• by Kathy Sharpe , June 23, 2008

Can a call to action be conveyed in under 140 characters?

When historians talk about the power of media, the most often cited example is the role of television in influencing the American public's perception of the Vietnam War. That shared experience led to different reactions, but as the history books tell us, not only did public opinion of the war shift over time, but so did average American citizens' willingness to actively make their opinions known, a shift that ultimately forced a conclusion to the war.

Click on NOW: The United States is again engaged in a highly unpopular war; according to a USA Today poll, the Iraq war is now less popular with Americans than the Vietnam War was in 1971.

With the advent of social networks, blogs, e-mails, chat rooms, forums and bulletin boards, registering discontent with the war should be a comparative piece of cake. The capacity of social networking to empower individuals and unite them in action across the country and the world should be evident.

Well, not exactly.

The online content exists: Between 200,000 and 300,000 Iraq-War related videos are on YouTube alone - everything from news footage to homefront protests to clips from documentaries such as Baghdad ER and even a few videos from soldiers at the front.

Viewing seems a little more scattered. Several of them have a million views. Many have fewer than a thousand.

No matter - the real activity would be taking place on the social networking sites, where shared purpose and proposed actions should be visible. On Facebook there are more than 500 groups related to the Iraq War. Membership varies, but the average seems to be about 1,000 members. Even the 1,000,000 Students Against the Iraq War only has 29,000 members; 1,000,000 Against the War in Iraq has fewer than 20,000 members.

The postings are numbing. Everything is happening online, with the exception of the war itself, and the effect is a little surreal.

A search on Technorati delivers more than 400,000 blogs that mention the Iraq War. This includes any blog where the war has been mentioned in the past year; active dialogue on the topic is not necessarily taking place every day or even every week. 

Some of the blogs have millions of readers - political commentator Andrew Sullivan's, for example - but others are in the low teens. Again, like Facebook, these are mostly expressions of opinion, not calls to action, and certainly not action plans. The Iraq War doesn't even come up on a search of Twitter.

Numbers tell a tale. All the numbers above total a little more than 500,000, or the number of people estimated to have attended the Mobilization in September 2005 - possibly the single largest peace rally in U.S. history. The numbers fell far short of the nationwide participation in the Moratorium a month earlier. These were events where people acted as well as opined.

Now is the part where you say, "But you can't compare Vietnam and Iraq." In so many ways, this is true. However, what can be compared is how the Web, particularly social media, impacts action - an issue that is of some interest to marketers who are working to drive sales.

The answer is relatively simple and completely counterintuitive. With social media, the content, energy and emotion of the group is dispersed across multiple channels: blogs, videos, groups and more. Everyone has a voice, but few voices are being listened to. Social media enable each single person to talk to anyone who is willing to listen, but the willingness is distributed across too many options to have impact. 

In other words, we are all Twittering into the void. Harsh, yes, but as content is continually distributed to more outlets, its overall impact is shredded, as is the feeling of unity that it was capable of creating.

Kathy Sharpe is CEO of Sharpe Partners.