Creating a poll can be a great way to get your community directly involved in your digital marketing campaign, allowing a rare opportunity for businesses and individuals to provide the users with exactly what they’re asking for. However, due to the nature of the internet, this leaves a glaring opportunity for these polls to be targeted for manipulation by online pranksters and trolls. Often this leaves the creator of the poll with a difficult choice – do you ignore the result and risk alienating your fans, or do you go ahead with the unintended outcome and risk failing to meet the objectives of your campaign? In this post, we’re going to explore two ‘victims’ of vote manipulation, and how the responses to the results were received by the public.

Pitbull

In June of 2012, the American musician and rapper Pitbull launched an online campaign with Walmart and Sheets breath strips, offering users the chance to have the musician personally appear at the Walmart branch with the most likes on their Facebook page. What they likely hadn’t anticipated was Twitter user David Thorpe’s (Thorpe, 2012) apparent disdain for Pitbull, driving him to launch a campaign of his own, #ExilePitbull, to unite internet users in voting to send him to Kodiak, Alaska – a remote town with a population of just 6,130 people (Census.gov, 2017).

Thorpe’s campaign resulted in Walmart Kodiak’s Facebook page receiving over 70,000 likes (Lafferty, 2012) – over ten times the population of the town, causing the branch to soar to the top of the poll and ‘win’ the competition. At this point you’d probably expect Walmart and Pitbull to dismiss the vote due to obvious manipulation, however, in an unexpected move, Pitbull actually agreed to visit the branch, and furthermore invited Mr Thorpe along with him (Pitbull, 2012).

So how was the campaign received? Well, after the initial campaign video received a relatively lukewarm reception, gaining just 36,000 lifetime views on YouTube (Walmart, 2012) and 19,000 likes on Pitbull’s Facebook page (Pitbull, 2012), the follow-up video received over 370,000 YouTube views (Walmart, 2012) and 59,000 likes on his Facebook post (Pitbull, 2012), with several high-profile newspapers (Farberov, 2012) also covering the story. Furthermore, many people reported that despite not being a fan of Pitbull, they had formed a newfound respect for the musician after sticking to the internet’s decision.

Through embracing the campaign’s result, Pitbull, Walmart, and Sheets breath strips managed to circumvent potentially negative press and create a situation in which all parties involved came out positively. Whether or not the campaign would have received as much traction without the ‘aid’ of online trolls is debatable, but it can be said with certainty that Pitbull’s reaction created a heart-warming gesture to the people of Kodiak and his fans and critics alike, helping to boost his own image and reputation and create some new fans along the way.

Boaty McBoatface

2016 proved to be an extremely divisive year, with the Brexit vote (Hanley, 2017), the US presidential election (Peters, Thee-Brenan and Sussman, 2016), and of course, Boaty McBoatface. In the Spring of 2016, the NERC (Natural Environmental Research Council), seemingly oblivious to the dangers of creating an online poll, decided to allow the public a chance to name their latest research vessel through a vote hosted on their website (NERC, 2016). The poll had a relatively tame start, with more traditional (and arguably more boring) names such as the RRS Henry Worsely and RRS David Attenborough being initially put forward, until former radio presenter, James Hand, jokingly suggested calling the vessel ‘Boaty McBoatface’.

Of course, with the internet being the internet, the suggestion quickly gained traction across Twitter and the news media, until the name found itself being by far the most popular suggestion on the website, beating the runner-up by over three times the amount of votes (NERC, 2016).

The vote was concluded on the 16^th April 2016, after receiving over 250,000 votes on the poll in just one month (NERC, 2016), leaving everybody questioning whether they would actually follow through with the user vote. Meanwhile, the internet seemed divided, with many firmly stating that the NERC should abide by the result, arguing that the name could be used as a tool to foster interest in the vessel’s mission and promote science amongst children, whilst the other side made the argument that the name ‘Boaty McBoatface’ would make a mockery of the institution and would not be a suitable name.

Ultimately, the NERC decided against the result, and selected the fourth most popular ‘RRS David Attenborough’ as the name for the ship, which had only received 11,000 votes (Khomami, 2016). This served to bring anger and disappointment to many, who saw it as a missed opportunity and in some more extreme cases, a damning indictment of democracy. A few months later, the NERC did somewhat concede and named a submarine on-board the RRS Attenborough as Boaty McBoatface in a move to recognise it’s former popularity and finally attempt to put the issue to rest (Knapton, 2016) – helping to appeasing those on both sides of the argument.

So What Can Be Learned?

 Creating an online poll can indeed help to promote your digital campaign, creating engagement and retention – two key objectives in a campaign as new generations of consumers demand more online interaction from businesses (Ryan and Jones, 2017).  Depending on who you ask, these campaigns may be viewed either in a positive or negative light in regards to the outcome, but it can be said with near certainty that these polls helped to generate a huge amount of engagement and attention that may otherwise have not been attainable if not for the ‘hijacking’ by the public.

 As we have seen in this post, whilst an online user poll can be a great way to captivate your audience and even reach beyond your target market, it is an avenue that could cause harm to your brand when not handled correctly. When choosing to create a poll that determines the outcome of your campaign, it is important to remember that vote manipulation is not just a possibility, but oftentimes can be almost guaranteed, and must be planned for accordingly. As Wilson, Robson and Botha (2017) state, once a poll has been voted on by the public it is too late for managers to intervene, and “a firm’s best and sometimes only option is to go along for the ride” (Wilson, Robson and Botha, 2017).

Whilst there are cases when it is obviously acceptable to go against your user base (Rosenfeld, 2017), often these votes are nothing more than harmless pranks, that if entertained, can help to impress your audience and create new customers, as was the case for Pitbull, Walmart, and Sheets. And in the case of Boaty McBoatface, whilst many are likely to have been disappointed, the campaign did certainly help to create awareness and interest in an otherwise likely unknown vessel and mission.

For more online poll hijinks, click here.

 

 

 

 

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