Spending money is an exercise in choice and influence, so why waste it?
The social media response to the Alan Jones saga is uplifting, argues Matt Jones
When thousands warn a brand they will buy a competitor product unless the brand ceases funding content they find offensive, is that really 21st Century censorship? Or just consumers expressing a preference?
When those same people use social media to amplify their voices, accelerating and multiplying the impact of their purchase intentions, is that cyber bullying? Or just consumers seeking to shape the world they live in, not just shop it?
Like most people, there are things I don’t like about the world and would like to change (or at least influence). But how to be heard?
Let’s carrotmob Coke.
Soft drinks are now officially the number one cause of health problems in the US –
Coke…it’s time to go!
Thank You Matt! Choosing to boycott a product a brand or a company because it supports someone you find offensive – eg. Woolworths/Kyle Sandilands – and letting them know you have chosen to do so respectfully isn’t some sort of cyber bullying. It is democracy in action. I’m loving this paradigm shift. Finally everyone has a voice. How can that be a bad thing?
Go for it, Carrot top..boycott anything you want. It’s your right, and your choice..your money, your say! But you’ll need the numbers! That’s why the boycott of the sponsors on the Alan Jones programme is so successful..it has the numbers behind it..the huge force of people saying “enough is enough”! That’s not cyber-bullying….that’s People Power! All Power To the People! The so-called Little People are saying: we have a Voice and we will be Heard!
Disclosure; I feel I need (in case anyone thinks I am defending Alan Jones in what follows) state that I don’t listen to Alan Jones, and I don’t have much time for his style of radio. Obviously, there are people as intelligent and clever as Jones thinks he is; It’s just that he isn’t one of them.
It’s appropriate that your opening line (“The social media response to the Alan Jones saga is uplifting”) is on a marketing blog. The truth is that the social media response to the Alan Jones saga is an example of the audience being manipulated, just as any organisation tries to manipulate an audience via any other marketing campaign. The difference is that when an industry uses the Anna Meares story as a metaphor for their grit and determination to do good for Australia in a TV campaign, we (as an audience) have many years of experience behind us that we can use to decipher and decode the ‘real message’.
By comparison, while many people use various forms of social media, it’s obvious that the limitations and technicalities behind it are not so apparent, not so well understood. Not by the audience, and certainly not by those interepreting and reporting on the campaign. using the Alan Jones example, the change.org petition at http://www.change.org/petition.....boycott2gb demonstrably has no verification of how many times one computer, or even one individual signs the petition. There is not even any verification that you are who you say are – I implied above that Jones was not as clever as he thinks he is, but even I doubt he was conned into signing the petition – see http://dl.dropbox.com/u/181339/petition.jpg A simple google on the initiator of the petition https://www.google.com.au/search?q=“Nic+Lochner” finds him listed as (amongst other things) a 22-year-old Randwick politician and an unanswered accusation of being an ALP stooge (and just in the first 10 entries). Regardless of my opinion of Jones, this starts to colour my opinion of Lochner’s independence or motives.
In the short term, this will be as successful as any other (at the time) innovative marketing practices – just see the coverage the petition is getting;
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/.....26vla.html
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/.....2725l.html
However, while companies, organisations, movements that continue to use these sorts of Social Media tools, without the appropriate AND visible AND effective safeguards to prevent ‘gaming’, will end up being regarded as untrustworthy and unreliable, there is another risk. If it is so easy to set up a stackable gameable method to promote my agenda or movement, then it’s just as easy to for anyone else to do the same. How about a #SackGillard petition for every #BoneJones petition ? Even more effective would be to hijack the current campaign. For example, given change.org’s lack of verification, it would be a trivial task to add another 100,000 signatories overnight, except having them named, say, ‘Jones I.S. Innocent’ or “Julia G Sucks”.. or even, if you were particularly devious, a list of names from the Sydney whitepages.com.au with comments that Jones was being unfairly treated.
As promoters take advantage of the new marketing and influencing tools, we as consumers also need to keep up with these tools and their failings, so we can keep the promoters (regardless of their politics or intent) honest.
hth
Martin English, as I understand it you are trying to accuse Change.org of manipulation and misrepresentation. In addition you are using the argument that those who support it are too witless and unsophisticated to know they are being duped.
Manipulation is what I would call your spurious arguments and your use of ‘opinion’ spaces to promote unfounded claims which could be interpreted as libellous elsewhere.
I would suggest that it while it may be easy to manipulate a social media campaign on a small scale, manufacturing over 100k separate signatures with separate email addresses is very difficult.
Moreover, numerous recent alternative click-campaigns and petitions supporting Jones, have failed miserably, this is despite them not even requiring any verification whatsoever. The Change.org petition requires an email address and a statement of your reason for supporting the campaign.
Perhaps there are just not as many dumb and easily-manipulated people online than you think!
*as* you think!
@mkat, please read my first paragraph again.
I don’t think I implied that people voting on the change.org petition were witless; I will cop to saying they are unsophisticated. That was, after all, my point. I WAS incorrect in that I obviousy implied all of them were unsophisticated.
As for the ability to manipulate change.org petitions, their verification / validation is so poor that I was able to register ONCE, then add multiple variations of D Duck, S Kangaroo, T Abbott to the petition. Using the same logon. From the same computer. I do have experience in coding data scraping processes, and I know that scripting the process I just described and running it on Amazon Web Services would take me less than 2 hours to get running. Adding the other bells and whistles (adding random comments, using realistic names etc) would take longer to setup, but the point is it is not difficult. The limit to how many entries I added to the petition would be how fast the target site processed the updates; after all, bringing the site down would not be the point, I would be doing this to expose them to ridicule.
I haven’t seen or heard of any similar petitions supporting Jones. I would suggest that apart from the ‘non jones’ demographic being more likely to use Social Media, they would also be more sophisticated / aware of the possibilities of gaming it.
Finally, and I feel pained that I have to spell it out so completely….
1. I have no sympathy for Jones. For someone who professes to be so media aware, it was the height of stupidity. For someone who professes to be so in touch with people, it was cruel and callous.
2. The ONLY reason that the plan I described would work is because of how poorly change.org have setup their verification process.. Don’t shoot the messenger.
hth
Personally.
Hi Martin,
Very few people in the community think as you do about gaming online petitions. Call it ‘unsophisticated’ if you like, I prefer to call it ‘honest’.
As Change.org’s management have stated publicly, they check for people doing what you did and periodically remove the duplicates. You probably now have a flag against your name, email address and IP when responding to further surveys and will undergo extra scrutiny (though you might not see this). Also all your duplicate signatures have probably been deleted (though I’ve not checked through the 114,000 signatures to confirm this).
The fact that change.org let you behave in this manner and then picked you up is actually a control technique to identify ‘sophisticated’ users and address inappropriate use.
If the service instead picked up this type of inappropriate behaviour up front it could goad ‘sophisticated’ users into trying harder to break the system. There’s no reason for change.org to encourage this.
As to comparisons…
I was aware last week of a change.org petition set up in support of Alan Jones. Checking it today, It has attracted 129 signatures and 12 comments negative or satirical of Jones (noting these people had to sign to comment) as well as 3 supportive comments. You can view it at: http://www.change.org/en-AU/pe.....alan-jones
Doing a search of change.org for ‘alan jones’, there is also a change.org petition specifically asking 2GB to NOT sack Jones. This has 66 signatures: http://www.change.org/en-AU/pe.....alan-jones
You might enjoy reading the comments. Again, largely negative towards Jones.
There’s a number of other surveys – the largest (over 16,000, 2,000 and 187 signatures respectively) are both anti-Jones. The others (164,36,35,34,24,17,4,2,2,2,2,1,1,1 – for a total of 325 signatures without considering the number of duplicates) are pro-Jones surveys.
The biggest of these “Support Alan Jones!: Stop the nasty attack on Australia’s greatest radio announcer” has over 100 comments, with about 2/3s being negative towards Jones or the survey creator (who apparently has stood for election several times for the Protectionist Party, but has never been elected and is known for creating petitions like this).
Moving off Jones for a moment, The Telegraph’s ‘stop the trolls’ petition on change.org has attracted only 664 responses over four weeks: http://www.change.org/en-AU/pe.....r-tweets-2
If The Telegraph, with it’s supposedly huge circulation and readership (including online – so not simply people who don’t use the internet) and ability to manipulate and aggregate followers, can’t crack 1,000 signatures on an online survey, then a survey receiving 114,000 signatures demonstrates a significant level of public backlash.
Perhaps that’s why companies listened to the anti-Jones sentiment. Real people with real money were unhappy – not simply ‘sophisticated’ users defrauding the system.
On the basis of the evidence above, Martin, there appears to be no evidence of massive fraud in change.org by Australians in the opposition to Alan Jones. You can rest assured that the vast majority of those 114,000 people opposed to Alan Jones are indeed working Australians (to borrow a phrase).
Is it so hard to believe that this many Australians may simply have thought he went too far and were prepared to sign a petition to emphasise this?
Given one large advertiser (of the over 70 who withdrew) reported 25,000 calls in four days telling them they would stop buying if they continued to support Jones, is 114,000 signatures out of the scope of reason?