Never Mind The Five Million....What Are The PAB-Bots Actually Doing?

ShutOutOnline

Anti-SocialMediaConsultVille

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Update: And now it appears that the HST misinformers within the Campbell-Clark Governent's Finance Ministry are, like Voldemort, those who can never, apparently, be named. Mr. Holman (sans interns - see below) has that story too.

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Sean Holman, through an FOI request, came up with some interesting traffic stats on the HSTinBC.ca (mis?) information website.

In case you missed it, all the trumpeting of said (mis?) information is being financed by $5 million of our money that has been commandeered by the Campbell-Clark government so that it can presumably be mainlined, speedball fashion, directly into the coffers of their ConsultCo. media friendlies.

Now.....

Given the fact that that the website concerned generated ~140,000 visits from January to June of this year compared to the ~250,000 visits to Mr. Holman's own shoe-string budget-driven site, Sean decided to ask what it is, exactly, that we are getting for our money.

Apparently, it is 'effectiveness'.

....In an email, finance ministry communications director Matt Gordon defended the effectiveness of the government's advertising campaign.

"To compare a news site to an informational site is like comparing apples to oranges. News sites change daily with new information for browsers to review. A site like HSTinBC.ca is a static site," Mr. Gordon wrote. "In the context of government sites in general, this site has proven to be very popular."...

Really Mr. Gordon?

Is saying that it is 'not a news site' and it is therefore allowed to suck the best you can do?

Well.

Given all that, perhaps you would like to know that this wee little F-troop blog, which runs on a budget of considerably less than zero (and is most definitely not a news site), actually received about a third of the visits that your mega-bucks website did in the same period of time.

So, I have a proposal for Mr. Gordon et al. to consider.

Specifically, I propose to drive my traffic up tenfold and go "All-HST-All-The-Time" for information purposes. What's more, all points of view will be included and it will be a completely codswallop -, not to mention demonstrable falsehood -, free zone.

I also propose to do all of this if the Campbell-Clark government throws me just 1% of their mis-information budget (ie. $50,000). I will then hire two interns to do all the grunt work to get things buzzing through all the various non-stop tumbles and tweets required to, as they say in the trade, 'grow the eyeballs'.

This will use up $20K of the money.

What will I do with the remaining $30K?

Hmmmmmm.....

How about this - I will give it directly to the proprietor of the best online provincial politics (definitely not mis) information site in British Columbia so that he can afford to go whole hog and increase his FOI request rate by 1000%.

Heckfire, I might just do it all myself, and chuck the interns Mr. Holman's way too.

How does that sound?

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And stay tuned for a hit-list comparison of another of the Campbell-Clark government's uber online initiative....Internally, we have dubbed it Christy's 'Anti-Viral' Project.

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