 | ||
| Dec. 29 2009 - 08:49 am View comments (7) |   | |
0 | |||
 |  |  |
Epic fail = Noynoy Aquino as Presidential candidate
Recently, I've been on the receiving end of sage advice from people I do not know. One advice that has been repeated mindlessly like a mantra is that writing about Noynoy Aquino's epic fail as a Presidential candidate is in a way promoting him as a candidate.
Here's one particularly bright nugget:
In effect, by writing so much material about the opponent of your candidate or the candidate you don't particularly like, you end up burying your candidate. For the most part this is why I think Noynoy is so successful, why Chiz is so visible, why Gibo is starting to pick up his vibe, and why Villar and Gordon are having their bits of turbulence.
The prescription is simple: write more about your candidate. Whenever you can, extol the positive virtues of your candidate, and gather as much positive press as you can about him or her. You need to write, rewrite, and develop your content in such a way that you can rake in the readers, educate them, and convince them to vote for your candidate. That begins and ends with:
Now, I am an idiot when it comes to SEO or online marketing, but from what I understand, it's not just about visibility but also about the context in which your blog post or website page appears. The context is usually a person searching for information on something in particular for reasons such as mere curiousity to finding information because they need to make a decision.
Supposing one wanted to make a decision about who to vote for as President in the Philippines in 2010 and didn't know any of the websites that carried that list, how would that person look for information on who the Presidential candidates are?
One search on google they could make is to key in "philippine presidential candidates 2010" and this would give them the following results:
Say, for example, I wanted to promote my candidate as a Presidential candidate, I'd probably gun for the top of the search results for the search "philippine presidential candidates 2010" and attempt to populate the search results with as many favorable articles about my favored candidate.
If what the writer in the block quote was saying is true, then perhaps we should find a webpage or blog entry favorable to Noynoy Aquino. But, right now, that is not the case.
However, I think that people searching for information using Google are basically conditioned by traditional media - radio, tv, and newspapers.
So their search may be more specific and with the amount of hype being pumped about Noynoy Aquino, I think there is good reason to assume that most people would be using the search term "Noynoy Aquino"
Right now, a Google search for Noynoy Aquino comes back with results pointing to articles that are mostly favorable to the candidate and the unfavorable articles are buried in the 20s and 30s of the search result.
Anyway, people who believe that bad publicity is still publicity probably haven't realized that this saying is more often applicable to entertainment celebrities and not people who are running for the Presidency of the Philippines.
I wonder what effect it would have on Noynoy Aquino if his name turned up in searches for warlord or warlordism? Not that Noynoy Aquino is a warlord.
Anyway, I don't think I won't really know the answer, but for certain, articles like this tend to question the propaganda being put out.
Rather than merely engage in mudslinging or promoting a particular candidate, my purpose is to promote a culture of debate, a culture of critical examination where claims are tested and in the process, proven to be true or false.
One way of doing so is to reveal the flaws in the claims and positions.
Some claim that Noynoy Aquino deserves to be the next President of the Philippines. To examine this claim, we have to ask: What does it mean to deserve to be the next President of the Philippines? Deserving something assumes that there is a criteria or standard that one has to meet in order to obtain some reward.
What is the standard or criteria set for the Presidency? The Philippine Constitution merely states that one has to be able to read and write, be of a certain age, and be a natural born Filipino - that's anybody.
But what criteria or standard should we have for a leader of a land that is beset with so many problems?
I think in choosing between Aquino, Villar, Gibo, or Gordon, it is very crucial to find out first what is the proper criteria for selecting a President of the Philippines.
In my view, that criteria should include:
- Relevant experience and accomplishment. Why? While it is true that past performance is no guarantee of future performance, it shows demonstrable proof of what one is capable of doing. One can even scrutinize if any of those experiences and accomplishments are worth considering as a plus or minus, a merit or demerit.
- Proficiency in planning and executing plans. Why? By looking into a person's capability to plan, we gain insight into a person's ability to engage in higher level thinking and perhaps "sincerity" in achieving the objectives he claims to want to achieve for the people. It also works as a way to hold that person accountable. By looking into how he or she has executed plans in the past, we find further evidence of his or her ability to lead people.
- Integrity. Rather than define it as being free from any allegation of corruption, I define it as staying true to one's word despite all challenges and adversities.
| Comment It | |       | | |  | Email it |  | Print it |
No comments:
Post a Comment