I was at OxfordJam, a conference about social entrepreneurship and social innovation where I had the opportunity to speak to David Wilcox about a specific type of social network dynamics that I am describing as the work of ‘Social Insurgents’, groups of people on the internet that are united by common interests, that are using guerrilla warfare tactics to gain maximum disruptional benefits, for the minimum amount of effort.  This applies to a number of groups, in this video I mention a group of climate sceptics who worked so successfully in sharing the emails hacked from the CRU under the frame of “climategate”.

However I believe that this post could have easily have mentioned a number of different groups, this kind of behaviour is becoming more and more common, the work of GreenPeace against Nestle could have been described as GreenPeace advocating and looking to inspire a type of Social Insurgency, although as I have described before this was not quite achieved.

This links to some research that I found on KDPaine’s blog in reference to work by Bokyung Kim and Joonghwa Lee from the University of Missouri (graduate students from South Korea) which stated that (in this case observed in relation to the Samsung Oil Spill Korea 2007)…

bloggers tended not to report at all on Samsung’s apologies (standard crisis communications reactions) and even claimed Samsung denied responsibility and made excuses that, in reality, it had not. Also, the trajectory of intensity of anger and duration of coverage for the bloggers actually increased over time. All this suggests that we need to rethink “the rules” for corporate response to a crisis, given the changing news cycle, the presence of bloggers and other advocates, and proliferation of news outlets.

So in the light of the the fact that people are organising themselves very successfully online and the fact that there is more and more research stating that the social web reacts differently to traditional channels and as it is simply not as accountable for the information it disseminates, means that we now need new rules to deal with this threat.

In this video I talk about a few solutions that can be explored to tackle social insurgent attacks, one solution could be to fight back with counter-insurgency efforts, essentially looking to form small agile organisations (the fact that large respected organisations cannot do this is simply because, large organisatons do not want to be seen to be bullying adversaries into submission) that can quickly mobilise to deflect the attention and attacks from the social insurgents, however if you attempt to do this you are immediately entering into an arms race where success will be dictated by whether you are faster, more knowledgeable and better equipped than the insurgents.

A strategy with much more chance of succeeding would be to take the ‘moral high ground’ by entering into conflict resolution, where the social insurgents are brought into a neutral space where dialogue can be established in the hope of reaching consensus on key issues.