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03/05/2013
NOM confuses ability to extend an invite with actual support
The National Organization For Marriage's "March For Marriage" Facebook page is stale. Our two-week-younger pro-equality page has been outpacing it for weeks, currently standing at about 1,300 LIKES above the NOM effort. Plus there are even questions about the support NOM does have, since the most popular city connected to their U.S.-centered "march" page is listed as Paris, France.
Bottom line: NOM's social media effort is flailing. So what do they do? Well, in true NOM fashion, the staffers attempt to create a new reality. Take a look:
What they've done here is create a new Facebook event (as opposed to just a page) where they can try to achieve a better result. And since their LIKE count on their original Facebook organizing page is not shaping up the way they wanted, they are now focusing on the number of invites on this event page rather than the LIKE count on the main page. Only thing? This invite count is a completely ridiculous statistic that means absolutely NOTHING.
For those not up on Facebook, let me explain. When one creates an event, he or she can invite whoever the heck he or she wants. If I create a page right now announcing that I will have caribbean baked tofu for lunch, I can proceed to invite my thousands of friends to attend that historic moment. In one click I can do this. From there, my friends can invite their friends, their friends can invite their own network, and so on and so forth. There is no high bar to achieve. There is no merit attached. It's simply an invite. And in fact, for a national org. like NOM that has had years to build a supportive network, 7,000 invites is actually quite tiny.
NOM is hoping you don't realize any of this. NOM wants some sort of number that sounds high and good so that people will people will be all like, "7,000—WOW!" They will not tell you that, at the time of this writing, only 226 people have vowed to attend the NOM march (plus another 156 "maybe" and quite a few pointed declines). Instead, they will pretend that their ability to simply click a button and send out an invite is a measure of something that resembles momentum. But it's not. At all.
Nice try, NOM.
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