CARIBBEAN BUSINESS THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 201253 ADVERTISING

BY ANGELA VARGASangelav@caribbeabusiness.pr

This is probably one of the last stories on the 2012 Puerto Rico elections you’ll read this

year and it concerns the newest trend all political parties agree harnessed some of the most memo-rable material this past election season: Internet and social-media strategies.

Just as it goes stateside, the number of people connected to the Internet and participating in social media increases by the day. For Puerto Rico, it comes out to 50% of the population connected to the Internet; and 69% are older than 18 and have Facebook profi les. This segment—of eligible voters and Facebook users—represents 31.4% of Puerto Rico’s population, according to 2011 data from the Federal Census Bureau and Internet World Stats.

Monitor SN, a local consulting social-intelligence fi rm, conducted a voluntary Facebook survey on how much people actually included and interacted with political views on their newsfeed. Sixty-six

percent of the 1,195 respondents answered that they followed a political party, and commented and shared that party’s posts.

CARIBBEAN BUSINESS conducted a series of interviews to shine a light on what the three major parties were doing to get the message across through digital platforms.

Luis Caraballo, technology director for the Luis Fortuño 2012 campaign, explained that his candidate’s digital strategy was pretty much in place two years before the 2008 gubernatorial election. The New Progressive Party’s (NPP) Internet campaign had an offi cial website and was present in Facebook, Twitter, Google +, and smartphone applications. The latter were designed and created by NPP volunteers.

“The most challenging aspect was maintaining information fl owing consistently and monitoring constantly. We had to make sure all information was precise, clear and correct, and if it wasn’t, we would correct it immediately,” Caraballo said.

Another interesting aspect of Fortuño’s Internet presence was the host of banners popping out everywhere from the New York Times’ website

Social media anxietyNPP, PDP and PIP counterparts explain social-media and the Internet’s growing importance in campaigning

Continues on page 54

Samuel Rosario, creative and Internet director for the PIP, and his team hatched a very precise plan as soon as they learned Juan Dalmau had a tattoo. It was just a matter of waiting for the right time

to use it.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 20128 CARIBBEAN BUSINESS

Committee approved a package of tax-extender legislation that included both provisions, but the U.S. House was working on its own version of the legislation and members expressed opposition to the Senate plan. Press reports at the time also criticized the tax extenders as the kind of special-interest giveaways that Congress needs to tackle to rein in federal spending.

The rum rebate is under attack because the USVI and Puerto Rico are granting incentives to their rum producers using program funds that give them an unfair advantage and will squeeze other Caribbean rummakers out of the U.S. market, with some nations threatening to fi le a World Trade Organization complaint.

To address this issue, Resident Commissioner Pedro Pierluisi has advocated legislation that would cap the amount of rum-rebate funds that can be granted to producers, but Congress has never acted on the proposal.

The USVI lured British liquor giant Diageo to shift production of its Captain Morgan rum from Puerto Rico to St. Croix in exchange for

generous incentives funded from the rum rebate program. Since the departure of Captain Morgan, the commonwealth government has been forced to sweeten incentive deals for local rummakers

so they can stay competitive with those in the neighboring USVI. Puerto Rico is now offering rum manufacturers incentives worth up to 46% of the rum-rebate revenue generated from rum sales. The aim of the incentives is to match the offer by the neighboring jurisdiction.

There are also concerns among top Puerto Rico government offi cials that the rum-rebate program has become endangered by the generous incen-tives the USVI began to grant its rummakers last year. If Congress moves to kill the entire program, however, it wouldn’t likely happen until it ap-proves a more sweeping federal tax reform, which is expected to be worked out for most of 2013.

More immediately, Congress and the Obama ad-ministration need to work out a deal to get over the so-called fi scal cliff, when a series of tax breaks expires and automatic spending cuts kick in at the end of the year. Much of the negotiations taking place during the lame duck session of Congress will be centered on approving legislation to ma-neuver around the situation.

Obama wants the tax breaks continued for ev-eryone but the wealthiest, while Republicans want the tax breaks extended across the board for a year to give time to enact a more sweeping tax reform. �

lame duck CongressContinued from page 6 The rum rebate is under

attack because the USVI and Puerto Rico are granting

incentives to their rum producers using program funds that give them an

unfair advantage and will squeeze other Caribbean

rummakers out of the U.S. market, with some

nations threatening to fi le a World Trade Organization

complaint.

to Foxnews.com. This feature, called ad serving, can be done

through any platform offering Internet marketing, such as Google. It mostly works by placing cookies, or small fi les, on your computer whenever you visit, for example, a webpage on a certain topic for the purpose of storing information about and recognizing the user.

“It’s not that you’re placing an ad with the New York Times, it’s that the campaign is using you to place an ad on the webpage you’re visiting. It’s just basically following you through Google,” explained Armando Valdés Prieto, communications director for Alejandro García Padilla 2012.

Luis Herrero Acevedo, social media director for the Popular Democratic Party (PDP) added that resources were signifi cantly limited for the campaign to have banners in place for 60 days, so the team concentrated their efforts on four main goals: gaining funding (through the PDP website and email lists), propagating the campaign’s message (with Facebook being particularly useful in its targeting), generating news for traditional media and generating content to complement the campaign throughout.

For his part, Samuel Rosario, creative and Internet director for the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP), gave a useful list of functions for Twitter. The fi rst is what he calls GPS (posting what someone is doing, where they are going, eating, etc.), referencing back to other campaign aspects (such as website campaign proposals), active participation in trending issues and fi nally rousing other issues.

Who in the social-media sphere can forget the savvy goings-on in these past elections? From losing their website domain (luisfortuno.com) to a political rival, to a veritable media explosion concerning PIP candidate Juan Dalmau’s tattoo, every party agrees social media is here to stay and will only become more pervasive in 2016.

In an interesting side note, Rosario and his team had a very precise plan as soon as they learned that Juan Dalmau had a tattoo. It was just a matter of waiting for the right time.

As soon as a major periodical mentioned Dalmau’s back art, Rosario jumped to upload a picture of the article on Facebook, which incited a

cascade of comments-mostly from men-defending and empathizing with the candidate’s fashionably current tastes.

The second wave of comments sprung when a picture of the actual tattoo appeared in social media. This time, an army of women commented on Dalmau’s hip sex appeal.

As far as Twitter hashtags (the pound mark in a post or “tweet” on a specifi c topic) go, none is more

entertaining than #siSantinipierde (ifSantiniloses) …. And that wasn’t even created by the PDP team. It all started when Teatro Breve, a live theater attraction featuring political satire and other sketches, offered a free show on Twitter, but only, of course, #siSantinipierde (ifSantiniloses). The hashtag quickly went viral when people with all sorts of talents and from different industries offered some of their services free of charge. This kind of interaction is what social media is all about-where the public starts out as a receptor and fi nally as a producer creating content for a campaign.

“To guess which platform will dominate our efforts in 2016 [Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.] is disrespecting the nature of the medium itself,” said Ricardo Alfaro, technology director for PDP. “This is something that lives and that evolves. But whatever is coming to stay needs to be shorter, faster, mobile and more visual.”

“I wouldn’t dare say that social media and Internet strategies defi ned the campaign or changed many votes one way or the other; maybe this will happen in 2016 with better tools,” Herrero Acevedo said. “It is still much more important to have a wholly integrated message in both traditional and digital media.” �

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“The most challenging aspect was maintaining information fl owing consistently and monitoring constantly. We had to

make sure all information was precise, clear and correct, and if it wasn’t, we would correct it immediately.”

—Luis Caraballo, technology director for Luis Fortuño 2012

Continued from page 53

Do you follow politics on social media?

Follows their political partyComments, “Likes” or sharesComments on posts by friendsComments on other candidate’s pageNone of the above

Source: Monitor SN 2012