We have been covering how closely social networks and social media platforms can be used to better business collaboration and communication for organizations. For those who are still skeptical about the capability of blogs, instant messaging, forums and online social features in increasing productivity for businesses by providing a more efficient communication and collaboration platform to make things happen, you don’t need to look to far to see massive achievements mobilized by these new age social platforms. We are talking about national and international scale revolutions!

In the older days, creating a national movement and gaining momentum for a cause such as freedom, political justice, or a mass revolution took tremendous effort and time. They relied on waiting for a Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela or someone charismatic to move the people and take control of the newspapers, televisions, or radio waves to get their voices heard. Evidence shows the last few international scale revolutions started with little known people with Internet access who have been using social networks and social media platforms to gather support and organize movements on a massive scale very quickly. What we are seeing now is the radical change in the way a revolution or movement can be started online like never before.

The movement in Iran spread rapidly online from Twitter, Facebook and thousands of blogs, empowering each person in the movement to have an individual voice and at the same time create a flood of voices collectively online. It spread to the extent that people from as far across the world as Australia, Brazil and the United States have joined in to support the cause of the people for free and fair elections and democracy. Online discussions, powerful images, videos, and blog accounts of happenings across online communities sparked a resistance and uprising the government would hardly have imagined possible.

Despite security forces attacking demonstrators and detaining people on the streets, it’s not possible to silence the voices and organization of next steps on the websites powered by social networking software. If this were any other "offline" movement, I’m positive it would have been silenced and quashed instantly, but the ability for people to get together online and organize events and manage the movement online is an example of the collaborative capabilities of what’s happening and what is yet to happen across countries.

Earlier sometime in May of this year, we saw the people of Moldova create a movement raising voices over the government and insisting on change by using Twitter and other social media. The protests took the people right to the parliament doors, started taking shape and gathering momentum online ... gaining a lot of international coverage for a nation that usually stays out of the global news.

Also, this year we saw China doing everything in its power to suppress anything related to the Tiananmen Square anniversary this year in a move to suppress another online movement. This didn’t seem to stop the people from sharing their views, starting discussions, and providing content for the global press to cover the event despite being kept more than an arm’s length from the square itself.

What is noteworthy in all these cases, is the complexity and the amount of coordination required to start a movement or a revolution of these proportions -- and yet they were executed online where people could come together and still have an international impact offline too. If a global revolution can be planned and executed on social networking software platforms, businesses looking for a collaboration solution can take a lesson or two on just how powerful they can be.