Social Media as Persuader

The BBC has a story today that tries, unsuccessfully I’m afraid, to answer a questions many advertisers has asked before them:  Can targeted social media really change behavior of the targets? This is a question that Facebook asks every day for advertisers, but has found the answer is not suited just to advertisers.  Political parties are trying to do the same thing.

In one of my security education speeches, I used to compare the methods of security officers with advertisers.  Advertisers have a target and they want to change the behavior of people in a market segment to get them to buy a particular product.  They are not doing this to get you to be entertained, enlightened, or distracted from your daily routine.  They want you to make a choice when you buy, and that is to buy the product their ad represents.  For you Security Officers, that means something similar.  Given a choice of behaviors, the audience should chose the one that the security rules favor.

How successful are advertisers?  Jerry Thomas at Decision Analyst says:  The advertising industry, as a whole, has the poorest quality-assurance systems and turns out the most inconsistent product (ads and commercials) of any industry in the world.  This might seem like an overly harsh assessment, but it is based on testing thousands of ads over several decades.”  Those of you getting political advertising thrown your way on TV, newspapers, other print media like mail flyers,  etc. know what you do with the stuff you see.  Anyone thoughtfully read that, or watch it with the intent of knowing what it says? Security puts out a lot of stuff just like that.  

But, this group of social media might be onto something in using targeted material for small groups with different messages for each one.  The Russians thought it was worth paying trolls to tailor messaging to certain groups.  Those messages encourage behavior that favored the Russian view of world events, or favored disruption of those who they perceived as enemies.  They got those ideas from political parties targeting of their electorates.  This is a kind of “advertising” that comes from friends, or friends of friends and that is more effective than general advertising campaigns.  But they also create news stories to back up what those trolls are saying.  They use dirty tricks to lie about someone who opposes them.  Just like advertisers paying for good reviews of a product, they pay to have their views presented favorably, and pay for bad reviews of the other companies’ products.  

But, the BBC article does not tell us if the use of social media actually works as a persuader.  Does it actually change behavior?  Does it change enough behavior to make it worth the effort and political backlash that goes with it?  Advertising proves that just because people do it, there is not necessarily a proven effect.  Thousands of ads are not successful, yet are repeated over and over because businesses have always had advertising budgets that have to be spent.   I don’t believe the Russians are any more successful than advertisers as a whole.  At least, I hope not.