Politics and YouTube a recipe for disaster?

The topic of politics is a heated debate and often times can divide people who are normally friendly towards each other. It’s no secret that the power or social media is vast but is it really for everyone? It all depends on the message that your video is trying to convey.

Recently Republican Candidate Rick Perry launched a campaign on YouTube with his video entitled “Strong”. Unfortunately for Mr. Perry, the instantanious feedback from the public was not as forgiving with well over half a million dislikes on a single video. Ouch. Very painful indeed. This is seriously in much need of damage control, but this is not the way to do it. Using actions such as disabling the lie/dislike button, removing comments etc, is not really helping his cause in fact it’s making it worse. Pretty much the essence of what makes social media, well social media was removed.

As a vehicle of interacting with potential and current voters, this would have been a good way for the candidate to come online and face his attackers. There is a strong disapproval with the campaign he chose to use. Does he know why people are so upset over it? Does he care about what the public really thinks on this matter? By disabling comments on the video, he has lost the perfect opportunity clean things up.

I think there is a better way that should have been utilized in order to keep the video on YouTube as social as possible. Even though there is a lot of negative comments and dislikes, instead of disabling the comments, he could have a moderator go through them and remove and remove them individually from the page. They should do this not because the viewer disapproves of the message given, but because it is not appropriate for public consumption. Removing comments because the responder is not for your argument is a step in the wrong direction. Positive and negative comments are the internet’s form of debate and that is what is healthy. He should try to see what is upsetting the public so much with this campaign and try to compromise or seek out a better platform to reach his viewers better. If this was not the response he wanted to get for this campaign, he really needs to backtrack and come up with a different approach to let the voters know what he truly meant to say.

 

Resource: The Rick Perry Viral Video Disaster – What Politicians Do Wrong on YouTube http://www.reelseo.com/rick-perry-viral-video-stron/#ixzz1gMGnua3l

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