Thursday, June 18, 2009

Twitter – helping fight a war in Iran

There was a time when if a revolution occurred in a country and the foreign media were asked to leave all reporting of what was actually happening on the ground ceased.

Today what is happening in Iran is just incredible. The use of Twitter has just shown how powerful technology is. It has rapidly become the go to source to the point of organising people on the ground, where to go, areas that are safe, how to clog up internet traffic etc.

I watched in awe a few days ago as almost every few seconds there was a tweet or a picture posted on what was happening on the ground.

I can only but imagine what the old guard in Iran thought. They expelled all foreign media and yet news was still getting out. Twitter has become the new CNN or the on-line protest tool for the world on what is happening in Iran.

Twitter even cancelled a maintenance downtime to enable people to get their stories out. Although social media outlet like face book has been blocked somehow Twitter has remained on line. Despite the fact that users can only use 140 characters to get their stories out it has not stopped people from providing quite graphic details of what is occurring on the ground.

There are many who do not understand the power of this social networking site and there are many businesses in our industry (real estate) yet to embrace it.

I read recently that doctors used twitter to ask for help and share information during an operation to remove a brain tumour from a 47 year patient in the US.

Twitter makes people and businesses smarter, faster and more efficient. It allows your customers to talk to you, give you feedback and for you to share information. It is like a online feedback or suggestion box for your clients to use.

It is certainly an evolving technology and it will be interesting to watch how it is used over the years and in two years time how we are using it.

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