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?"

Comments

Re:Social media

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not just about social media, very few even understands simple marketing.
You still see advertisements that try to force themselves onto people, not realizing that this creates a connection with discomfort and the product.

"Worst" or "Best"?

[Kwyj1b0]

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).

Re:"Worst" or "Best"?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

On the minus side, it has become readily apparent that the internet's SNR has some... room for improvement. It's also pretty easy for moderately competent jokers to combine trolling skills with sock-puppetry, poll stuffing, etc, etc.

Even on parts of the internet where controlling the discourse is worth essentially nothing, some nutjob is probably wasting his life winning the edit war or posting about how he earns $68/hour working from home. If there were a location where politicians were actually listening(and, implicitly, money and power were available for allocation), you'd need explosives to cut your way through the astroturf...

Re:Social media

[swanzilla]

Perhaps they should have consulted with a Social Media Expert. Preferably one well versed in SEO and targeted ad compaigns. Those guys are great.

Politics, still they don't get it

[captainpanic]

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.

Re:Politics, still they don't get it

[InterGuru]

We denigrate politicians because they lie, but candidates who tell the truth don't get elected.

Re:Politics, still they don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

When polled, the US voting public wants the Federal budget as a whole to go down but wants each individual item to go up. Are you surprised that the representatives they elect can't pass a budget?

Re:Politics, still they don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

Case in point: Jimmy Carter was naive enough to the nation the truth, and the public was so upset that they threw him out on his ass and put in a senile movie actor who told us things that made us feel good.

If the public wanted politicians who told the truth, they would vote for them.

Re:Politics, still they don't get it

[Meeni]

A balanced budget is -not- a sound economic policy. Your budget must have a deficit approximately equal to growth rate. For some retarded reason, this is the way money is created (fed buys treasury bonds, emit money as a result), and available money needs to be commensurate with the size of the economy.

Now the trick is that bonds have an interest rate. Hu ho. Creating money costs money. The second trick is that growth rate is notoriously difficult to predict accurately, in particular because growth rate strongly depends on public spending. Hence it is somewhat easy to "overestimate" the deficit that should be dialed in to result in best economic output (and it could be argued that being conservative would have direr economic results that overspending, by shrinking the economy today instead of creating a potential problem later, maybe never). Anyway, both issues result in permanent deficit increase, even in % of GDP, which is bad, but is somewhat the result of how "the system" works, independently of politicians ideas.

Re:Politics, still they don't get it

[DickBreath]

> Mostly because americans as a whole are retarded and cant balance their own checkbooks.

Balancing your checkbook is an obsolete skill. Move into the 21st century.

Everyone today knows that you spend by using credit cards. When they get maxed out, you just get new ones.

Problem solved. See how easy that was?

Re:Politics, still they don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, this is a bold faced lie (or at least strongly misleading). First, even if you assume that the Fed has to buy treasury bonds (which they don't - think about the most recent QEfinity nonsense with MBS), the money supply doesn't have to grow. Many economists believe that a moderate rate of inflation (1-2%) is beneficial to economic growth (as opposed to slow deflation which would result with a constant money supply with a growing economy - see 1870-1900), but there is very little empirical evidence to support this position - it's taken mostly on (in my opinion, somewhat dubious) theoretical grounds relating to consumer and producer expectations. Further, even if you posited that the money supply must grow and the Fed must buy treasury bonds, there is still a huge surplus in government debt that would last 50+ years before we would run out of treasury bills/notes/bonds to add to the Fed's balance sheet.

You can make arguments as to why sovereigns should run deficits. The need to run deficits to grow the money supply is not one of them.

(Yes, IAAPHDE - I Am A PhD Economist)

Re:Politics, still they don't get it

[RevDisk]

I'm not sure why you were mod'd +5 Insightful. At the time, long range helicopter operations essentially did not exist. Because of the failure of Operation Eagle Claw, significantly more attention was paid to Special Operations aviation. 160th SOAR is one example.

The military dropped the ball, not Carter. I read several books on the incident, for obvious reasons. Failures can often teach more than success, if one pays attention and learns from mistakes. Of the 8 aircraft, 2 returned due to navigation issues. One's hydraulics failed. So, the military aborted, which Carter approved. Then a helicopter ran into a C-130. These were RH-53s, flown by U.S. Marines off the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz. It was the Marines that essentially killed the mission. Not really their fault, no one had done that sort of thing before and it allowed the US Army to develop its own special forces aviation.

And essentially, that's what Carter's failure did. USSOCOM now consists of squids, jarheads, grunts, and zoomies. And they do quite well these days. Read Eric L. Haney's "Inside Delta Force" book sometime. His portrayal of Desert One is what caused me to do my own research. And led me to understand the military failed President Carter, not the other way around.

keyword: desperate

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Why would anyone be surprised

[MikeLip]

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.

Opposite side of the country

[EmperorOfCanada]

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.

Usenet was great too, before AOL

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Usenet between 1989 and 1998 was gold. Despite flame wars in places like soc.men and soc.women, or soc.culture.indian / soc.culture.pakistan in general the quality of discussions were good. Quality of information unbiased or the bias of the poster was obvious. The "travel agents survey" of soc.culture.indian was gold to the PIGS. (Poor Indian Grad Students). When commercial ISPs were being discussed, many usenet users predicted the death of usenet. They were prescient. Usenet died under the weight of spam and shills.

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.

Re:clueless

[mark-t]

This is in Canada.

There's more than one "opposing party".

Can't control the message

[RogueWarrior65]

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.