Shooting Yourself In the Foot, 21st Century Style 172
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?"
Social media (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Social media (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Why would anyone be surprised (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Politics, still they don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
We denigrate politicians because they lie, but candidates who tell the truth don't get elected.
Re:Politics, still they don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Opposing forces (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
We shoot ourselves in the foot every day (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Opposite side of the country (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Politics, still they don't get it (Score:0, Insightful)
Mostly because americans as a whole are retarded and cant balance their own checkbooks.
Re:"Worst" or "Best"? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:I Wish (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
The problem: There's a world of difference between not knowing what people think of you, and not giving a rat's ass.
Usenet was great too, before AOL (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
This is in Canada.
There's more than one "opposing party".
Re:Politics, still they don't get it (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Hmmm...Many people now think that Regan actually did a pretty good job overall.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Regan#Legacy [wikipedia.org]
Truly inspirational leaders, (Winston Churchill springs to mind), manage to combine the ability to give the bad news whilst simultaneously outlining credible plans for fixing things, and giving people hope.
Carter failed on the second count.
Re:Politics, still they don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:2, Insightful)
All this speech did was potentially (if not responded to in the short term with vigor) opened the door for the President of the United States to start telling people to tone down their own lives for the good of the collective. Carter already had terrible approval ratings and SOMEHOW this speech actually helped him in the slightest, but, only for a short time. I'm thankful that some "senile movie actor" was around to remind people of what they already knew.
Can't control the message (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Politics, still they don't get it (Score:3, Insightful)
Jimmy Carter was thrown out on his ass because he permitted the hostage crisis to last so long - right up through the election. Being a veteran, Jimmy Carter SHOULD HAVE had some idea how to handle that hostage situation. Instead of handling it, or getting the experts to handle it, he put together this special little Kum-By-Yah task force. And, watched that task force fuck itself in the desert.
Being a NAVY veteran, Jimmy SHOULD HAVE known that if ANYONE could handle the mission, it would have been the Marines. (That is not to say that the Marines could have successfully completed the mission - that is only saying that IF ANYONE could do it, they could.)
Jimmy Carter made a laughing stock of himself, and the Armed Forces with his Feel-Good-Circle-Jerk task force.
You simply cannot magically wave a wand, and create a task force consisting of squids, jarheads, grunts, and whatever the fuck the Air Force people call themselves, and expect them to accomplish anything more than a cluster fuck.
Zumwalt should have taught his protege something about leadership.
They hostage situation may or may not have cost him the election anyway, but that major fuck-up guaranteed that he couldn't be re-elected.
Re:Politics, still they don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
They hostage situation may or may not have cost him the election anyway, but that major fuck-up guaranteed that he couldn't be re-elected.
If the hostage situation guaranteed that Carter couldn't be reelected, why didn't the Iraq war guarantee that Bush couldn't be reelected? The Iraq war was a much larger fuck-up by orders of magniuted. The public doesn't care if you fuck up. They care whether or not you swagger when you fuck up.
Information from a Resident (Score:2, Insightful)
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).
Re:Politics, still they don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)