Slashdot Mirror
Malaysian Gov't Spends $600,000 On 6 Facebook Pages
gizmodolt writes "The entrenched Malaysian governing party, Barisan Nasional, has spent almost $600,000 on six Facebook pages promoting tourism in the country. This has sparked criticism from opposition parties, decrying the 'ridiculous' reasoning behind this waste of taxpayer funds and garnered widespread recrimination from Malaysians around the globe, who have made their sentiments known, quite publicly, on those very same Facebook pages."
The summary says these are just pages, but they're actually applications and games. Those do cost a lot more to create. It also seems like with his saying "those are just facebook fan pages" he doesn't really understand how much behind the scenes work such things actually need. Yeah, some lovely video of cute cat on YouTube might go viral, but theres a small change of that with something like promoting a country's tourism. Companies also spend lots of money for marketing and those Facebook pages can be highly valuable resources to them. This being slashdot I'm sure I get responses like "if it's good enough people will come", but that just doesn't work with everything and even then you still need to make sure people know about it. There is a lot of work done behind the scenes on such things.
The $600,000 might be a little bit high, but it definitely isn't ridiculous compared to how much it can improve a country's tourism. South East Asian countries are highly dependent on tourism. There are many things I feel my country wastes money on, but this seems like a good deal. It definitely isn't waste, as it brings tourist to country and therefore jobs, money and wealth. My country spends cash on a lot more stupid things than that.