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Andres Oppenheimer
The crushing defeat of Colombia's opposition candidate Antanas Mockus -- who had a record following
on
Mockus, a former university president and two-time mayor of Bogotá, had drawn international attention in recent months for becoming one of the world's politicians with the greatest numbers of "friends" on
In addition to more than 150 independent
Newspapers covering the Colombian elections, including
A week before the
Mockus himself had bought into that idea. He told the Spanish daily La Vanguardia that he had based his campaign on social media, which had allowed him "to replace the traditional political vote-buying practices."
A DISTANT SECOND
But on
"Mockus may have had 700,000 friends on
Jonathan Salem Baskin, an author and
"They are important, but to say that they are a replacement for retail campaigning in politics -- the actual hand-shaking or speech-making -- or that spending time on social networks is a replacement for companies offering meaningful goods and services, is crazy. It is absolutely stupid," he said.
"That number of 700,000 Mockus' friends is meaningless: Those aren't friends, but anonymous clicks. For the nanosecond that it took them to click into the candidate's page, they are persons. But to call them 'friends' immediately thereafter, is stretching the definition of 'friend,'" Baskin said.
But weren't social media a key factor in the 2008 Obama campaign? I asked him.
"What Obama's people did is using social media as a distribution list to get people who just clicked to do something more in the real world, such as knocking on doors and getting out the vote. The list itself was meaningless. The list of people who did things for real was priceless," he said.
THE LESSON
Something similar happens in the business world, Baskin said. As more and more people are being paid by companies to write in social media posing as anonymous bloggers,
So what's the lesson, both for politicians and businesses, I asked.
"I can have a million friends on
PROVED ME RIGHT
My opinion: I confess that I have a
The outcome of Colombia's vote proved me right. Social media will continue growing as virtual meeting places, but their real impact in politics and business has yet to be proven.