Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is now becoming a regular news topic, but it took several weeks for the movement to even get covered by the mainstream media. While the growing size, tenacity, and fervor of the protesters definitely caught many people's interest early on, another factor had a major effect on knowledge of OWS around the world -- the intersection of social media and word of mouth (WOM).
The OWS organizers have been actively using the Internet and different social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Youtube to get out information on their cause and prove their legitimacy. These outlets have earned huge followings and their posts, tweets, pictures, and videos have been spread across the country and around the world thanks to online WOM.
"A lot of times organizations talk about community," Crowdwise co-founder Robert Wolfe told The Huffington Post. "This may sound silly, but it makes people even more anonymous. It's really about individuals who affect change and build movements."
To learn more about the strength of this buzz, Attention USA decided to measure the online conversation in early October. The results, posted in a blog post by the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, show that over 80% of of online buzz for OWS was generated through Twitter. In fact, daily mentions on Twitter rose from around 395 on Sept. 18 to over 2,600 on Oct. 8. The next most popular sources for information on the movement were blogs and Facebook, with mainstream media coming in at a low .06%.
So where was the mainstream media on this big story that everyone else seemed to be following?
TriplePundit blogger John Paul Chulliyil addressed the issue recently, comparing coverage of OWS with that of the Arab Spring.
"Unlike the mass amount of news and media coverage in the Arab countries that went on for hours on some news stations, I find it odd that the American media took such a long time to cover the recent demonstrations happening across the country, until after a few weeks of its existence,” he said. “
“Instead of the traditional methods of media we find a new generation of sources such as Twitter and Facebook and various internet sites providing a channel for new websites to pop up to inform the masses.”
It will be interesting to see to what extent people continue turning to online sources for the majority of information on OWS even as the mainstream media starts picking up leads. Just as Clay Shirky mentioned in his book "Here Comes Everybody," the OWS movement has shown that people don't need to depend on traditional news sources for their information anymore. With the help of social media tools and online buzz people can help define and disseminate the news stories of day themselves.
