Study: developers need to start organizing online; opponents are!
By Owen Eagan and Jay Vincent,
The Saint Consulting Group
Our company, Saint Consulting, recently conducted a study to assess the extent to which community groups were utilizing Facebook to oppose real estate development projects. The results should provide a wake-up call to developers.
Using a set of strict research criteria, Saint Consulting found a significant number of community groups conducting well-organized opposition campaigns online. Not surprising to us, we also found that these opposition campaigns outnumbered support campaigns by a ratio of 9 to 1. These virtual campaigns consist of many of the same elements of traditional offline grassroots campaigns.
For instance, the greatest challenge of any campaign is targeting your voters and developing lists of supporters. With more than 250 million active users on Facebook, this social network tool provides citizens with a means of more effectively and efficiently connecting with like-minded individuals and sharing information about development projects.
Many other offline tactics have migrated to the Internet as well. For example, door-to-door canvassing and petitioning activity can now be done from the convenience of one’s living room or the local Starbucks with one’s mobile device. It is clear from our research that using social media to oppose real estate development projects will likely be a popular trend going forward. It is also clear that, in addition to their offline campaigns, developers now need to wage online campaigns to combat the effectiveness of these groups.
Owen Eagan is senior vice president for transportation, The Saint Consulting Group, email eagan@tscg.biz
Jay Vincent is regional vice president – Midwest, The Saint Consulting Group, email vincenty@tscg.biz
Can you provide a link to the research report?
Social media also can allow for a 2-way conversation. By monitoring social media, a developer can engage in more of a dialog with the opposition as well as neighbours who are more curious than opposed. For example, developers could comment on a blog or facebook or twitter conversation started by a group opposed to their project.
Although there will always be some people opposed to any change, for many others it’s one or two pieces of a larger project that is the source of their opposition. With dialog, those opposed may learn either new facts about those one or two things that bother them (sometimes the facts get distorted by main stream media or a well-meaning but uninformed blogger). Or the developer may realize that they can change aspects of the one or two things generating much of the opposition thereby making the road ahead easier.
Two points, from my study and teaching on this topic: First, it’s much, much easier to organize a crowd that’s angry or against something than it is to pull people together who support something. For that reason, you must be proactive and strategic, not reactive.
And second, social media alone will not save you. You need it as a tool in the toolkit but you need all your other more traditional tools as well. Too many initiatives rely too heavily on just social media, and as a result cannot garner the support they need. A good communications strategy has to be much larger and anticipatory than that.