So here we are again.
I received a lot of negative feedback for my essay on volunteerism some weeks back, and I have a feeling that the same will happen about this opinion on the Twitter campaign – Globe’s virtual outreach program for Ondoy victims. But you know what, somebody needs to speak for the dissenters, and although I really wish it weren’t me twice in a row, well, your RSS readers have filters after all.
If you don’t know what BangonPinoy is, you may wanna check out the site, which outlines the program in sparkling marketing speak. The important bit is as follows:
Put #BangonPinoy after your tweets starting today until November 6, 2009. For every #BangonPinoy hashtag used, Globe Telecom, in partnership with the Philippine Blog Awards, will guarantee a P1 donation to be spent for typhoon victims. Our target is to reach 400,000 tweets in 3 weeks!
Sounds innocuous enough, right? PhP400,000 is a decent chunk of change to be donating to the cause after all. There are a couple of small, niggling problems though.
The first is that we need 400,000 corresponding tweets with the #BangonPinoy hashtag. My first reaction upon seeing that number was one of awe. I doubt if there are more than a million Filipino Twitter users currently, so 400k messages seemed like an unreasonably ambitious number. As of this writing, we’re on Day 6 of the 3 week experiment and the current number of mentions is still under a thousand. If you’re too lazy to do the math, we need to be hitting 2,000 tweets per day in order to get to the target. Now, to be fair, Globe said that they would guarantee PhP1.00 for every tweet, so even if we only have 5,000 mentions by November 6, they’re good for at least that amount.
On the other hand – and here’s my real beef – if they wanted to make a PhP400k donation, they don’t need our tweets for that. They could just hand it over to the appropriate organizations. Why delay it for three weeks?
Answer: this is very likely a social media experiment to see what kind of influence Globe can exert on the Philippine social web. Social media is a hot property right now, and lots of local advertising agencies are working out ways to harness it effectively. This is one of the first that’s operated solely within Twitter, and that’s a significant step forward.
My second issue is that Globe is really encouraging Twitter spam here. It’s spam “for a cause,” certainly, but it’s still spam. When the greater twittersphere got wind of the campaign, it took about half a day before they realized that there was no way to hit the 400k number without modifying their tweeting habits. Soon, people were tweeting snippets of OPM lyrics and other miscellaneous detritus and appending the #BangonPinoy hashtag indiscriminately.
Now, one could argue that the ends justify the means here, in that it doesn’t matter what our tweets contain, as long as we hit significant numbers with our efforts. But the whole point of the use of hash-tags is to raise awareness, and right now, all we’re doing is accumulating dozens of tweets that say “Humanap ka nang panget” or “Let’s sing Merry Christmas” and whatnot.
Early on, I tweeted (in a rather tongue-in-cheek fashion) about the possibility of simply building a bot that tweeted with the #BangonPinoy hash-tag every 15 seconds or so. Three or four such bots could, in concert, hit 400k tweets in about a week’s time. I argued that ultimately we were doing this for the Ondoy victims that Globe has promised they will give aid to. We’re already spamming anyway. Why waste human brain-cycles when we can apply CPU cycles to the problem instead. (Consider that a bot like this would take about an hour to write for your average Web2.0-aware developer, and the returns seem rather enticing.)
This is not a particularly out-of-the-box kind of idea either, as it’s no secret that the only reason Trending Topics manage to stay Trending Topics on Twitter for any significant period of time is because of bots. They latch on to words and tags that are beginning to trend, and greatly amplify it so they attach marketing links to the messages. Yes, .
The obvious argument against the bot idea is that it goes against the very principle of this campaign, i.e., these tweets should be coming from concerned citizens. Without trying to be facetious about it though, it stands to reason that these bots would be written by a developer who is himself a concerned citizen. And if you wanted to make sure the tweeted messages are marginally relevant, you can program your bot to re-tweet what other (human) twitter users are saying. (Or if you want something inspirational, you could compile a list of quotes from ThinkExist, about hope and the strength of human resolve. Or the words to “Panatang Makabayan.”)
A caveat however: anyone who is seriously thinking about writing these bots and deploying them needs to remember that Globe reserves the right to call the whole thing off if they smell something fishy. In other words, you are running the risk of ruining the whole campaign by “helping out” in this manner. (There are, of course, workarounds for this problem as well. Twitter allows you to change your username multiple times after all, and there’s no limit to the number of accounts you can register.)
With all that said, I would be cautious about actually doing this. The way the social web reacts to this situation will lay the ground rules for many other social-media marketing plays to come. How would the big corporations and their advertising agencies interpret it, I wonder, if our first reaction to their social-media campaigns was to write bots to circumvent them?
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UPDATE: I originally drafted this piece on Saturday the 24th, and in the 36 hours since then, BangonPinoy’s numbers have grown to 1,048 tweets, an average of about 140 tweets per day. Still not very encouraging, but I did notice something interesting in the aggregated feed. There’s an RT-bot already on there () that’s operating almost exactly as I described above. It came online in the late evening of Sunday the 25th. Of course, it may not even be an actual bot. With this kind of low-volume tweeting it’s almost impossible to tell the difference between an automaton and a human who has simply gone the extra mile, so to speak.
One other new Twitter user, , came into being on Sunday as well. For the most part, it’s been broadcasting lines from nationalistic poems or lyrics from patriotic songs, which are, in my humble opinion, slightly more relevant that simply spouting random 80s OPM. One can only hope that it is enough though.