This is what I see right now on my screen and I cannot believe it. Twitter is over capacity. The events of the past week have ignited enormous numbers of tweets, and at last the server of Twitter couldn’t deal with the load. The Haiti disaster was the main topic that created the load.
People were sharing ideas and thoughts about the issue through Twitter. We can experience that social media is spreading like a fever. New people join the ranks of Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and the like by thousands each day. The latest star who joined in is Bill Gates. He had more than 150,000 followers in 10 hours. This is probably a world record that is hard to break.
Bill Gates’s first Tweet is “@aplusk thanks to you and all the other people who have welcomed me. I have a lot to learn about Tweeter but look forward to sharing more.” A humble beginning for someone who has changed forever the way people live. Probably his messages will be aimed at creating awareness about the research done by The Gates Foundation and the issues that it tackles. Bill Gates is not the only sensation of the recent days.
In my opinion the innovation award goes to the Tekel workers who have been on strike. We see them in televisions and newspapers from time to time and most of the time we see them as a background to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s speeches when he is bashing them for earning easy money. Believing they were not given the deserved attention of the press, they have created their own TV, which is on air after 7 p.m., at www.sendika.org.
There is an option for Web masters to share the stream in their own blogs or Web sites as well. This live feed from the strike is way better than watching the workers through a news piece from a journalist’s point of view. Here, workers interview fellow strikers and present their opinions free from all kinds of censorship, which is so common in big media companies. If you want to see what is real, you should log on to that Web site.
Social media is being explored very fast by Turkish people and companies. There are many examples of new media campaigns. IKEA’s home campaign is frustrating, for example, but there are many good examples too, just like the strike TV by Tekel workers. Weberazzi.com has made a poll to choose the best of social media in Turkey for the year 2009, and the results just came in yesterday.
The best digital marketing campaigns are: GittiGidiyor’s “Eski Sevgiliye Kapak,” Sprite’s “Brutal Truth,” Microsoft’s “Experiment.” The best Web sites are alkislarlayasiyorum.com, uzmantv.com, izlesene.com. The best mobile applications are Turkcell IBB Trafik, Turkcell Online İşlem and Turkcell Pusula. The famous people who use social media the best are: Sertab Erener, Nil Karaibrahimgil and Erdil Yaşaroğlu. For the whole list you can log on to the mentioned Web site.
Social media is so popular these days there is a special TV show named “Sosyal Alem” devoted to the people of the social media. Turkey is a great laboratory for any researcher these days. We are experiencing a shift and a social movement.
There will be lots of mistakes, but we, as journalists, will be watching closely to get the essence and make sense out of this change. Hurriyet reported on 20th Jan 2010.
