“Astroturfing” vs. “Grassroots” Social Media Marketing
Image by chad davis via FlickrAlways active and alert timelady brought this travesty from Mashable to my attention. John McCain is promising “incentives” to engage in social media on his behalf…essentially he’s crowdsourcing his social media marketing campaign. This is in an effort to counter the strong grassroots social media campaign his opponent, Barack Obama, has been gathering since he announced his candidacy. This technique, paying people to mimic the behaviors of grassroots campaigns, has been dubbed by some “astroturfing“. Needless to say, this tactic is criticized.
It seems that Rizzn wants to defend astroturfing and make an interesting claim:
Essentially, the McCain campaign is taking a very capitalist approach to their digital campaign strategy, just as the Obama campaign could be described as having a very hippie approach to their campaign strategy. McCain is providing a rewards system for those interested in promoting his message, where as the Obama campaign tries to (and often succeeds in) getting folks involved in spreading the message based on idealism.
Later he claims:
But what about MoveOn? What about the Howard Dean blogosphere movement? What about the network of Obama blogs? What about the countless other Twitter campaigns that launch based on issues that arise on a near weekly basis? Are these things not essentially the same thing for each of their respective issues? Suddenly when a Republican gets New Media savvy, it’s got to be termed as something negative?
Sure, none of these campaigns explicitly incentivized their campaign messages, but they encouraged users to go forth into the blogosphere and spread the word. What is the McCain campaign really doing here? Are lifelong liberals, or folks who aren’t supportive of the McCain presidency suddenly going to pop out of the woodwork so they can qualify to recieve a McCain bumper sticker or a McCain baseball cap?
Now, I think that this is like comparing punk rock and disco. A grassroots campaign has the kind of traction and appeal it does precisely because it comes from the hearts, minds, and hands of real people who really care about whatever it is they get connected to promote. It has credibility because those people are doing it for honest reasons. This is credibility through sincerity and integrity.
Now, when you purposely try to imitate that process by making it look as though people care and want to promote you, so that your campaign appears to come from the credible source of sincere real people, that is about as dishonest and manipulative as you can get. There is a huge difference, and Rizzn acknowledges it without actually allowing it to affect his argument:
none of these campaigns explicitly incentivized their campaign messages
So it’s like he sees the problem, but doesn’t want to acknowledge it anyway. He sees what makes it different, the exact issue, but then says there is no difference and it doesn’t matter. And he tries to blend in some sort of swipe at liberals, like they are being crybabies or something for pointing out that an astroturf campaign has no credibility, actually hurts credibility, and is a vast and horrific attempt to co-opt social media.
I would like to make clear, I am neither liberal nor conservative. I have no interest in choosing between a Big Mac and a Whopper. Instead of having a party, I just have a rudimentary understanding of ethics. But this seems to be pretty easy to parse from logic, as well:
p1: If two things differ is some salient respect, then they are not the same. (Identity Relation)
p2: (there exists an x such that x is) Grassroots campaigns (x has property p) are motivated from below and are trusted because of this.
p3: (there exists a y such that y is) Astroturf campaigns (y has property r) are motivated from above and simply do more to make the object of that campaign seem to lack integrity and credibility.
p4: r =/= p (from p1)
.’. (therefore): x =/= y
Or, for Rizzn and the difference-challenged (the politically correct term for people who say how something is different while still claiming they are the same):
