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?"

Not surprising ...

[gstoddart]

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.

Re:Politics, still they don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

Case in point: Jimmy Carter was naive enough to the nation the truth [wikipedia.org], 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.

What really sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Politics, still they don't get it

[isopropanol]

If the parent post is on topic, the poster is referring to the BC provincial budget recently passed. The governing party claims that it is balanced but several economists etc. who have been interviewed in the media say that it achieves being balanced by liquidating provincial assets and predicting unrealistic revenues from natural gas wells that have not been drilled yet.

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.