My colleagues recently passed around the infographic below from Gizmodo, In Twitter No One Can Hear You Scream, that questions whether people are really paying attention to what you say on Twitter. It shows that 71% of tweets get no reaction (retweets or replies) at all, while 23% get an @reply, and a tiny 6% actually get retweeted. Of that 6% sliver, 92% of the retweets happen in the first hour, suggesting that the window for you to be heard via your tweet is quite short.
This made me think about the article that Malcolm Gladwell wrote for the New Yorker, Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted, published a few weeks ago, that elicited a firestorm of debate online. In short, he asserts that Twitter and Facebook activism doesn't have the power to create real social change due to the "weak ties" between "friends" and "followers" on these social networking sites. As you can imagine, this set bloggers, social media gurus, and especially the social media for social good-ers, a-blaze. The Dragonfly Effect blog, based on the book, which discusses how to use social media to drive social change, has a roundup of just some of the many reactions to Gladwell's article.
As I summarized the slactivism argument in my post, Has Do-Gooding Gone Mainstream, the internet and social media has made it so much easier for people to raise their virtual hands online to support a cause, but as the information depicted in the chart below questions, are those virtual hands really being noticed? Could Gladwell be right?
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