figure of authority attracting followers can determine people’s effectiveness, media literacy can too. The relatively low levels of media literacy in the Arab countries and Iran again provide an opportunity for governments to influence the people and there will also be the threat of influence from external pressures. Since an entire chapter has been devoted to this issue and there are adequate criteria for its measurement, this issue is not discussed further in this section.

Receiving a message what happens

Let us return to the examples of global business in order to understand the importance of this index. This example aims to show that although the social media are a way to reduce the cost of access to users, even high-performance private commercial companies have made a mistake in identifying the path along which users receive messages. This can probably be linked with more mistakes, because there are fewer experts on social media directing messages from government than there are in a big global business. Results indicating this were obtained by the author of this book from other research studies on global business. In this study, first of all, messages of corporate social responsibility (CSR) published by 50 top global companies in social media were extracted and the ways in which these messages were transferred were identified (see Table 6.1).

As expected, use of the company website was the simplest means to distribute CSR messages and a majority of the companies studied employed this method. However, two popular social media networks also contributed considerably, and at least 21 companies have used Facebook for this purpose. The Twitter network, however, was apparently more popular among the companies studied and at least 23 companies used it for the publication of CSR messages. It is probable that companies selected a suitable tool for their objectives; however, we still cannot claim this for sure. Therefore we must show on which media the companies studied became more familiar with CSR messages, and on the other hand through which media they preferred to become familiar with companies’ CSR (see Table 6.2).

It was found that customers have indeed received messages on social responsibility through instruments of the social media, though these have been used by relatively few companies. When a political crisis occurs, this gap will become more important and proper knowledge of the path for receiving messages is the gap between the survival or demise of a government. Social networks prioritise other methods in terms of the transfer rate of a message; however, rumour reduces the level of confidence in the published messages in such networks and it is probably for this reason that users do not use the network enough to receive what companies are really trying to say. This eight-month study investigated a group of 3,252 people from six Arab countries and Iran who responded to the questionnaire’s items as discussed in previous chapters. The questionnaire included questions on methods by which they preferred to receive political messages from government and the political parties. It should be noted that the issue of preference was not considered in this section and probably what actually happened was different from the results of this section. Since we intended to create a plan for the future, it would be better to know the preferences of users. In this section, users had two options. For this reason, total percentages would not come to 100% and so those media that achieved less than 15% are not shown in Table 6.3.

As seen in Table 6.3, online news sites had the greatest priority for receiving the political news from government and parties, and the level of confidence in such sites is greater than in other sites because, unlike social networks, they have a greater percentage of rumour. What can be helpful in such news sites for governments is to create targeted news which could be directly available for sites through the government itself (and not the official journals) and direct opinion along a certain path in the long term.

Degree of virtual socialisation

This section deals with whether introvert and extrovert people can be distinguished in virtual communities. It is clear that the type of reaction to any message can be a function of the introversion or extroversion of individuals; however, there is not sufficient evidence to claim that introvert people in the real world are also introvert in the virtual world because use of the secrecy feature in the social media can remove some of the obstacles presented by introversion. In this study, we divided 637 respondents to the questionnaire, all of whom were Iranian and members of Facebook and Twitter, into four groups. All respondents had been members of these networks for one to two years (with a current account).

Of the 1,831 people selected only 637 people responded to our online questionnaire (the whole period of data collection was 23 days). In fact, we tried to understand which people can be called introvert and extrovert in a virtual environment. Although the number of friends and conversations within the virtual community was low, 34% of them claimed that they had more than one account in similar virtual networks. For instance, if their main account, which was the reason for their selection as a sample in the study, was in the social network of Facebook, 34% of these people had at least another account with their name (7%), with another name (22%) or with both (5%) in the same social network. This percentage was nearly equal to 1.4% for the fourth group but there was no significance between the second and third groups. Having more accounts is usually associated with some kind of secrecy and individuals can post an opinion in one account and then post the opposite in other accounts. What was of great importance for us was their type of reaction to a positive political message and a negative political message. There was no significant difference between groups in their type of reaction to the positive and negative messages; however, over 38% of individuals in both the third and fourth groups shared their messages and/or gave a comment on them. Content analysis of these comments indicated that the reaction to such messages was logical and only a few of them responded beyond the pale to the messages. Similarly, in the first group, nearly 29% of individuals posted comments and a few also shared messages. However, content analysis of the messages in many cases (nearly half) indicated some type of agitation or extreme behaviour. Whether participants of the study are called introvert or extrovert, the results showed that those receiving the political messages must be classified according to the degree of action and reaction in the virtual environment so that appropriate messages can be designed for each group.

The producer or consumer of the content?

The experts in our study prioritised the factor of content production as the second important index of segmentation after the reference people and groups. They believed that a small number of people produced an important part of the content in the social networks and media. In order to prove the claim, 1,000 personal pages were closely investigated at random from only six countries in the Twitter network, that is, five Arab countries and Iran. The number of tweets (minus retweets) was important for the study. The investigation of the content showed that about 0.73% of these tweets belonged to 0.19% of users and 14 people out of the total 0.19% could be classified as popular, while others were ordinary. This indicated that people with greater content are a small part of the community in the social media. It should be noted that those producing content should not be confused with reference people or groups because a reference person or group may not produce a lot of content and only be selected as a reference because of their fame or popularity. Thus, if the content producers are considered to be a market segment and the consumers of that content as another sector, were governments to focus on the investment in content producers they would take a majority of the market. Again, note that if the government can attract to their side in this case the maximum or at best 0.19% of users who are producing content, the whole community in fact is under control and the cultural concerns of the government will significantly decline (although that 0.19% seems almost impossible to control). Let us look at the issue from another angle. In Iran and the Arab countries being studied, more than half of the families in the country are dependent on the government (although they may not ideologically agree with that system) owing to the fact that the government keeps all personal affairs under constant surveillance and the private sector is not as active as in developed countries. Iran’s government, encourages government personnel to be present at important religious and civil ceremonies, so the same personnel must become content producers. This requires continuous training, but at least it is better than the overthrow of the government. What the experts involved in the study insisted upon was to create cultural content and try to preserve the culture of the people. They believed that maintaining cultural roots might prove an obstacle to the collapse of the state. However, when a home-grown technology competes at the local level over time and the community gradually becomes familiar with its different aspects, it prepares itself for the correct use of the technology. In contrast, when a state is a long way from the use of important knowledge and modern technology that appear so exciting for young people with regard to their communication capabilities, the development of such technology is achieved at great speed owing to the excessive increase in demand. In practice, it is a shock to the community while people are not still ready to digest and deal properly with the technology. As seen earlier, a majority of the users in Arab countries joined the social network in a very short time, which became the reason for the lack of culture creation, and many people did not give the government a chance. However, Iran and Saudi Arabia have successfully weathered the storm in the region and now have the opportunity for cultural creation and the production of healthy content in order to change public opinion. We might think of the Internet as a cultural pathway leading to a change in the culture in two ways. First, any technology basically has a culture with respect to its origin by which the culture transfers, such as the culture of open communications or the presence of critics in the social networks. Secondly, such a technology is a confluence of different cultures, in which the cultures change each other and the dominant culture will contain a set of the features of all cultures in it and will partly retain its root characteristics. However, how do we try to become the dominant culture? In our study, two factors – language and trust – account for the most important of the barriers to the cultural development of Arab countries and Iran. On the one hand, the language used in such countries, that is Persian and Arabic, is not the dominant language in social media. Therefore cultural products can cross those countries’ borders, but it may not be possible to penetrate the international market. On the other hand, trust in the news issued by the internal media of these countries is very low and people prefer to receive necessary content from British social media. This results in some difficulties in producing content for the government. Thus, the first step to promote the production of national content is to build trust in the content produced by the internal media and also to produce the content in an international language so that, in addition to the influence of other cultures, the internal culture can be affected by the content produced. Other factors, such as national identity, can also be seen to segment the political market. However, as this has been dealt with in a previous chapter, we will not consider it again here.

What have we done?

The first content that a government or party must attend to is to use the principles of no deception and express the facts. Although we may try to gather advocates for ourselves through deception and illusion, the activities conducted must first be emphasised. What we have done so far can be transmitted to the people in several ways, such as infographics. Attempts to improve lives, welfare, education, health and so forth can be provided for the public in a comprehensive and fascinating overview. This kind of message must put greater emphasis on the dimensions of transfer rate and attractiveness, because the first step must be a very powerful one. Media such as photo sharing and YouTube, and even publishing media such as wikis have a good effect in this case.

What have others done?

This section emphasises the comparative analysis of the activities carried out by the government or party and previous governments, and the inputs and outputs are compared to each other. We will try to highlight the negative points of government opposition and parties that can be illustrated by infographics. If a new emerging party has been set up before us with no previous record (which, for example, has been much the case in Egypt where new parties have been formed), so that its negative points or weaknesses could not be highlighted, our advertising slogans and strategies must be focused on what potential negative consequences of their strategies can be expected. An important point that must be stressed here is to use people’s previous experiences. For instance, an unpleasant historical event must be indirectly evoked for the people and related to the competitors’ strategies, so that the people understand, if they support the competitor party, that such an event may happen again. When this message is provided for the people through a social media network, via a reference person or group, its effect could be doubled because the believability of that message will be increased. People trust that reference person or group, thus their message will be trusted.

The innovative content and generator of core identity

After the Iranian elections and resultant public unrest in 2009, what the group of reformers had as their winning ticket was the creation of a common identity. Thus all supporters of the reformers recognised their identity (liberal and intellectual); and such shared identity made them more coherent, so that a serious move against the government was made for the first time since 1979.This discussion is completely different from that on national identity that was mentioned in Chapter 2, and its objective was to create coherence of thought. If governments can create a coherent identity through social media, they can guide the people’s thoughts in critical circumstances as necessary. In cyberspace and in the age of globalisation, since access to information and communication is easier and faster than ever before, citizens who enter cyberspace have a greater basic tendency to get information and enjoy greater knowledge, and have incremental demands in the expectation of participating in the public affairs of their community. Governments can use this as an opportunity for an optimal and low-cost solution to several problems that have been encountered. One-dimensional orientations and inclinations are the methods that political parties in Egypt adopted after the revolution, and were then a sign of extremism and that they could not understand the phenomena and dynamic processes of identity and do not properly understand the value of different interests and tastes. On the contrary, policy and logical process based on the identity policy-makers’ feedback and the avoidance of destructive, exclusive and extreme attitudes and behaviours can be a sensible strategy to balance multiple and diverse identities. Such identity strategy has the ability to reduce stresses and conflicts effectively. When our politics content is partly based on user-generated content, it means that all requirements are seen in it and are based in continuous learning. Social networks have the most effect in content production. It is natural that the creation of a quiet environment with mutual understanding results in optimal and low-cost identity policies. However, when can such moderation can be created in identity politics?

The shareable content with prestige

Consider the Twitter page of the US president Barack Obama (@BarackObama). In addition to more than one link, most tweets make use of a lot of pictures and videos. Now look at the number of retweets. You can see that the reputation of a person such as Obama has much more power for transmitting messages. It means that a message that was issued by him once will be shared thousands of times by other viewers. Note that the retweet of a message does not mean the viewer is in absolute agreement and you may even make the decision to retweet that message in spite of disagreeing with it. Sometimes a retweet may be so that our followers know we are also followers of Barack Obama’s page. This creates some type of prestige for us. Note too this fine point, that the creation of prestige for content leads to an increase in the number of retweets. Just as buying a luxury car created prestige in the past, nowadays being a follower or doing a retweet can create prestige for some people. However, it is clear that following a person such as Obama, who is the most powerful politician in the world, differs from following a party or government in Arab and Middle Eastern countries. Our expert team believes that the young population in the Arab countries and Iran often share messages that are signs of their intellectuality; however, this requires more research in the future.

Content that creates engagement

Many Arab and Middle Eastern countries enjoy a seemingly unlimited wealth of natural resources and oil. The question raised by the people in such countries, however, is, how are these resources allocated? Why is the living standard very low in many countries in spite of their rich resources, and why is the class gap greater than in developed countries? By using social media, budget preferences can be selected in consultation with the people, and the people’s trust in the government will be increased. However, imagine that you are in a community where there is no political participation to date and you understand that you could unwittingly have a major role in government decisions. It is clear that such participation cannot have a positive result, owing to the lack of political knowledge among the citizens. The first step, then, is to build an infrastructure and educational content for the people. Most often, citizens do not have a good understanding of what participation entails, that is, they do not know what advantages participation will bring for them and how participation will affect their future. On the other hand, people in third-world countries have difficulty with corporate communication and unlike individual behaviours, collaborative behaviours are always difficult to teach. Many people consider themselves either superior or inferior to others and so they do not have enough incentive to participate. Therefore the creation of uniformity, which is the most important feature of the collaborative communication, will be very difficult. In fact, it can be argued that one reason for the lack of political participation in social media is insufficient awareness, a problem which education can overcome for governments. The degree of political and social awareness among the citizens has a direct relationship to the degree and quality of information flow, ease of access to it and public trust in information resources. In general, the people’s party or team, their business, social and political tendencies and their reaction to the government’s performance in political, social and economic arenas depend on background awareness. As a result, content that can be synchronously informative can also improve political engagement in the long term and achieve governmental objectives with a lower cost.

Content creating legitimacy

In addition to what was stated in the previous chapters on legitimacy and the legitimacy crisis, it must be said that legitimacy can be observed in the content when the principles of good governance can be introduced to the people on the Internet. The World Bank presented several indices for this situation. Here, we will describe some examples of indicators that can be strengthened by the capabilities of social media. Voice and accountability are among these indices. This means that people can query and prosecute the government about what influences them. This index includes concepts such as political rights, freedom of expression, sociopolitical assemblies, freedom of the press, the number of representative rulers of social classes, political processes in elections, and so forth. During the people’s movements in the Arab countries and even in Iran, many of the political rallies were coordinated through the Internet. However, the government always called such assemblies unauthorised and tried to prevent them from taking place, giving rise to violence in the assemblies (and a reduction in the legitimacy of government). On the other hand, government agreement with an assembly on social media and even the presence of government representatives in such assemblies could result in peaceful public gatherings. In fact, governments have the opportunity through social media to predict people’s movements before they begin and they can also attend their meetings in order to respond to the people so that people trust them more than ever. The presentation of satisfactory content to the people so that they know they have the right to hold gatherings and express opinions freely at any time can induce good governance in people’s minds as well. For example, in Iran, after the adoption of the filtering of some mobile-based applications, the government of President Rouhani opposed this development. This caused an increase in public confidence for the government as a result of its support for freedom in the virtual environment, an issue that had enormous benefits at low cost for Iran. Moreover, the use of strategies to reduce poverty through information technology can greatly decrease the possibility of revolution in search of equality and justice, with improvement in the people’s welfare. Naturally, in order to increase efficiency in the process of empowerment of the poor, it is necessary first to produce practical and appropriate content for them, and secondly to introduce training to use the content generated. Thus, the basic rule is to create enabling content, so that any person can become a potential entrepreneur with sufficient free training. Thus both educational poverty and economic poverty are alleviated. In fact, IT application is an economic, cultural and social phenomenon. On the one hand it requires cultural, social, economic and political contexts while on the other hand, as an active factor, it can influence cultural and social behaviours and relations at the community level. This phenomenon can also result in some innovation and transformation in people’s attitudes. Although such transformations are necessary for any development, they have existed throughout history and may have destructive effects as well. As the most important emerging phenomenon, IT has a concrete role in the development of other technologies and has a profound effect on social and cultural infrastructures. For this reason, the introduction of every manifestation of IT into society involves recognition of its cultural outcomes and planning to bring it to a local level. This means that the Arab countries and Iran, which always emphasise copying Western education for their citizens and make no investment in the production of local content, will have no choice but the destruction of what they have built and cannot build legitimacy for themselves. It is clear that if the content of such technology can be brought to the local level and then internalised, problems in the cultural and social fields can also be solved. However, if you look at it simply from a technological and hardware point of view, there are many problems in the application and interaction. For example, the spread of the Internet in the nations of the Middle East should occur in a way that contributes to the development of creativity and does not result in a retrograde step. Policy on the development of the Internet should not be limited to expanding its consumption or reproducing its content but must extend to the development of native and religious culture and cultural resistance so as to establish enough legitimacy for the governments of the Middle Eastern region. The researcher believes that we need powerful internal social networks to create legitimate content before anything else in order to guide the people in crisis situations by producing enough trust. Iran has been making attempts to address this issue and, for instance, has created the Aparat.com website, a video-sharing service to replace YouTube, the Irexpert.ir site, a social expert network to replace Linkedin, and the Cloob.com network instead of global social networks such as Facebook. Although these sites are not as popular as the global sites, they are steps in the right direction in themselves and can have a positive impact on people’s minds.

Create a platform specific for the people’s feedback on social media

A special way to pass on feedback specific to the voice of the people should be created. You do not need to seek public feedback on all sites and social media, but they are the people who will come to you with feedback. If this platform allows you to share images, video, text and so forth, it will be easier to analyse its content so that the people’s needs are quickly investigated and the roots of the matter are detected. In addition, the rate of responsiveness is reduced. It is the factor by which governments can benefit principally in a crisis situation because people’s patience has no meaning in such circumstances. We should recognise that the response to feedback can avert thousands or even millions of other negative feedback postings while no response to feedback can result in the beginning of a revolution. Such civil movement is a kind of political engagement. However, remember that in this case, not only will it not reduce the importance of content analysis but also, having a very strong political-content analysis team can reveal the true capabilities of the platform.

Be a learning government

You are probably familiar with the concept of a learning organisation, a concept which, if ignored or not understood, could lead to the organisation’s demise at the hands of competitors. Earlier, we talked about the importance of learning to users, but learning within the state can be even more important. The boundaries of traditional hierarchies of authority must be broken down to move towards a learner government. In traditional states, senior officials who are responsible for leading and recognising the strategies of government are obliged to think and act for the entire government. People just play the role of voters and intellectual supporters of the government. However, in a horizontal state, which is created via the benefits of using information technology, people are given more authority and trial and error will be based on people’s needs. Today, the old adage ‘knowledge is power’ cannot be applied everywhere, but at the root of this knowledge in a learner government is communications. Proper communication is the source of government power, and could lead to the production or updating of knowledge. Before its introduction into social media it represented implicit knowledge for the government, and now it has been transformed into explicit knowledge. However, it should be noted that the difficulty in understanding implicit knowledge is not a barrier for its transfer to the government. For this reason, mutual cooperation between the government and the public and a long-term relationship between the two can transfer this knowledge.

Provide motivation for feedback

According to the results of a study (in the physical environment of Iran and not in the virtual environment), only 26% of respondents gave comments on government performance in the social media, generated content and comments and shared photos and videos in the case of agreement or disagreement with government activities. It is notable that only 3% of all respondents also considered giving solutions and suggestions. However, 79% of respondents continually talk about government activities and performance with others in their daily lives. We can see that there is a huge gap between individuals who just talk with others, those who leave a message on social media and those who give solutions. It means that given the pervasiveness of social media, we have been able to find scattered information on the comments of only 26% of people. The other 74% either do not talk about the government and politics, or just talk about it informally without being registered somewhere. This could amount to a huge force during a crisis situation and no government would be able to meet their needs. Therefore motivation to give feedback on the government and its workings will be a fundamental principle. So far, we have found how to create a platform and use knowledge and learning concepts but our data and inputs do not represent the entire community’s view. Thus the gap must be filled in somehow. The first motivation for giving feedback is that people know their feedback receives attention and is addressed as soon possible. Therefore, showing that the government has an option to resolve problems posed by your feedback can be a great motivation for political participation. However, it is not possible to fully implement a process for responding to the feedback and in such a situation governments must provide logical reasons why all these problems cannot be solved. For instance, they must understand that, say, three years’ effort is needed to resolve a particular problem with the resources to hand, but if the people engage in this effort the result will be achieved faster. In this case, people will peacefully follow government activities without disruption and on the other hand will engage in solving the problem and become an executive arm of the government. Furthermore, political crowdsourcing can be very useful, so as to hear the opinions of different people on how to proceed, because their ideas for a solution result from their knowledge of the roots of the problem. As it is the people who always have to cope with such problems, they are better able to get to the bottom of the problems and suggest better solutions to government. When the problems and innovative ideas are expressed in depth and are of a high quality, governments will inevitably change their procedures. There is no doubt that the Wikileaks site will cause changes in the foreign policy of many countries around the world with respect to America and may improve information security in many. If every citizen took the view that the comments in his or her feedback may bring about a change in policy, every citizen can be a part of Wikileaks, even when the amount of feedback is at its lowest level. The above-mentioned issues imply that being an ‘electronic’ government cannot be considered an advantage for the government alone, but given the great number of people in the online environment, the people and their opinions should be classified and a special message written for them or a special message received from them in accordance with their needs. In this way, we can see the best electronic monitoring. It should be noted that electronic monitoring is one of the central elements and levers of e-government and not the entirety of e-government. In other words, electronic monitoring alone does not work, but is a means to improve and promote other government services which monitor government agencies, the reduction in degeneration and the feedback received from the public. In this chapter the author has tried to emphasise some of the issues of political marketing in the virtual world. In political systems, competition among the political actors who are aiming to gain power or influence decisions within the parties depends largely on the quality of the marketing of themselves and political, public and social activities against public thoughts. Political marketing is considered only as a fixed point in developing countries, in Iran and in countries in the Middle East. Political marketing activities start three to five months before an election and end after the elections finish, although in a country like America, for instance, this process is always rolling forward and is scheduled long before the election. Interestingly, the fixed-point method would usually be effective in the Middle East for political marketing activities and many of the political marketing rules would have basically the opposite result in these countries. This can be caused by many of the indices mentioned in the previous chapters, that is the excitement of people, the heavy dependence on people to meet primary economic needs, the level of media and information literacy, the level of trust between government and people, social capital and legitimacy. If the political systems of these countries really operate in terms of the long-term development of their country and not just winning the election and taking power temporarily, they must know that they are responsible for one of the most important tasks, that is to enhance the political awareness and literacy level of the people so that successful policy models of the developed countries can be founded within them locally in the long term. Thus the third world could become a rich sector, like the countries on the margins of the Persian Gulf, to give the most optimistic scenario. Otherwise, they will never develop intellectually and politically, despite having such wealth, and will have only a developed appearance, with a rotten and dependent interior.