Because the old one is full of crap

I’ve heard it said that one of the major factors that won  Barak Obama the Presidency of the United States was his campaign’s effective use of the internet — particularly, the social networking site we’ve all come to love, Facebook.

In the Philippines, almost all of the politicians gunning for various seats in 2010 are using Facebook to spread their propaganda.  Some have done so quite effectively and some have merely used Facebook as the internet equivalent of pasting posters on walls.

The unsophisticated approach to would be to simply gun for visibility, as if the mere visibility of what is easily revealed as propaganda can convince people to vote for a candidate.

It could be in the form of a link or uploaded photo that screams, “Vote for me! Vote for me!” or the equally droll “This candidate is the best candidate because I say so!”

I guess the practice works for the so-called masa or jologs crowd whom I will forever deride, but not for the more serious thinkers who scour the internet not just for information but sound and well articulated positions on candidates.  Moreover, these aren’t just disembodied brains scouring the internet and you have to consider that apart from purely logical/cognitive input, these people are also drawn to what I refer to as  ‘authentic human interaction”.

There are people on the internet who go about campaigning for their candidate on the internet like complete automatons and it is a real turn off.

I think the higher level game in campaigning for a particular candidate is not really how well you SEO a website or blog, but how well you articulate your thoughts and convey them in a sincere, understandable manner.  Moreover, if it is at all possible, one must behave on the internet as they would think their candidate would behave.

I guess the simplest way to say what I am trying to say is this: Your behavior on the internet speaks more loudly about your candidate than any slogan or picture you can point to.