“Collectively Organizing and Mobilizing Action” (COMA) is the the Twitter Revolution for Moldova Protest and Amazon Fail

What the Moldova Protest and #AmazonFail might have in common.

Today I made the wrong decision to stay away from Twitter to concentrate on some thesis writing.  However thanks to @TimCooperUK, I’ve been alerted on a recent activity on twitter that has been creating quite a lot of buzz if you search the hashtag #amazonfail. So I’ve decided to update an article I wrote recently regarding “People Power on Twitter” for the Moldova protest. You can find the original post below.

Apparently, Amazon is deleting the rankings (de-rank) of LBGT and erotica books. Though this has possibly just caught on fire today, this has been going on since February. The response the authors affected got from Amazon was this

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Some people are already closing their Amazon accounts and threatening to stop buying from Amazon.  I’ve never seen hashtag updated so fast! I’m beginning to wonder if Twitter will crash because of it! They’ve even already managed to make a logo out of it! That was quick!

Though what will be more interesting to see is what will happen tomorrow? What type of impact, action, maybe backtrack (like Facebook case) or PR response will come from Amazon. Will we see a 24 hour turnaround in response to Twitter “Collectively Organizing and Mobilizing Action”? Will customer voices on Twitter be heard loud and clear? Will Twitterers #amazonfail come together to launch a petition to demand Amazon to get their act together (Just updated – here it is http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/in-protest-at-amazons-new-adult-policy? Are we going to see a Facebook Group created to boycott Amazon until they change their ways (spoke to soon – its here http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=70927484220)?

Here’s a snapshot of #amazonfail

Here’s a video on Youtube that popped out around an hour ago

The great thing about all this is… I’m sure I’ll find out in REAL-TIME what the outcome will be. I don’t have to wait for the news to come on, or a newspaper website to publish it, or even someone to blog about it. All I need to do is check #amazonfail on Twitter or even better yet, I’m sure one of my friends on Twitter will tweet it or RT it to me. Let’s see what “Collective Organizing and Mobilizing Action” (COMA) on Twitter will result in this time.

Here are some links talking in more details about #amazonfail

1. #Amazonfail and the politics of anti-corporate cyberactivism
2. An open letter to Jeff Bezos
3. Amazon Rank
4. Amazon Follies
5. GoogleBomb AmazonFail
6. Why Is Amazon Removing The Sales Rankings From Gay, Lesbian Books?
7. Amazon Accused of Removing Gay Books from Rankings

Original post:
There’s so much going around Twitter these days, its quite hard to keep up with its news and progress. We hear Twitter being mentioned everyday now and it might be a surprise to some people that those news headlines regarding Twitter are no longer confined to “What are you doing?” chit chats or the newest celebrity using twitter.

Just take an example of what is currently happening in the Moldova protest. People are “Collectively Organizing and Mobilizing Action” (COMA), which is from where I stand, is the true value of Twitter. Some people have called it the “Twitter Revolution” because of Twitters ability to report real-time events in a simplistic micro-blogging method of tagging each conversation with #pman. The #pman hashtag is then picked up by twitter’s search results at search.twitter.com . Then through these tags, more links and social media channels can be shared to update #pman with Flickr pics or Facebook group links and other social/new media and mobile applications.

I feel Flickr and other photographic new media outlets are also very powerful in this protest because everyone knows that “a picture is worth a thousand words”.  And not to be outdone, YouTube ,Vimeo and embedded videos from various news and other websites can also play an important part of social media if something significant happens like the incident where a man died at the G20 protest in London (link to YouTube video).

Here is an interview with an internet expert for global politics (Evgeny Morozov) talking about just how much of a factor is Twitter in the Moldova protest.

Moldova Twitter Revolution

So there could be a 1,000,001 reasons for governments, organizations or individuals to ignore or resist social media, however there are also 1,000,001 reasons to join the Twitter Revolution of  “Collectively Organizing and Mobilizing Action” (COMA).