Iran Elections: Watershed Moment for Online?

Share This June 29th, 2009 Cara

The Iran Elections serve as a case study for the growing power and influence of online media.

With the latest political conflict in Iran over Ahmadinejad’s re-election, the powers that be have announced a media blackout in the hopes of keeping the rest of the world out but this blackout has only served to show how pervasive modern technology really is.

The news is still leaking out from Iran with Iranians themselves now in the driving seat as they send out video clips and photos to the rest of the world via the internet.

Whilst this is a big plus for the power of social media and the Internet, it’s not such great news for traditional media houses.

The balance of power is shifting as this latest media blackout reveals that the big guns, like CNN, BBC, Fox, are no longer the definitive source of information on the Iran Elections.  One good example is CNN.

Traditional media out of the loop

CNN ran a short poll last night asking viewers if they felt that the information they were getting from citizen journalists was accurate and adequate, problem with this question is that it has become irrelevant.  People are already going somewhere else for news because CNN isn’t able to cover the Iran Elections adequately.

The Nielsen Company stated that CNN rarely shows up in the top 5 search results for select Iran Election terms and complaints from viewers have emerged that CNN’s coverage of the election was lacking.  All of this points to a change in media circles.

Social media comes out tops

Since the CNN’s and BBC’s of this world are unable to deliver the eyeballs are going online to the likes of YouTube, Wikipedia and Twitter.

Nielsen reported that Wikipedia emerges within the top two search results for 4/5 of the leading topics on the Iran Elections (see graph below).

Social media sites, like WSJ.com, were also winning big as every term had at least one social media site within the top 10.

Love them, hate them, you can even feel  ambivalent about them but the fact remains – social media sites are here to stay and they are shaping the world as we know it.

Entry Filed under: General