Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Grumpy Cat Trumps BDS, JVP

The  Palestinian BDS National Committee Facebook page now has 100,000 “likes.”  This is being heralded as the triumphant mainstreaming of BDS.
  
Er, no.

Fallacy: Appeal to popularity


Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) tried this a few months back in perhaps their lamest marketing campaign ever. Only in the fantasy world of BDS, is a "Like" a significant measure of ...anything.


From Jonathan Marks, writing in Commentary
Grumpy Cat Trumps BDS on Facebook

...there is something to Mitchell Bard’s contention that the actual success of the movement, especially in the United States has been underwhelming.

One hundred thousand sounds like a big number. But it sounds less big when you consider that the BDS movement, including its Facebook page, has been around since 2005, is allegedly on a roll, yet has fewer likes over the course of the history of its page than National Geographic Magazine garnered in the past 30 days (270, 405, according to Quintly, a social media analytics site). Over a similar period, the Facebook page of “The Official Grumpy Cat” the spokescat for Friskies, has added over 136,000 new likes to its 7 million. This startling development has, as far as I can tell, had no impact on the international cat community.

Perhaps you will have the patience to scroll all the way through the Quintly rankings to reach BDS. I gave up at the page ranked 6860 (bear in mind that Quintly does not list every page), “I Will Go Slightly Out of My Way to Step on a Crunchy Looking Leaf,” which has over 1,680,000 likes. Now that’s a movement.

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