Many times here on Telofski.com, I’ve written about social media campaigns that activists mount against companies. This post is about a social media campaign mounted by business against an activist organization, specifically Greenpeace. Turn about is always fair play.
The thrust of the campaign is an interesting video from TunaForTomorrow, “a campaign to combat misinformation about sustainable stocks of tuna fished by the (sic) America’s leading canned tuna brands.” This campaign is sponsored by the National Fisheries Institute (NFI), a trade organization and is in response to Greenpeace claims about some of the NFI members’ fishing practices.
What I like about this video, entitled “Greenpeace Bullies,” are two things. First is the fact that an industry has chosen to respond to Greenpeace using tools similar to those employed by Greenpeace, in this case online video production. Greenpeace is a heavy user of online video. Just check their YouTube.com channel.
The second thing I like is that an industry has chosen to respond to the accusations of Greenpeace. Often companies, or their trade organizations by proxy, will not respond at all or will just automatically capitulate to the demands of this activist organization. And given that Greenpeace is not always correct in their research, a point that has been made on this blog several times, these knee-jerk capitulations serve well only Greenpeace fund raising campaigns and not necessarily the companies they attack or the customers served by those companies.
Now for the thing I don’t like about this video.
The video is a disappointment. The video doesn’t make its point.
The title of the video is “Greenpeace Bullies” and at :12 the viewer sees the words “Think Greenpeace is a reasonable and peaceful organization? – Think again.” This is the point NFI wants to make. I very well understand what NFI wants to say. On this blog I’ve written about Greenpeace’s unreasonableness many times. Click here and take your pick among the articles I’ve written on that subject. But even though I’m already convinced of Greenpeace’s semantical bullying and their unreasonableness (although I’m still on the fence as to whether they are “unpeaceful”), for me this video falls flat. Here’s why.
Throughout this one minute and twelve second video there are too many disconnects between the images and the audio running over them. In a nutshell, the images detract from the point NFI wants to make.
For example, from :26 to about :47 we hear recordings of Greenpeace campaigners apparently on the phone to the fishing companies being targeted, accusing those companies of theft, leaving nothing in the ocean for the common man, and threatening power to be unleashed on the streets against the companies targeted. Under these audio clips, we see video images of a man in a yellow suit handing a phone to a child as well as images of standard Greenpeace street theater, specifically someone dressed
Continue reading “Greenpeace Bullies” Vid Needs Improvement
Back in September there began on the social web a controversy about how effective the social web itself is in activism. Malcolm Gladwell touched off the latest installment in this argument with an article in The New Yorker. Since then there has been much written about this issue. Simply Google “Malcolm Gladwell” and “digital activism” and you’ll receive more reading sources than you will probably know what to do with.
Malcolm’s position, in a nutshell, was that the social web did not help progress activism. However, I recently read an article on the Greenpeace blog which made a succinct case against Malcolm’s position.
“An Answer to Critics of Online Activism,” written by a Greenpeace blogger known only as JulietteH, the article relates her tale of how her journey into activism and now employment with Greenpeace, began with reading a single post on a Greenpeace blog about five years ago.
Now, certainly this focus group of one does not make a logical, compelling case for countering the argument that the social web is ruining activism. But if we consider that logic often does not apply in activism, then perhaps we can get an entirely different perspective on the social web’s importance to activism.
In a PBS.org article titled “How Climate Activists Are Warming to Social Media,” the reader gets a very good overview of some of the ways activists are using social media. The article is by no means comprehensive, and some of the material is repetitive of past well-known events. However for anyone interested in the social media tactics of activists, the article can provide a good basis of knowledge.
When companies deal with social media activism against their brands, getting a clear message out to the audience is a difficult task. A recent eMarketer article underscores the problem.
In “Companies Struggle to Keep Social Media Content On-Message,” it was pointed out that a Burson Marsteller study showed message distortion in blog posting occurred at an average of 69%. The high message distortion rate was attributed to the tendency for blog postings to include “opinions, personal experience, knowledge of competitors and products, and speculation.” Naturally, message distortion occurs in mainstream media as well. But the study stated that message distortion in the mainstream media occurs less than 50% of the time.
For companies dealing with irregular competitors in social media, these statistics do not bode well. But what can companies do about this problem?
The eMarketer article points out that to mitigate the problem of message distortion companies need to “create their own compelling content and distribute it across social networks.”
Such a strategy might work well for both proactive and reactive strategies against irregular competition.
Earlier today I wrote about the punking of Chevron’s new “We Agree” promo campaign. For background on this campaign and how it was punked by activists, you may read that article “Could the Yes Men Get Punked in Return?” by clicking here.
In that article I noted that Chevron announced their “We Agree” campaign on the morning of Monday, October 18, 2010. There is further information concerning the timing of the announcement and how it was made.
A New York Times article states that Chevron made the announcement, in the form of emails sent to reporters, after an article about the promo campaign was published in The Wall Street Journal on the morning of Monday, October 18, 2010. Chevron also announced the new promo campaign via a corporate press release on their Web site on the morning of Monday, October 18, 2010.
The New York Times article also states, however, that several hours prior to those Chevron emails being sent out, emails resembling Chevron emails were sent out, referencing a Web address different from what was mentioned in the actual Chevron emails. These first emails turned out to be spoofs. That other Web address referenced in the spoof emails was a Web site that the Yes Men used in their spoofing campaign, Chevron-WeAgree.com.
If the information in the Times article is correct, (and it appears that the Times article is not a spoof itself) it would seem that someone on the activist side of this affair had foreknowledge of the announcement of the “We Agree” campaign.
Indeed, that possibility can be supported via an independent check of the domain registration for Chevron-WeAgree.com.
Go to Who.is and check the registration for Chevron-WeAgree.com. You won’t learn who registered that domain. But you will find out WHEN it was registered. The registration record for Chevron-WeAgree.com, according to Who.is, states that the domain was created on October 16, 2010. That’s two days before Chevron announced the “We Agree” campaign publicly.
This information raises at least two questions.
Was there a leak in the “We Agree” campaign? If so, where did it occur?
You have the information as shown above. You may draw your own conclusions.
UPDATE: October 19, 2010 – 7:45PM ET, In a post on their site (which does not appear to be a spoof), Rainforest Action Network (RAN) admits playing a role in this Yes Man protest campaign. RAN also admits sending out information prior to the Chevron emails “. . . we had the element of surprise . . . before Chevron’s press release announcing its ‘We Agree’ campaign could hit reporters’ inboxes, we sent out a press release of our own on their behalf.” RAN also admits to creating the Chervron-WeAgree.com Web site along with the first fake press release by saying in that same post “before we sent out our press release, we put together a spoof website and a fake press page.”
To do all of this along the
Continue reading Was There a Leak in the "We Agree" Campaign?
Yesterday, a firestorm erupted on the Internet. This particular fight concerned Chevron and the Yes Men, the activist/culture jamming/tongue-in-cheek pranksters.
Early morning on Monday, October 18, 2010, Chevron announced its new “We Agree” advertising campaign. They did so via a press release posted on their corporate site. You may read the press release here. A short time later, the Yes Men issued an ersatz satirical press release, disguised as a Chevron document and taking the ideas behind the “We Agree” campaign to the Nth degree with spoofing turned up to 11. You can read that ersatz press release here. But the Yes Men didn’t let up with this one press release.
Hours later, after word of the lampooning hit the media, the Yes Men, like Al Qaeda which is known by its trademark one-two punch, released a second ersatz press release also disguised as an official Chevron document. The second release portrayed Chevron officials as commenting on the first Yes Men press release. You may read that second press release here. And to add in a third jab, the Yes Men included a sentence and a link at the end of the second press release saying that Advertising Age was taken in by the ruse. The link in that sentence takes you to an ersatz Advertising Age page, which you may visit via the link at the bottom of the second ersatz press release or just go to the Ad Age spoof via this link. So, as of late yesterday, the Yes Men committed a “triple punk.”
But will their protest claims against Chevron be what people remember? Or will it be the “triple punking” that sticks in people’s minds? Or will it be the original message of the Chevron “We Agree” campaign.
I’m voting that its the Chevron message that has the legs in this throwdown between activist and corporation. Why?
Because the Yes Men may have, indeed, punked their own message. Their triple play campaign has drawn so much attention to the original “We Agree” campaign that in the long run probably more people will attend to the Chevron campaign, which is bound to last longer, than to the Yes Men triple play, which is bound to be of a much shorter duration. So in the end, the Yes Men may make the Chevron campaign more successful than it would have been if the Yes Men hadn’t indulged in the tomfoolery.
|
About  Here at " Richard Telofski on The War on Capitalism," I discuss and analyze the individuals and groups conducting campaigns against capitalism. In the articles on this site, I provide analysis on lesser known facts about this movement. More . . .
 |
Klout.com rates Richard as influential on the subject of activism. |
|
