Aristotle is very pleased to announce the winners of the first annual Aristotle Excellence Award, recognizing singular achievement in political campaigns around the world. Held in conjunction with Politics Magazine, the awards attracted a wide array of worthy nominees this year. We’re confident that our 2010 winners can be counted among the very best in our business.
Carlos Fara, Argentina/Bolivia Carmen Fernandez, Venezuela Ajmal Ghani, US/Afghanistan Steven Joyce, New Zealand Mixo Kochakidze, Georgia Necati Ozkan, Turkey Sami Panah, Afghanistan Kostas Sazmatzoglou, Greece Klaus Schuler, Germany Mauricio de Vengochea, US
Congratulations to the winners and many thanks to everyone who submitted a nomination.
For more about the Aristotle Excellence Awards, visit: www.aristotle.com/excellence
As Iranian authorities shut down Internet servers, [Twitter] allowed younger protesters, particularly those affiliated with universities in Tehran, to organize and to follow updates by Mir Hossein Mousavi; by spreading the word about the location of government crackdowns and the threat of machine-gun-wielding soldiers, it probably saved the lives of any number of would-be revolutionaries. We don’t know how many Iranians belong to Twitter; there seems to have been about two dozen active voices from Tehran, but if we assume a multiplier effect — these 24 people can coordinate with their 20 friends — the use of the technology as a central organizing hub that circumvented official channels of communication cannot be understated. In this way, Twitter served as an intelligence service for the Iranian opposition.
While Twitter (like SMS) can be used to organize protests on the fly, I haven’t yet seen any evidence that it made a substantial difference to organizing efforts in Iran. This is not to say that it didn’t – but we need good evidence (which will require Persian language expertise, obviously) of correlation between specific bursts of Twitter communication and forms of social protest etc before we can really be sure that there was an effect. ….But there is also a tendency among US journalists and commentators to fetishize sophisticated technologies when very often, it is decidedly unsophisticated methods of communicating solidarity (such as pot-banging) and organization (leaflets, posters) that work best.
What’s going on here is the same old thing happening in a new medium, not the new medium actually allowing new things to happen. Insofar as Twitter becomes a more popular communications tool, popular protests will increasingly have a Twitter component. But that’s not the same as saying that Twitter is actually driving the political events.
In other words, there protests were bound to happen with or without Twitter – just look at the Velvet, Orange or Rose revolutions of years passed. People have organized and brought governments down for hundreds of years using far less sophisticated technologies, such as pamphlets or land lines, and they’ve managed to bring down everything from the British Empire to Jim Crow. Iran is no exception. With or without Twitter, these protests would have gone forward – Twitter is not the driving force.
What Twitter is doing successfully is twofold: 1. It is filling in a major media gap, so that the rest of the world can easily follow what is going on in real time. Just take a look at the #CNNFail hash tag, to see that the cable news network has not exactly been up to the task of the Iranian protests. There has been some great reporters on the ground from ABC, NPR and the New York Times, Twitter has been essential for filling in the gaps. 2. Going back to Ambinder’s point, by using Twitter as a real-time organization tool, it may actually have saved lives by letting people know where to go and where to avoid. While Twitter is not the only, or even the best, tool at the disposal of the protesters, it has unquestionably helped in organizing the masses.
When I wrote “For those skeptics who think that Twitter is just a flash in the pan, so long as it provides a medium that police states can’t control, it will continue to be an organizing and media force,” I did not mean to imply that Twitter is the only organizing force out there. It is important to remember that Twitter is not the only tool, nor should it be used at the exclusion of all others. When organizing your campaign (hopefully something less dramatic than the Iranian protests), use Twitter as a tool, but incorporate it into your overall organizing strategy, which should also include direct mail, phone banks, canvassing, events, blast emails, websites and social media components.
BOY was I wrong. It turns out, the revolution will most definitely be twittered.
Unlike the faked uprising in Moldova, the upheaval in Iran right now is very real, and the implications for the outcome are very serious for the future of the Middle East. Where can you find the best coverage of what’s really going on on the ground? Twitter.
The Iranian police seem to be confiscating film and photography, but cell phones are still allowed, and the #IranElection is the number one topic trending on Twitter. People on the ground are reporting first hand accounts of the protests, the violence and the organizing.
I had previously written “Although I do believe that the Internet is, at its heart, a great force for openness and democracy, I think we can anticipate more hiccups like this along the way.” This isn’t a hiccup, this is a great test of Twitter as a tool for social change. For those skeptics who think that Twitter is just a flash in the pan, so long as it provides a medium that police states can’t control, it will continue to be an organizing and media force.
Working at Aristotle requires knowledge and appreciation of all aspects of political involvement. Our client base includes hundreds and hundreds of names from the campaign, PAC, and grassroots markets. When you get a chance to step back and look at the big picture, it is extraordinary.
The campaign market is where Aristotle is able fund and experiment with new political technologies and tactics. Innovation is the result. Campaign management databases, new Web applications, a national voter file, and online fundraising tools are all Aristotle innovations spawned in partnership with our campaign clients.
The grassroots market takes those innovations and re-thinks them, in order to find some larger political potential. The campaign management databases, campaign web sites, and online campaign communications tools targeting voters became stakeholder databases, grassroots web sites, and online advocacy communications tools targeting elected officials. Aristotle created the computerized zip-to-district matching process — the missing link, so to speak — for this to happen.
The demand for perfection, meaning reliability and usability, comes when working the PAC market. Adoption of new things is careful and selective; they have rules and regulations, of course. PACs drive reliability and usability back down the chain, but they are the beneficiaries of campaign and grassroots innovations, imperfect as they may be. The compliance database application shares DNA with its voter-centric and legislator-centric cousins. And, the online solicitation Web site is the union of online fundraising and online advocacy Web applications.
So, what is next? One never knows what Aristotle and its customers will innovate, re-think, or perfect.
It is a great feeling to know that whatever it is…we will be in the middle of it…and, I will get to talk about it with a lot of terrific campaign, grassroots, and PAC professionals both here and abroad.
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