Egypt, social media and the rise of 'clashmobbing'

Picture this: In a UK football stadium, a grey mobile phone the size of a shoe box is pressed to the ear of an average-looking Joe, wearing club colours around his neck and wrist. With a bloody scrap in full spate beside him on the terraces, he's calling in his crew's exact stadium location and organising back-up troops and other 're-inforcements' to join the fray.

British football hooligans were sort of, technologically speaking, social media pioneers.

This was mid-1980s England, when soccer gangs or "firms" used clunky mobile phone technology and teenage "runners" sprinting from lookout point to pub, to organise themselves to act in concert against rival factions, police or other interests. As the internet evolved in the mid-90s, these same gangs (sometimes called 'casuals' because of their smart, indistinguishable attire) supplemented telecomms use with message boards and online forums to invite friends and incite rival fans to a showdown. The inevitable conclusion to this rudimentary yet strategic communication was an illegal assembly, a smattering of wild violence (with collateral damage to innocents) and subsequent media coverage wondering what on earth the world was coming to.

Sound familiar?

We're seeing it again with what I'm calling Egypt's 'clashmobbers' – a more aggressive form of smartmobbing, which involves online coordination of physical groups – who are congregating on the streets.

The ability of groups of disparate citizens – often largely disillusioned youths – in Tunisia and Egypt (possibly Syria and Yemen soon) to energise, organise and mobilise their disaffection is being portrayed as action almost solely borne from the emergence of social media.

Yet telecomms-fuelled agitation has been with us almost since Naomi Klein had her first pangs of teenage angst. And now it's got a nasty violent streak, too.

Although football yobbos and today's citizens for social change in Egypt might share a methodological commonality, the consequences of their actions is markedly different.

Mobilising the masses

Fifty scrappers looking for a Saturday afternoon knuckle-fest pales when compared to 50,000 baying for commercial or political change on Twitter or Facebook. The force becomes even more compelling should they confront police and security forces in a 'million man march' (coming to debris-littered streets in the Middle East soon). The media pressures on government and commercial interests could be quite seismic.

Nowadays, activists of change or chaos can exert greater influence, physically and virtually, than they've ever managed before. And because the interests of big business as well as every level of government could conceivably be the object of their attentions, preparedness or preventive action against clashmob activism should be on every large interest's risk agenda.

In Australia, citizen interest groups such as cycling activists Critical Mass, students at the Victorian College of the Arts and even anti-internet filter forces have all planned polite smart mob events to ambush attention and command media interest for their cause. However cases from the USA and Germany show that risk management interests and police forces are becoming more intolerant of mall-based or High Street protests that increasingly spill into overt aggression – arrests and curfews have been dished out to offenders. Others are being intercepted (via social media monitoring) before they even get started.

In New York, police ring-fenced a BP gas station as 200-plus flashmob protesters converged on it, dripping in fake 'chocolate' oil and shouting "Clean up, don't cover up". Philadelphia police have even pepper-sprayed mall-mobbers bent on destroying commercial and civic property.

The four Cs of social media

Academics and theorists now have gathered enough evidence to dissect how social media is typically incited and implemented by activists. Georgetown University's Guarav Mishra has developed a neat model that encapsulates how social media usually gains traction within any community. Mishra's '4C Social Media Framework' – content, collaboration, community and collective Intelligence – can be seen to have played out quite accurately in Egypt for instance.

Firstly, Mishra suggests, there's a focus on using social media tools to create and share compelling multimedia Content. (When Wikileaks revealed US diplomats' withering assessment of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisians rallied on Facebook and mobilised via Twitter.)

This content, in turn, promotes collaboration (gossip and photos surrounding Ben Ali's beach house being razed to the dunes, sent via phones and social forums, got tongues wagging across in Cairo).

After that, comes a shared sense of community. ("Hey, if they can do it, why can't we?")

When it became viral, it lead to collective intelligence. ("We know the world is watching and waiting; let's march on Tahrir Square to assert our position.")

But where does the mindless violence trend fit in?

I also venture that if frustration follows, the next 'C' is confrontation (as desperate as those seen in North Africa, Egypt and, imminently Jordan). As evidenced with the WTO protest movements, we often see it spill into Clashmobbing riots complete with hooligan-like, nihilistic aggression.

In the early 1970s, young British football thugs wanted to express themselves, claim their turf and assert their power, albeit in a largely neanderthal way. They often used their personal media to make arrangements. Although there's a palpable political motive, perhaps history is repeating itself with their disaffected young Middle Eastern contemporaries of today.

Around 1973, the US poet/singer Gil Scott-Heron warbled "The revolution will not be televised". He was only partly right. Now, it will be streamed, blogged, photographed, captioned, tweeted and instant messaged live from a million handheld new media devices.

After that, old media will pick up the content and repurpose it for every global citizen's TV set.

As we try to figure out what the hell the world is coming to, business and government would be well-advised to insure themselves against the consequences of the new breed of 'clashmobber'.

Gerry McCusker is the author of the business book 'Public Relations Disasters', a case study anthology of inept PR . Gerry is the owner of online reputation management consultancy Engage ORM.