Lebanese Elections ‘09 + Twitter = Tipping Point?
If you’re a fan of Malcolm Gladwell, strategy, branding, sociology and physics you’ll be familiar with the Tipping Point: ”the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point”. As Gladwell put it, “ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do”. I’d like to draw contextual reference with the Lebanese Elections and how Twitter allowed for its tipping point in the Lebanon’s social web.
Let us start by defining an important epidemic towards a Tipping Point: The Law of the Few
Connectors.
Mavens.
Salesmen.
Twitter enabled a hub of its own for these people to exist, in context of the Lebanese elections. The hub or community led hashtag is called #lebanonelections.
The Connectors are those with a talent of just that, connecting. By connecting people through Twitter (and Facebook), the topic of the Lebanese elections spread like wildfire. You’ve got the bloggers, the Twitter and Facebook e-Vangelists who are connecting the social media dots in Lebanon when it comes to the elections, expanding the collective through dialogue and energy.
The Mavens are those Twitterers you know so well, the kind that will have a link, twitpic or any never seen before piece of news that they usually share firsthand. Let me paint you a picture: after the polls came to a close and just before the announcement of the majority vote for the Lebanese parliament, electoral district (or the equivalent in Lebanon, I speak in Canadian terms sometimes) numbers were already being announced by the Twitter community, or the Mavens to be exact. Gladwell calls them, “people we rely upon to connect us with new information.” And they did just that.
The Salesmen, i.e the charismatic persuaders, were not as evident among the Lebanese elections dialogue on Twitter. The occasional few did emerge with their thoughts, opinions and gentle persuasion towards their political values. They serve a purpose: to instigate a different channel of conversation about the elections, effective in keeping the noise level high.
