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Did you know that there is a revolution going on in the streets of America? What started rally cry to 90,000 redeemers, rebels and radicals has turned into a thundering movement that is sweeping across the country. #OCCUPYWALLSTREET has morphed into a full-fledged peaceful movement.
In June, as our elected leaders played a game of chicken with our unstable economy by manufacturing a debt crisis that would lead to the downgrade of America’s credit rating, the anti-consumerism magazine Adbusters registered the domain occupywallstreet.org. While the majority of American’s watched in disgust as elected official left for summer vacations instead of solving the problems they were elected to fix, an independent affinity group registered occupywallst.org. This is where the movement’s official site is now hosted. Not long after the registration of the sites, Anonymous, a hacker activist group, encouraged it's members to flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months.
For those of you unfamiliar with Anonymous, they were involved in the protests in Tunisia and Egypt. During the 2011 Egyptian revolution, Egyptian government web sites, along with the website of the ruling National Democratic Party, were hacked into and taken offline by Anonymous. The sites remained offline until President Hosni Mubarak stepped down. Anonymous also has ties to Wikileaks, further explaining the sighting of the Wikileaks truck at the protest sites.
One of the most consistent complaints from the protesters has been the lack of un-biased reporting of the real issues by the mainstream, corporate-owned press. No one knows if Anonymous plans to hack any U.S. news organizations, but based on past activities, it seems its a real possibility. Given the recent ridiculing and dismissive nature of Time Warner’s / CNN’s recent coverage by Erin Burnett or even interviews like the ones conducted by the Business Insider, I would not be surprised if Anonymous was already working on a plan.
Corporate-owned media outlets claim that the movement lacks a focus, however if you’ve have watched the content they have distributed or taken part in a rally you would hear three things:
The movement’s core message, which is often lost in AdBusters anti-consumerism message, is that 1% of the population has profited wildly from the last 20 years and the other 99% have seen zero. Special interest money has corrupted our system. That's not sustainable. It's not fair. And it's not the America that 99% of Americans want. If this is a democracy, those numbers should matter.
The Art & Symbols Of The Movement
There is a ton of art that has begun to emerge and define the movement. You can visit http://www.occupytogether.org/downloadable-posters/ to view the latest in protest art.
You may have also seen images of protestors wearing Masks. Those are Guy Falkes masks. This is a disguise used by members of Anonymous to protect their identities and brand their activities. Guy Fawkes was part of a plot to overthrow the king of England in the early 1600s and his character was made popular in the comic book V for Vendetta.
A Growing National Movement
As protesters and citizen journalists share their stories in Zuccotti Park (near Wall Street), Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Chicago and other cities across the country, we have recorded a groundswell of conversations and interactions taking place online. There are daily additions to the URLs who are covering and enabling this revolution. You can visit http://www.occupytogether.org/ to get in on the local action in your area.
We are people of Substance.
We are supportive and sympathetic to the protesters. They are showing enormous courage in the face of seemingly all-powerful institutions. They are being arrested, maced and harassed without the protection of a free-press. They are mocked, laughed at and even toasted with champagne from high-price balconies and yet they remain peaceful.
I encourage you to visit a few of the movement sites I have listed below. Judge the movement and its message for yourself. You may find that you are part of The 99%.
Additional Information Sources:
With every passing day, the benefit of social listening and data becomes more engrained in how we determine where we reach and market to people.
If you use social listening to identify marketing insights and innovations, you know the power of the outputs. More than conversations, the data provides us knowledge of where those conversations are taking place. We can also determine the volume of conversations as well as the influence of the people having those conversations at a particular URL. That data combined with public traffic records now gives media planners the ability to pinpoint where their customers are engaged with content.
The power of this data and knowledge can guide higher performing media plans.
Surprisingly, most media planners and buyers use antiquated methods to plan and purchase media. Today, media buying companies rely on publishers to supply them with traffic stats and standard demographic data. These are typically combined with third party reporting tools from firms like ComScore.
Given the power of data @substancenyc is extrapolating out of our social listening exercises we decided to test a new way of building media plans. Instead of using traditional methods of media planning we used our social listening tools to identify high volume conversations & influencer data to create a media plan that allowed our branded content to reach our target.
First we used social data to identify the right kind of customer. Then we created a keyword list for our social listening tools to listen for. After that, we created an algorithm to extrapolate relevant conversations. Once we identified the relevant conversations, we wrapped a volume metric around the URLs & places those conversations were talking place. Once that was achieved we used a tools to identify the number of social influencers having the conversations. Using the outputs of these simple exercises we created transmedia plan that effectively told our brand story.
How did we know this was going to outperform a traditional plan?
We tested it. We tested a traditionally built plan against a social data guided plan. The result, the social data plan out performed the traditional plan by 19%. The social data plan had more reach and conversion than the traditional plan.
This test has transformed the way we are going to market for our clients.
What are you doing today that could change the way we do business tomorrow? Let us know @substancenyc.
