Sunday, September 20, 2009

Filipino Politicians and the Internet

Manny Villar is now on Twitter and apparently, he is now my follower.

Manny Villar Follows Me

The moment I read this email notification, I had to laugh at first. Imagine a politician following an ordinary person like me? Almost immediately, I realized what this is about.

It is a campaign strategy for this presidentiable (and for other presidentiables who are/maybe on twitter (or other social networking sites as well). Here's why I can say that: the moment that a person has been notified that someone has followed him/her, followed person becomes aware of the existence of this follower. In this case, I wouldn't know that Mr. Manny V. here has a twitter account hadn't I received the mentioned notification. Let's say I do not have a clue as to who Manny Villar is and I get something like this in my email, my curiosity would still lead me to check who this follower of mine is. This, regardless if this is the real Manny Villar tweeting or just one of his campaign people who tweets.

While I may commend Mr. Akala Mo for using the internet to reach out to voters (probably adopting the same strategy U.S. President Barack Obama used to build his popularity and seal his victory), I do not like the idea that they are already doing all sorts of campaigning (think: tv campaign ads that they pass off as infomercials *roll eyes*) this early.

Oh well, I guess there's no stopping these politicians now. *shakes head*

[Disclaimer:
With this post, I'm probably doing Mr. M.V. here a favor: helping him out with his publicity. Given that, let me make it clear that I am not for Manny Villar. It's still too early for me to have a definite presidentiable in mind for our 2010 Philippine general election.]

2 comments:

Debbie said...

hahaha
sikat ka! Instead of people following him, he follows you. Haha
Sana they can replace follow with serve! We need public servants not politicians!

raichua said...

Very profound debz ^^

When we were talking about this, we felt it was more of a campaign thing. Given that normally you also follow someone who follows you, as an act of courtesy... sorry but this is not facebook :p