TOOKC Phase 8: Targeted Engagement
Malign Marketing
Targeted engagement at the theater to global level is weaponized marketing.
That’s it, that’s the post.
OK, now I have to come up with 600+ words about what this means for a small unit.
Attention Conservation Notice:
If you’ve done advocacy or other marketing related duties, this will all be familiar turf. The exception is the “dark arts” used against small groups or specific forums. So … skim and see if there’s anything that surprises you?
The Big Picture:
Much of the macro work in this area literally IS just stuff you’d hire a marketing firm to do.
Clarify Mission Objectives.
Identify Target Demographics.
Create & Test Messaging.
Select & Operate Measurement Tools.
Roll Out & Monitor Campaign.
I haven’t had a public role in advocacy for a number of years, but I have been involved in things behind the scenes, or in ghost writing. These days I can’t open a browser tab without encountering SOMETHING that’s an influence operation, and much of it feels like 2012. The year before that I could conceive some scheme in a small chat room, round up a crew to push it, and it would “go viral”. During the spring of 2012 things … changed. What had been working just months before consistently failed almost at the start. It felt like stepping outside into a tropical storm force wind, every step was against a tremendous force. That change, for me, is when I became concerned about what was happening, even if the Internet Research Agency was not yet known.
I don’t care for Facebook, but I did have an account that was friends and family. As 2012 got hotter, I ejected everyone I actually knew, and started adding every account that had a Guy Fawkes mask or some other token of Anonymous. I idled that account right after the 2012 election and didn’t look at it again until the fall of 2017. My 3,200 Anonymous friends had been decimated. The vast majority of the 2,400 survivors had morphed into white rural conservative Christians.
Your Area Of Responsibility:
Where a small group would be used in such activity is varies in terms of the phases of targeted engagement. The following are things I’ve done or seen done:
Initial recon to find out what current leaders in a given geographic or topical area are discussing.
Exploring a nominal demographic, say the residents of a state with a single at-large Congressional seat, to see what internal divisions are in evidence.
Sometimes prior to A/B message testing at some sort of scale new concepts get floated quietly in places where you can get quality feedback.
Measurement tools are usually a specialist’s job, I used to do this with Twitter’s streaming API, but Musk killed that last April.
Campaign monitoring in the form of shadowing leaders to see how things are going.
This is absolutely an area where dirty tricks abound. If there are leaders of demographics that will be hostile to a given messaging plan, their operating environment will get manipulated, and perhaps they will be personally attacked. This is a very gray sort of thing, what is acceptable, albeit unsavory, in a political campaign, would be the kiss of death for a brand trying to sell more widgets.
Part of the reason I am such a lightning rod has to do with the four former members of Congress who went out the door in 2010 and 2012 with my footprint on their behinds. Prior to the wave of foreign influence, which was at first merely offshoring/wage arbitrage, and then evolved to several things much worse, I could get 50,000 readers with a timely, well done piece on DailyKos. Replicating that today takes money, and that’s a problem for human, reality based decision making.
Conclusion:
While no longer a visible player in such things, I’ve been contemplating what I actually do, and there is ALWAYS some calculus about this stuff as a component. If you want to find out what’s happening, gotta wade through spin. If you want to influence what’s happening, having factual information is just a start, you still gotta wade through spin. If the issue is of any importance, in late 2023, you gotta wade through a vortex of drivel from ChatGPT & Friends every step of the way.
There may be some AI enabled sort of fierljeppen possible, but this seems to me, at least at this point, to be thing for a specialist who’s putting time and money into the area.
