Slashdot Mirror
Shooting Yourself In the Foot, 21st Century Style
rueger writes "Right now there's an election happening in British Columbia. A desperate government is flooding Facebook with "Sponsored Post" spam (example) extolling the wonderful things that they plan to do if re-elected. There's one problem though. Every one of these posts is followed by hundreds of extremely negative comments added by people who either dislike the party in question, or Facebook spam in general. Desperate moderators are trying to control the 'discussion,' but seem to have no hope of doing so. What was thought to be a cool marketing tool has turned into a public relations disaster. Is this the worst use of social media in an election?"
Still no one gets it.
If computers were people, I'd be a misanthrope.
the people running the show thought "let's market on facebook yeah!"
and then they hired some fucktard that ruined their campaign.
one of the reasons politicians screw up so much is because they are dirty and cannot trust anyone, so they find people they trust to do things they are unqualified for.
Nothing better than seeing peoples pathetic attempts to "own" or "steer" the conversation backfire.
Only the free market and unlimited foreign workers can save Canada.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2205975/Waitrose-Twitter-backlash-I-shop-Waitrose--I-dont-like-surrounded-poor-people.html 'I shop at Waitrose because... I don't like being surrounded by poor people': Internet jokers hijack 'posh people's supermarket' Twitter stunt Supermarket asks Twitter why people go there using the hashtag #WaitroseReasons but got some answers it will not have liked Majority of people who replied concentrated on its posh reputation and only a minority gave serious answers 'I shop at Waitrose because Clarrisa’s pony just WILL NOT eat ASDA Value straw,' one said Another said: 'I shop at Waitrose because the toilet paper is made from 24ct gold thread' Waitrose's PR team tweeted back that they enjoyed 'most of them'
Depends on your point of view - as a publicity stunt, it is an epic fail. It should have also been expected. Keeping open discussions on the internet is inherently problematic, even if you are posting the most non-controversial of statements. Start a discussion on how cancer is bad for humans, and there will be someone posting about how good it is for population control.
On the other hand, if some of the top government officials can be bothered to read the criticism, they might actually learn something. While democracy is great and all that, once people get into office they might as well be governing from the moon. It's easy for you to refuse to allocate funds to fix my roads if you don't use them on a daily basis.
The internet has made it easy to offer feedback and that should (in theory) help people govern better. While it is true that we could always "write/call" our congressman, it isn't really practical when you get to higher levels of government (e.g. do my tax dollars go to fund a war or education).
They still don't get it.
The fact that politicians are allowed to lie in an election is just insane. Politicians present a budget that just is not balanced. If a detergent commercial would include lies of such magnitude, they'd be banned from tv. And the politicians wonder why people do not feel connected to politics.
They still don't get it. Politicians shouldn't be using simple marketing at all. But because one is doing it, they're all doing it. They can only solve it together.
If the advertiser is truly desperate, it may have been worth the gamble.
Here, I interpret "desperate" as "likely to lose." They may have realized that the normal route (kissing babies, buying TV ads) wasn't going to work.
If you're going to lose, gambling big makes sense. The downside is losing (and you were losing anyway). The upside is winning (and it is huge).
I always wondered if this is why immigrant Americans seem to start so many businesses...they have little to lose while us native born folks with equal skills have decent jobs and houses and see no reason to risk all that. (I'm biased, I still prefer arguing with my son over homework to driving a fancy car).
It's just an indication that the sheer ignorance on the part of government of the use of the internet in general and social media in particular is world-wide. Hell, the people who dreamed up the idea probably think spam is a good mass marketing tool. Politicians are the same everywhere - disconnected and with a blind sense of entitlement.
And this type of behaviour is why I am afraid of the new PLAN emergency alert system text service the government is instituting here in the USA.
You can't opt out or block this service for 'critical' government updates.
I expect the current officials misusing the service in the same way.
I don't see how this is anywhere near as much of a failure as when Reagan showed his complete lack of understanding of Springsteen's Born in the USA, or when Paul Ryan did the same with We're not gonna take it, or Michele Bachmann with American Girl or Sarah Palin with Barracuda.
The real tragedy is that one of the four were elected.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
When Facebook started injecting "sponsored content" into the news feed, I started getting quite annoyed and letting the owners of that content know in my comments to their link.
As much as Facebook wants to sell ads, if the people whose ads are there are getting angry comments, they might figure out that people don't want it.
When you start injecting ads into things people can comment on, you might quickly discover the people those ads are being sent to don't give a crap about you and your product. These ads are intrusive enough that people notice them and don't like them.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Advertising -- especially political advertising -- is about controlling the message.
Social media is about allowing the message to be debated.
If you want the market penetration of social media, fine. But unless you can disable commenting, you have to take the bad with the good.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
I wish the U.S. President and U.S. Congress would use the same tactics so they and everybody else would see how much they are all hated.
We let two corrupt groups of people both offer up a corrupt person to be our representative, and we get to pick which one we hate the least.
The BC government has done such a horrible PR job that I don't like them from the opposite side of the country. I detest the government here yet I can make a bigger list of reasons to hate the outgoing BC government starting with the Chinese miners.
This just confirms a pet theory that government needs to be wide open to the people. The internet is helping yet the BC government has thought that they could do what they want and somehow retain power by creating their own reality. This is becoming harder and harder to do but backroom deals still abound in most governments. Quite simply governments should not be able to hide almost any information. When I mention this to government people they say No No No that would prevent us from doing what needs to be done; to which I reply it would prevent you from doing what people don't want you doing.
Nice trick trying to get me to click on a FB link. Instead of posting a screenshot of the ad, you link directly to one. I'm sure there's lots of data mining going on behind that link.
Well, the major difference is that, in the cases you mention, the politicians fucked up in the same direction as the electorate, and thus(from a pandering perspective) didn't fuck up at all...
I don't think that slamming the party is really relevant for talking about the flaws in social media advertising. (Nor really is loaded terminology used to describe it.)
Is that American style "politics of hate" have taken root here in Canada, over the last decade or so.
Arrragggh! Pee pee doo doo he is a bad president I am mad I have no job blargh a blag a fucking bloo.
Just to be fair, you can include Clinton with Won't Get Fooled Again. I'm pretty sure they all pick a song based on one key phrase without ever understanding the bigger message. Really all they are looking to do though is fire up their base for a little while.
One of the faults with our typical election is that it's a minority of individuals who remember all the promises made and broken in the last term in office. This is why the same idiots can get elected time after time. Now the idiots have opened the gates for that minority to remind the forgetful majority exactly how they've been abused in the last few years
Early internet had so many review sites that gave relatively unbiased information while the established players like PC Mag was seen to be basically shills. Eventually those review sites died or became shills or got lost in the noise of shill sites. Reviews in Circuit City, Best Buy, Costco etc all started out decent and died due to shills. Amazon seems to be fighting a losing battle with the shills.
Essentially the basic rule is this: If costs nothing to post a review or a message, expect to be overwhelmed by spam and shills. It is simply vendors adapting to the new medium. No way good samaritans would be able to keep up with the volume churned out by the vested interests and they will be lost in the noise. Bold prediction: Same fate will befall wikipedia, eventually.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
This is the dangerous side to social media. Because you can't control the message, things can spin wildly out of control particularly if the numbers aren't extremely in your favor to begin with. If you're a small company with a small customer base, one negative comment, justified or not, can destroy you. A negative comment can quickly go viral and they you're completely borked. You have no legal recourse to punish the liars and set the record straight. If you have an enormous positive following, that works to your advantage because they will defend you when someone brings up a negative even if it is true.
They should make a voting machine app in facebook.
When the bank screws up & makes all your money magically vanish... all the checkbook pencil scratches in the world won't get it back. The system ALWAYS goes with the banks figures and not yours, so why bother keeping your own figures?
If you can't do.. teach.. if you can't teach... run for office.
If you can't do . . . teach.
If you can't teach . . . administrate.
If you can't administrate . . . run for office.
FFS, I've always hated this shit. Be reasonable:
If you can do . . . teach.
If you can't teach . . . do.
The party in government is basically selling off everything owned by the government to either private corporations or semi-independant authorities, (authorities which apparently aren't covered by freedom of information legislation), doesn't understand that it was private debt that created the financial crisis, not public, that it wasn't anything in Canada that created the financial crisis, etc. Despite calling themselves Liberal, they are basically Conservatives, (the actual BC Conversatives just have those too conservative to consider joining a party labeled Liberal).
Further down the same article, they offer these gems:
Waitrose may have had an uncomfortable few days following a PR campaign online that went sour but it is not the first big player to be burned in this way.
Many other businesses have tried to whip up interest on Twitter only for it to blow up in their faces, while others initiatives have just been plain poorly judged or in bad taste.
In 2009 the Daily Telegraph wanted to show how techno-savvy it was by allowing tweets about the Budget to appear on its website automatically using a Twitterfall.
If someone used the hashtag #budget it would pop up on telegraph.co.uk but it was quickly hijacked by those who used it to make jokes at the paper's expense (pictured right)
Some choice comments included: 'Even the Indie is better than this drivel'.
McDonalds also wanted to boost its profile online by using the hashtag #McDStories to ask people to regale stories of their hard-working staff - but it didn't go at all to plan.
Tweeters came straight back with their horror stories at restaurants, claiming they were given food poisoning, and that one burger contained a finger nail.
Search engine giant Bing also courted controversy when it pledged to donate to charity following a devastating Japanese earthquake in a stunt they believed would also boost their profile online.
Their staff tweeted: 'How you can #SupportJapan - For every retweet, @bing will give $1 to Japan quake victims, up to $100k'.
But instead all it got was a barrage of abuse from people convinced it was in poor taste.
Only this year coffee giant Starbucks put its foot in it on Twitter.
They were forced to issue an apology after it managed to upset people in Ireland.
It 'erroneously posted' a tweet which encouraged followers on there to 'show us what makes you proud to be British' - and outraged replies followed.
And sometimes companies get it completely and utterly wrong.
Condom giant Durex decided to run a PR campaign with the hashtag #DurexJoke.
In utterly disastrous fashion it decided to start the ball rolling with this joke to its South African followers - 'Why did God give men penises? So they'd have at least one way to shut a woman up. #DurexJoke'.
It went very badly for them from there.
----
(A bit Off-Topic, but every time I copied some text from there, it automatically appended
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2205975/Waitrose-Twitter-backlash-I-shop-Waitrose--I-dont-like-surrounded-poor-people.html#ixzz2MgdsTGfK
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
at the end. I wonder what technical trickery they are doing ;p)
I am an ACCA student. Got a query on Accountancy/Finance? Maybe I can help!
Really? You are making this about immigrants?
I am here on a H1B visa and if I lose my job then I will get deported within 24 hours. I will lose my house. I will lose my car. I will lose everything I worked for after I came to the states.
You can start a business and fail and all you get is a bad credit score. If I start a business and fail I lose everything!
Nobody gets deported in 24 hours in the US, no matter what the laws say. And you H-1Bs and your bodyshops are expert at finagaling the laws.
Dude, you probably have my job and maybe my house. Stop whining. I lost all sympathy for you guys when I got reorg'd into a team in a US company where out of 18 reports to the manager on that team, there was all of ONE US FTE fully benefited employee, I was one of the three other US people (Citizen or green card), and the rest were either direct H-1Bs, or L-1s and H-1Bs brought in from a mix of small bodyshops and INFY, or at INFY in India directly. Then they got rid of two of the US people. Me the WASP, my colleague a Latina, and kept the one remaining US person, because she was under 40. Meanwhile even when there, we were perma-temped for ages with crapola benefits.
Zero sympathy for you guys.
Don't with over a trillion data points the net can quickly link to all the proof the reader needs.
You cant fake that or hold it back.
If you lie spin or deceive you will be caught.
why don't you try this again on Twitter.
Go ahead, give us another laugh. Please?
I like my spaghetti with source.
The October Surprise is why he lost, period. The fix was in, soon to be followed up with Iran-Contra as payment-in-kind for their win.
Pushing unpopular right wing views on a pro-environment pro-jobs population never works.
But then, what did they expect?
Just ask Mr. 47 Percent and his "anti-government" wrecking crew that tried to push their vision on America.
If you exclude Arkansas, W. Virginia and a few other places in the south, the percentage of folks that believe the universe revolves around them decreases significantly.
I'm talking general population here. Politicians are a special case and are also excluded.
...always a geek. Since this article was on /., I thought it would be about how a new computer language would allow you to inflict harm on yourself, as in : http://howto-pages.org/shootfoot.php