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"Here's a new tactic for Occupy Wall Street protesters to consider: dressing up as zombies for a mass performance of \"Thriller\".\nThat's what thousands of members of Chile's growing student protest movement did in June, gathering for a Michael Jackson-inspired flash mob outside the home of President Sebastian Pinera. Videos of the performance have gone viral in Chile, with multiple YouTube posts gaining tens of thousands of views each. \nIt's hardly the first time an international Thriller tribute video has hit YouTube; the most notable was created by prison inmates in the Philippines in 2008. But this may be the first example that was linked to a specific protest. \nChilean students, upset over the fees charged by their country's largely privatized school system, are leveraging social media in a unique way, according to Katie Manning, a reporter for a group of online newspapers in Chile called Mi Voz.  \nChilean students are \"pushing beyond the social-networking boundaries established by other global protests,\" Manning writes Monday on Wired. \nWhen protesters occupied the Chilean Senate building last month, urging a national vote on education issues, they livestreamed the sit-in via YouTube, as well as a service called TwitCasting.tv, offering a more complete picture than the quick clips typically shown on local television networks.\nStudents have turned to social media as not just an organizing tool, but a way to tell their stories \"without the censorship that occurs in traditional media,\" says one activist. \nSocial media is extremely popular in Chile, according to the research firm comScore. Chilean student protesters have launched an English-only Twitter account to better communicate with reporters, sympathizers and observers around the globe. \nWhile the mass \"Thriller\" performance may have generated the most buzz so far, even that moment came with some calculated serious undertones, according to one student quoted at the time. \n\"Public education is dying, so we took this Michael Jackson creation and we united to this movement that is dying, the zombies,\" he said. \"At its heart, that's what it is. And behind each zombie, there's a family. This has much deeper meaning.\" \nSo allegorical zombies going viral on YouTube \u2014 that may be a page the Internet-savvy Occupy movement can take from the Chilean students' playbook.\nWhat do you think about Chile's use of social media? Is it really much different from that of Occupy protesters and other global movements in Greece, Spain, Libya and elsewhere? And could \"Thriller\"-themed protests catch on worldwide?"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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