The anti-SOPA/PIPA campaign and social media strategy

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock recently, you will have seen mention of the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) bills on Twitter or Facebook, or noticed your most visited sites ‘blacked out’ in protest.

On 18th January 2012, 30 million US citizens saw Mozilla’s blackout Firefox start-up page; 1.8 million visited its SOPA information page, and 360,000 people emailed congress about the issue. Other internet giants participating in the anti-SOPA camapign boast similarly impressive figures: 13 million people viewed Google’s anti-SOPA page, resulting in 7 million petition signatures; whilst Twitter saw 2.4 million SOPA-related tweets in 16 hours (figures from The Huffington Post). Visual.ly has offered a great infographic mapping social media influence on this issue.

Through tracking the issue on Metrica Radar, I’ve found that high proportions of content produced were actually links and workarounds for the sites that went ‘dark’ on the 18th Jan. Even when disregarding these types of post, The White House campaign’s generation of 103,758 petition signatures pales in comparison, displaying the huge force and influence of the social media-led wing of the assault on SOPA/PIPA.

What was it about the anti-SOPA/PIPA campaign that made it so successful, and what lessons about conducting a social media campaign can be drawn from it?

The first considerable hurdle for the campaign was getting people to understand what the rather esoteric-sounding SOPA and PIPA acronyms actually meant. Secondly, to convey why they would be so detrimental to the internet if passed.

These are just a couple of examples of the way the anti-SOPA/PIPA message was relayed in succinct and punchy formats – attention-grabbing and easy to share.

Simply raising awareness of SOPA and PIPA, however, wasn’t the only factor of success; the campaign also invited people to react – to do something to stop the bills. The aforementioned figures from Mozilla and Google show that this call to action was answered on a massive scale (Business2Community).

The third deciding factor of the success of the anti-SOPA/PIPA campaign was the sheer capacity that social media and the internet have to reach a wide audience. As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, it’s hard to have missed what’s been happening with SOPA/PIPA, which isn’t surprising when you consider that; 85% of us (by which I mean UK adults) use Google, 26% spend 6-10 hours a week on the internet – 4% more than 40 hours a week, and 56% of us have a Facebook account (statistics from Metrica’s UKPulse).

Internet and social media usage have woven their way into the fabric of our lives so completely that it’s hard to imagine a society without them. It’s for this reason that tackling the proposed SOPA and PIPA legislation through this medium was successful when compared to the first ‘blackout’ in 1996, where internet users protested against Clinton’s internet ‘indecency’ bill. So argues The Huffington Post’s Patrick Ruffini, who comments that social media has become ubiquitous to the point that it will be impossible to win political campaigns without a comprehensive social media strategy in the future.

Considering the often disastrous attempts at social media engagement that our current politicians have committed (The Telegraph lists some of them in its ‘Top 10 Twitter faux pas’ article), this could be a way off, certainly in the UK. However, the anti-SOPA/PIPA campaign teaches us important lessons that can be put into practice with social media campaigns now;

• Put your information out there and let your online communities share it
• Include a ‘call to action’ in your campaign (i.e. as the anti-SOPA/PIPA campaign asked supporters to petition congress)
• Don’t underestimate the influence of the internet and social media – its use is established and pervasive in society. The notion of the public making their opinions heard and collectively affecting change is a powerful, and increasingly important aspect of social media strategy.

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