Last week i attend to CNN’s Program from Dublin, to explain the current problems and usable social media strategy for Gezi Park Protests.
From my point of view, here is the brief details about social media part for the current problems;
Social media is not a troublemaker, but a communication channel which should be managed well.
When we say ‘social media’, we are not talking about only Facebook or Twitter, but also blog pages, videos, photos and online dictionaries. So that ‘social media world’ is something which should be managed really well.
It is a communication tool of ‘new generation’.
In Turkey, our people can talk about their ideas freely but they believe that it can not reached to many people via traditional media. That’s why they are trying to be more active in social media. Turkey is more or less in Top 10 Countries for all social media solutions in terms of user numbers or usage time.
When the people working in the ‘traditional media’ is not doing what they are supposed to do, people started to share more in ‘social media world’.
What is bad about social media is the negative content is spread faster then the positive ones. So the governments and political party representers should be more careful and have a strategy about social media.
Now in Gezi Park, what are going through is a crisis and we have seen similar scenarios in the Arabic Countries which was then called as Arap Spring or in the US under the name of Occupy Wall Street.
In that kind of situations, governments or political parties and their branches should dedicated on how to react problems of the situations. I believe that the people who went to Gezi Park at the beginning were trying to say something good. The message was good and natural but it turned to be something really different at the end. We saw some pictures which were photo-montaged and read some lies about The Turkish government was trying to censorship the internet. These were all lie and spread really fast, as i mentioned before.
You can not censorship the internet. You can block Twitter, you can block Facebook but can not cut the cable of all social media world. People can still spread the news through other online channels.
So, in the beginning i dont think that our government has that kind of idea. And there were no talks about censorship. Everyone knows that, Turkey is not Iran. But someone started to talk about it and it spread to whole social media and damage the government reputation. This is why diplomats and bureaucrats needs to learn the language of social media to manage it.
Managing means to know what to do at the time of that kind of crisis or the time of elections. Like Obama, which is a really good example about how to get most from social media in terms of politics.
Obama’s team used social media very effectively and got good results with in last two elections.
That new era which we are living now, has different terms and its own language.
Dijital Citizen or ‘Dijital Vatandaş‘ (in Turkish) is one of those terms.
I have a short definition for Digital Citizen.
Digital Citizen is a people who follows the news from mobile devices, rather than TV. So you need to know their language to reach them. I am a digital citizen too.
Depending on the increase of world’s population, i guess that the number of digital citizen are going to pass the number of normal citizens. Because the X generation is following the Y and Z generations.
Also, Turkey can not be called inexperienced about the social media usage.
The Turkish President and his team is using social media really well since 2010. We talked it before in Bloomberg also.
But, now, we need more city-wise or country-wise social media examples that will increase our brand value in the world. For that reason, there are lots of to-do’s for the local management of Istanbul and other cities.