How Kony 2012 beat ol' SuBo

f you are reading this post and questioning who or what Kony is then you have obviously been asleep for the past 2 weeks. Joesph Kony is the leader of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda, fighting with the government to make it a Christian nation. During his leadership the LRA have kidnapped an estimated 20,000children to use as soldiers or sex slaves. Those captives who resisted orders given by Kony and the LRA were mutilated and some even forced to eat their own flesh. This, however, was falling under the radar for most until the viral explosion occurred. The 30 minute video ‘Kony 2012’ http://tinyurl.com/89q2lxx  uploaded on March 5th, soon dominated the news feeds of everyone’s social media, its aim to get the leader Joesph Kony arrested. From a Public Relations perspective they achieved the perfect online campaign.

People all over the world were sharing the video, talking about the campaign, writing statuses and tweeting; this meant that Kony, KONY2012, Joesph Kony and others to a similar effect, became trending topics on twitter, encouraging those who were not previously aware to tap into their natural curiosity and discover what Kony was for themselves. When people were lead to the video an additional technique is used to persuade those viewing to ‘share’ the message and the video; this can be considered as subliminal messaging to a degree. From the very start of the video Facebook is mentioned, exclaiming how there are more people on Facebook now than there were on the planet 200 years ago, proving firstly the expansive reach of the social network. As the video progresses the images flash from YouTube videos panning in on the share button after each point is made, causing the image of the share button to embed itself into the viewer’s mind, assisted with the talk and images of twitter and Facebook, a subliminal mental link is formed telling the audience to share this video and cause with these 800 million on Facebook and the millions on twitter, and after the horrific message, who will not want to share? This partially explains the viral success. As the actual charity behind the video ‘invisible children’ already had many followers and fans on Facebook it was easy for them to give their video the initial boost it needed.

Another tactic that furthered the campaign’s viral success was the use of celebrities. Music personalities Rhianna and Justin Bieber retweeted the video on twitter to their millions of followers, persuading their fans to take notice, when a celebrity retweets something it is given a level of importance to their fans; they admire and respect these celebrities and take their word as law. It also persuaded other celebrities to jump on the band wagon and spread the word. This is another reason ‘Kony 2012’ is now the most successful viral video ever on YouTube, knocking out old Britain’s got Talent runner up and singing sensation, Susan Boyle.

Although all of this was proving to be effective in its own right, there was another tactic that would secure true domination, active engagement. The audience ‘Kony 2012’ had already acquired were sharing and promoting the campaign, this itself is an active engagement, however the campaign took this a step further, moving away from the online domination it had secured and starting a physical domination. All over the world Facebook events were being set up to ‘cover the night’ in a V for Vendetta style meaning that a group of strangers would get together and plaster every surface in posters and stickers relating to the cause, this then meant that not only would ‘Kony 2012’ be all over the web, but all over the towns and cities in many countries around the world, without the director of the video, Jason Russell employing people to do so. A critique of this, however, is that all the events are set for mid-April, the hype had already started to die down until yesturday (02/04/2012) Invisible Children announced they will release a sequel video, jump starting the hype once more, meaning that the events created by the audience will receive attention once again, closer to the date of action, perhaps fulfilling the promises of the ‘cover the night’ tactic.

The negatives for this campaign are proving evermore to outweigh the positives. Such as evidence being given that Joesph Kony has not been in Uganda for approximately six years, although he is still an evil human and the crimes in Uganda still terrible, placing complete blame on Kony in the viral video lessens the authenticity of Jason Russell’s campaign as he is no longer a primary cause of terror in the 3rd world country. Grant Oyston (http://www.sabotagetimes.com/life/kony-2012-why-im-opposed-to-the-campaign/) illustrates ‘Last year, the organization spent $8,676,614. Only 32% went to direct services (page 6), with much of the rest going to staff salaries, travel and transport, and film production’, defying their name as a charity, and transforming into more of a popularity contest.

The ethical implications regarding money spending of the campaign and the clear negatives that are being discovered do not over shadow the fact that this campaign was highly successful and achieved its aim of viral domination; demonstrating the effectiveness of social media and PR in practice.