How to create a social media storm
Social media is no man’s land but a
level playing field with no or minimal censorship. At just one click, we are
free to post, share and read whatever content, whether true or false, propaganda
or extremist. From politics, world news to pop culture and achievement, every
day we are exposed to so much news and content, mostly streaming online.
Remember times you read a message on social media or noticed that a particular thing was trending and you wondered how wrong or extremist info got there. Guess what? The originators of the messages wonder how wrong you are to think that they are extremists. How do you counter such narratives?
Last week I was in Djibouti at an
Innovation Lab by IGAD (Intergovernmental Authority on Development) – training
on using art and activism creatively. As a PR person and journalist, this was a
media boot camp for me. In just two days, we were tasked with developing new
and innovative social media campaigns to prevent and challenge extremism and
promote peace.
Here’s how best to counter extremist
narratives:
1. First decipher extremist content – get your facts
right and do your research.
2. Tap into the truth and intelligence.
3. Get your message to counter it crafted properly to
suit your target audience.
4.
Get a social media plan ready. How to
do it:
·
Set your objective
·
Identify your target audience
·
Craft a campaign message
·
What is your goal?
·
What is your broad message?
·
What tone will your audience respond
to?
·
What sources do your audience find
credible?
·
What is your call to action?
· What is your content?
To put this to practice, we were first divided into 4 groups at the lab. Each group was tasked with identifying a major problem in their society – hypothetical in this case because we all came from different societies and countries across the UK and Africa. I really loved my group because our thinking was waaaaay out of the box, just like yours should be if you want to create and start a social media storm that will send out a strong message that will resonate with the masses.
The problem we identified with and
picked for the challenge was the fact that there’s a good number of young
teenage boys sharing extremist messages or propaganda like clips from terror
groups on social media. By the time the messages are trending on Whatsapp
groups, among other platforms, they seem truthful and trustworthy misleading
some teenagers to believe that being recruited in terror groups is something
cool or better than ordinary life problems like defunct family set up or being
a societal reject. The truth of is it’s not cool and when you join these groups
it’s not as much fun because:
1. You could join them and actually die while in the
line of duty.
2. It’s not much fun as you won’t even have Wi-Fi or
the freedom of choice while living and working in terror camps.
3. Unlike misleading narratives, it’s no benefit doing
wrong or killing people. If anything you could accidentally be targeting your
family, friends or those related to you.
4.
In summary, the truth is that when
you think you are hurting others by indulging in acts of violence or spreading
extremist messages – you’re not just hurting them – you are also hurting
yourself.
The last point lead us to – It Hurts
Me Campaign. The tone of our campaign is tough love and our objective is to
warn all teenagers and others on the dangers of involving themselves with
terror groups, and when we say involving – we mean even sharing or reading the
extremist texts or content circulating social media.
See a few samples of content we
crafted in English Swahili and Somali.