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.
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).
the people running the show thought "let's market on facebook yeah!"
and then they hired some fucktard that ruined their campaign.
Actually I think the idea is dumb. Political ideas are very divided, you're either for these guys or the oposing party. Since people are more likely to relate negative opinions than positive ones, you can only expect negative public comments to outnumber positive ones - there's no way this could come across as a positive endorsement.
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
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.
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.
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.
Wrong. Bureaucrats tender for proposals and hire the lowest bidder, that is why they don't get it and most likely never will.
If you can't do.. teach.. if you can't teach... run for office.
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.
You seem to have your stereotypes mixed up: campaign operatives, PR flacks, Ad agencies, and similar(while undoubtedly twisted abhumans who subsist on a diet of hatred and the flesh of innocents) are Not sinecured civil-service jobsworths(neither are a lot of real-world bureaucrats; but many of them at least have that option).
The ones attached directly to a given party or candidate rise and fall with the fortunes of their client, and the freelance ones only get re-hired if they appear to get results.
Some of the actual politicians are a few bulbs short of a christmas tree(though they usually have to have some sort of compensating virtues, like charisma or a smiling family for photo ops); but candidate marketing is a flavor of advertising, which is something that we take very seriously indeed.
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 in Canada.
There's more than one "opposing party".
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
> 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.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
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.
Barring the independents and van Dongen's 6 months as a Conservative, I don't believe your legislature has had more than one opposing party since 2001.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
If you can't run for office...teach gym.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
If you can't run for office . . . go into marketing.
Or become a fact checker for Fox News.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
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!
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.
When I was first given the vote, I disliked *all* of the candidates running in my home town for the local council. I knew them all to some degree and they were all self-serving idiots IMHO. There was one guy who ran on a communist platform. I voted for him that year. He got 2 votes. I always thought that by doing so I could at least brighten the day of 1 person. I did the same thing a few other times in different elections. One year he got only 1 vote, so either he forgot to vote himself or he voted for someone else himself :P
Still in reply to your post, I assume everything a politician says is a self-serving lie intended to get them power. Very occasionally I come across one who might actually be sincere, but never in the last 20 years. Perhaps I am just more discerning now, with age :P
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
There is no one worth voting for.
I live in BC.
I can't vote for the Liberals, because they are massively corrupt, and incompetent. Plus the woman who suppodedly is "leading" them is incapable of leadership of any kind.
I can't vote for the NDP, because the last time they were in power they fucked the economy so badly it took over a decade to recover, and their promises sound like they have learned nothing.
I can't vote for the Greens because they are a bunch of NIMBY assholes who obstruct any and all progress.
I can throw my vote away on an independant, but what is the point?
Nobody left.
I am going to start building my bunker.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
It has happened... in the past 20 years even. But yeah... it's *exceptionally* rare.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I can throw my vote away on an independant, but what is the point?
It beats not voting.
It beats not voting.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
You run out of beer eventually. And they may even stop airing hockey on TV at some point!
The amazing thing is when politicians 'spam' in any manner, and when a sitting government does this it has a lot greater implications, but it is always interesting how on one hand they want to pass 'Anti-Spam' legislation, and laws about government data being stored in foreign jurisdictions, except of course when it serves their purchase to do the opposite.
I do not watch sports. I have much better things to do than watch millionaires playing a kids game.
I still don't see how going out to vote for someone I don't like, don't trust, don't support, and firmly believe is a sociopathic liar, is in any way better than not going out to vote and doing something productive with my evening.
Since I have to drive to the local polling office it could even be considered the environmentally responsible thing to do.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
Are you saying that there's not a single independent or third-party candidate who is not a sociopathic liar?
If so, then you need to either run for the office yourself, or change your country of residence.
I have considered running for office, frequently. But I doubt I could lie convincingly enough to get elected.
I guess I will just have to wait for the revolution.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
...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