MAN: Social movements defined by Princeton.edu as a group of people with a common ideology who try together to achieve certain general goals, range across the political and social spectrum. Consider Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party. Both of these organizations communicate their messages and get support through social media sites. For example, they use Facebook to announce events and link to petitions.

In fact, a nonprofit organization called Social Movement Technologies created a Facebook page to help individual social movement organizations get their message out. But social media is not just being used as a platform for informing people of a group's mission and activities, or even merely to get people to sign petitions. Increasingly, activists are deploying social media to motivate like minded people to get into the fight.

To get a sense of what this means, consider the efforts of a 17-year-old skateboarder from St. Cloud, Minnesota. For three years, Austin Lee found himself struggling to get support for a skate park in his local community. But when he decided to use Facebook for his cause, things changed nearly overnight. Lee's posting attracted 1,085 members, and even drew a portion of those members to city council meetings on behalf of his cause.

David Woods of USA Today reported that Lee won the approval and $500,000 for his skate park. And it all happened within one day of Lee's original Facebook posting. So as you can see, if you can use social media to convince people to identify with what you want to accomplish, success is possible. Lee's accomplishments show us that we not only identify and affiliate ourselves with groups, but also are willing to actively work toward accomplishing their goals.