Building Social Movements: Heimans Joins Social Media Week panel

How does social media help drive more effective movement-building? How, if at all, do online and offline actions reinforce one another? What are the benefits of utilizing social media as a tool for participation, and what are the risks?

Purpose co-founder & CEO Jeremy Heimans tackled these questions and more on a Social Media Week panel alongside Shiza Shahid, co-founder of The Malala Fund, and moderated by Erica Dhawan, author of Get Big Things Done: The Power of Connectional Intelligence.

“Social media radically democratizes access and enables people to break free of the chains of the mainstream media,” Heimans said. “Idea dissemination becomes radically decentralized; in many cases, social media actually drives the mainstream media coverage. You don’t need one iconic figure leading the charge anymore.”

“The challenge before all groups using social media is how to connect the injection of energy to existing momentum. How, for instance, can you link #feminism to a vibrant, new-generation feminist movement and set of feminist organizations? In the official feminist movement in the US, we’ve got some people who have been doing good work and who are well intentioned but whose time has come to move aside for the next wave. We need to hear new voices while working through the challenges of consolidation. Social media is very good at punctuated interventions – but it’s typically most useful if the ecosystem that surrounds it feeds into a broader social change intervention.”

You can view the archived livestream video by logging in here: http://socialmediaweek.org/newyork/events/social-movements-reigniting-human-connectivity/.