Journal of Business Strategy
Re-tweeting the Ayatollah
Peter Buell Hirsch
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To cite this document:
Peter Buell Hirsch , (2015),"Re-tweeting the Ayatollah", Journal of Business Strategy, Vol. 36 Iss 2 pp. 49 - 52
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Voices and values
Re-tweeting the Ayatollah
Peter Buell Hirsch
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Peter Buell Hirsch is
based at Department of
Communication Studies,
Baruch College, City
University of New York,
New York, USA.
ave you ever received the message of Islam from any sources other than the
media?” tweeted Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khameini in a recent letter to
the youth of Europe and North America over the hashtag #Letter4U on January
22, 2015 (Khameini, 2015). On the very same day, the Prime Minister of Yemen announced
his resignation and that of his cabinet on his Facebook page, explaining the act by saying
“so that we are not made party to what is going on and what will happen” (Almosawa and
Nordland, 2015). While the replication of official communications in social media has been
taking place for a number of years, we believe that these two pronouncements in early 2015
represent a new level of social media engagement by government entities that needs to be
examined more closely. In the case of the Ayatollah, the tweets in question were apparently
re-posts from his Web site and not from any other official communique.
“H
The social media profiles of Yemeni politicians and Iranian religious leaders are certainly
not alone in cyberspace. Within the past few years, almost every official entity on the planet
has created and even regularly uses some form of social media platform, most commonly
Twitter and Facebook, often in translated as well as in original language versions. A very
superficial survey of Twitter reveals Twitter accounts for the Embassy of Canada to Italy –
in three languages, of course, Italian, French and English. We can also find the EU
Delegation to Turkey and the official Twitter account of the Government of Singapore –
@govsingapore. Notably, the account profile contains the following statement: “Your first
stop (emphasis added) for the very latest policy announcements, information and news on
Singapore”. In “This is your Government on Instagram”, Esquire reporter James Joiner
created a list of social media marketing expenditures by a range of US government
agencies from NASA to the Department of Homeland Security which, according to Joiner,
spent $563,300 on non-alert social media spending between January 2013 and July 2014
(Joiner, 2014).
These additional interfaces are over and above Facebook and Twitter which feeds now
almost obligatory for elected or aspiring politicians. While many of these outlets are very
basic channels to communicate daily activities and policy positions, others have grown
significantly more sophisticated, as a ranking member of the House Committee on
Intelligence tweeted about his arrival in Iraq on what was supposed to be a secret mission
in 2009 (Needleman, 2009). The opening of the 2016 presidential campaign will
undoubtedly produce additional attempts to use social media to effect. Senator Rand Paul
of Kentucky’s Snapchat “interview” with CNN on January 27, 2015, will not be the last vain
attempt to connect with a younger demographic (Bump, 2015).
The proliferation of social media activity by this very wide range of “official” entities, both
domestic and international, raises some intriguing questions about where companies and
other organizations should be investing their public affairs and government relations
DOI 10.1108/JBS-02-2015-0011
VOL. 36 NO. 2 2015, pp. 49-52, © Emerald Group Publishing Limited, ISSN 0275-6668 JOURNAL OF BUSINESS STRATEGY
PAGE 49
resources in the future. These resources have traditionally been allocated to lobbying and
public affairs in national and regional capitals such as Washington, DC, and Brussels,
engaging lawmakers and regulators both through official channels and networks of
influence. Extensive research and monitoring support staffs have been funded to monitor
and report on official outlets, digests of proposed legislation and the official speeches of
lawmakers, among many other traditional sources. While it would be absurd to suggest that
these investments will lose value in the short term, recent developments do indicate the
need to look into the future of how we will interact with official institutions. There are several
areas of potential impact that need to be explored.
Monitoring
What is immediately clear from these developments is that organizations will need to
significantly expand the range of official entities they are monitoring in social media. On one
level, it will be important to include governmental social media content in our monitoring in
a much more systematic way to track what they are saying about regulatory issues, public
policy and pending legislation.
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Deep dive listening
Social listening tools have advanced to the stage where one can now find out peaks in
conversation volume by topic area, when they happened and who contributed to them. By
setting up queries to filter for a specific set of public policy social media channels, one can
start to understand who is most prominent on social by topic.
Social listening can now also be used to determine who the second degree influencers are,
meaning the most influential people who engage with, share, retweet, the politician or
diplomat’s original content. This can be very helpful in determining specifically who to
target and influence to support or offset the original message.
Analysis
Even more significantly, we will be able to use social media metrics to gauge the level of
public, national or international interest in an issue. Whether it is followership, “like” stats or
re-Tweets/re-posts, all of the public interactions with the official narratives gives us a
window on how engaged the public is.
Content performance analysis
Tools also now exist allowing one to compare the engagement levels of social content. This
is a very useful means of determining what words and visuals are resonating most
effectively with people and affords one the ability to discern which public figure and which
issue really has a hand on the public’s pulse.
Network mapping
Another critical dimension that opens up to us as official entities migrate more “first notice”
content to social media is the flip side of the previous coin. To the extent that they
themselves repost, re-Tweet and share content from others, we are able to build up a
picture of the voices they are listening to and of the conversations that they are tracking.
Over the long term, public affairs professionals can build up a rich picture of the networks
of influence of the government entities and individuals that are of most compelling interest
to them. Once these portraits or “influencer maps” have been created, a number of different
engagement strategies can be put into practice.
Thought leadership engagement
These strategies include creating thought leadership events, involving those who influence
the target entity and inviting its representatives to participate on a topic of mutual interest.
PAGE 50 JOURNAL OF BUSINESS STRATEGY
VOL. 36 NO. 2 2015
It signals the desire to engage and create an ongoing conversation. An even simpler
strategy is to re-Tweet or re-post the same or similar content within your own blog or Twitter
feed. This will be picked up by the agency/individual you are seeking to engage and
communicate that you share interests with them. This mutual listening can help set the
stage for a richer real world interaction.
Consumer intent modeling
For better and worse, the marketplace of ideas is also now largely driven by the
marketplace of keywords and hashtags. Consumer intent modeling is the research and
analysis process used to ascertain what keywords people use most when looking for
information on Google, Bing and other search engines. Its corollary in the social sphere is
the word cloud which surfaces the most used hashtags and keywords on social tied to
issues, topics or other inputs.
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As we have seen in US Politics, the co-opting of language can be a very powerful way to
influence perceptions and beliefs and to frame or reframe issues. In our digital era,
controlling language starts with knowing the keywords and hashtags which comprise that
language. Deep dive listening, content performance analysis and consumer intent
modeling are all tools organizations should be applying not only to customers and business
partners but also to the governmental entities which are increasing their use of social media
for official communications.
It might be argued that the increasing use of social media by government entities,
especially in international relations, is simply part of an infinitely regressive mirror of
meaningless protocol, and there may be some truth to this view. On January 27, 2015,
following the state visit of President Obama to India, the official Twitter feed of Indian
president Narendra Modi tweeted:
Farewell@WhiteHouse! Your visit has taken India-USA ties to a new level and opened a new
chapter. Wish you a safe journey. (@narendramodi, Twitter) (Modi, 2015)
This is immediately followed by a re-Tweet of the @WhiteHouse message:
Thank you @NarendraModi for a memorable visit, and to the Indian people for their warm
welcome. #India-bo (@India-bo, Twitter) (Obama, 2015)
Clearly a little of this goes a very long way, even if this last tweet did receive 7,125
re-Tweets.
Censorship
Ironically, the increase in social media usage by leaders around the world has been
accompanied in a number of countries by a tightening of the governmental grip on citizen
access to the Internet. In addition to the paradoxical case of Iran, where the Supreme
Leader’s Tweets are inaccessible to Iranians, both China and Turkey have taken new steps
to control free social media speech. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation,
Turkey’s leadership has long been active in Internet censorship, cutting off access to
Twitter and Facebook at various times during 2014. In the wake of the terrorist attack on
France’s Charlie Hebdo, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu vowed harsh restrictions
on any depictions of the prophet deemed sacrilegious (Galperin, 2015).
Facebook has also caved in to pressure from the Turkish government to block access to
content deemed offensive to Muslim sensibilities. Perhaps more concerning is that
Facebook and Twitter also allegedly restricted Turkish access to content about Turkish
government corruptions at the highest level and news reports about alleged arms
shipments to Syrian rebels (Galperin, 2015).
In China, long known for its so-called “Great Firewall of China”, the authorities have also
recently begun cracking down on the virtual private networks which sprang up to help
academics, journalists, and ordinary Chinese get access to blocked resources (Jacobs, 2015).
VOL. 36 NO. 2 2015
JOURNAL OF BUSINESS STRATEGY
PAGE 51
Keywords:
Social media,
Twitter,
Instagram,
Consumer intent modeling,
Government leaders,
Network mapping
As reported by The New York Times, China recently blocked access to gmail on smartphones
and access to Google Scholar, a critical resource for academics. Even film critics have
complained that it has gotten harder and harder to stream foreign films.
Both the use of social media by government voices and attempts to restrict citizen access
are in their infancy, but it appears that it will be increasingly hard for authoritarian regimes
to have it both ways. In the meantime, organizations that rely on insight into and influence
on government entities have some new content and new tools to enhance their ability to do
so. Perhaps we can leave the last word to @Pontifex: “Practicing charity is the best way to
evangelize.”
References
Almosawa, S. and Nordland, R. (2015), “US fears chaos as Government of Yemen falls”, The New York
Times, 22 January, available at: www.nytimes.com/2015/01/23/world/middleeast/ayatollah-khameneiappeals-to-western-youth-on-islam-and-prejudice.html?_r⫽0 (accessed 1 February 2015).
Bump, P. (2015), “It’s Going to be hard to out-gimmick the Rand Paul snapchat”, Washington Post, 28
January, available at: www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2015/01/28/its-going-to-be-hard-toout-gimmick-the-rand-paul-snapchat-interview/ (accessed 1 February 2015).
Downloaded by Peter Hirsch At 07:04 01 May 2015 (PT)
Galperin, E. (2015), “Facebook caves to Turkish government censorship”, Electronic Frontier
Foundation, 28 January, available at: www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/01/facebook-caves-turkishgovernment-censorship (accessed 1 February 2015).
Jacobs, A. (2015), “China further tightens grip on the internet”, The New York Times, 30 January,
available at: www.nytimes.com/2015/01/30/world/asia/china-clamps-down-still-harder-on-internetaccess.html (accessed 1 February 2015).
Joiner, J. (2014), “This is your government on Instagram”, Esquire, 2 July, available at: www.esquire.
com/blogs/news/your-government-on-instagram-ranked#comments (accessed 1 February 2015).
Khameini, A. (2015), “To the youth in Europe and North America”, available at: http://english.khamenei.
ir/index.php?option⫽com_content&task⫽view&id⫽20015 (accessed 1 February 2015).
Modi, N. (2015), “Farewell @ White House! @narendramodi on Twitter”, 28 January, available at:
www.twitter.com/@narendramodi (accessed 1 February 2015).
Needleman, R. (2009), “Congressman twitters secret trip to Iraq”, CNET Magazine, 11 February,
available at: www.cnet.com/news/congressman-twitters-secret-trip-to-iraq/ (accessed 1 February
2015).
Obama, B. (2015), “Thank you, @narendramodi, @India-bo on Twitter”, 28 January, available at:
www.twitter.com@India-bo (accessed 1 February 2015).
Further reading
Bergoglio, J. (2015), “Practicing charity @pontifex on Twitter24 January”, available at: www.twitter.
com@pontifex (accessed 1 February 2015).
Corresponding author
Peter Buell Hirsch can be contacted at: [email protected]
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PAGE 52 JOURNAL OF BUSINESS STRATEGY
VOL. 36 NO. 2 2015