I was very interested to see the reaction to the Francis fight. We've known that ever since Francis left the org and then on Sherdog he magically went from being parroted as the greatest HW ever to OVERNIGHT becoming a scared person that ducked competition with no knees and 80 years old... that shit wasn't organic in the slightest.
Were you ever curious to know exactly how PR campaigns work online? The Francis/Fury aftermath will be a great example. Here is exactly what we'll see over the next month, I will break down for you how this works:
1. Event happens: this is what made me fascinated. The event itself was Francis being a fucking hero / showing UFC limitations / a resounding success story. He is essentially flawless from a PR view right now. UFC has a mountain to climb, but hey, they get paid to do that so what slander can they possibly come up with to tear down and minimize that hero?
2. Messaging: The corporation thinks of an idea of what the best message will be. That is why you saw ZERO Francis-bashing posts the night of the fight. No narratives were approved yet / the denigration of Francis had not started. Keep that in mind... zero denigration among Sherdog posters last night. There is a reason for that: no PR messages and organic slander messaging is NON-EXISTENT among fans. Obviously in some instances fans plant hater seeds right away, but in this one Francis was unimpeachable, so now the onus is entirely on the corporation.
3. Seed planting: So this is the phase we're in right now. After the first brainstorming sessions, a few potential points are posted online. Keep in mind this is encouraged to be an experimental process. Yes we get the talking point posts, but employees are encouraged to stray outside of them as well. No reason not to... if you post an odd narrative that doesn't catch on, no harm no foul and it disappears into history. But if you post an unorthodox one that catches on, you could strike PR gold. Only limitation to this is if your employees aren't so intelligent, then they aren't as capable of doing this. I don't think UFC's posters here are all that intelligent personally, which is why they rely so much on copy/paste posting. Anyway, Francis-bashing narratives may not be unified now, as there is still fishing to see what could catch on. I do believe I know the main talking point decided as of this morning however:
I have been open for multiple years now that
@kflo and
@markg171 are UFC employees, because 100% of every post they make is a comment that directly benefits the UFC and among their 1000s of posts they never do what normal fans do (just talk about fighting). So from this post I think that this message is the corporate gameplan as of this morning.
4. Weed removing/plant growth: Then the business looks to see what flowers. Maybe the simple "Fury is shit, Francis is shit, boxing is shit" angle works. Maybe something else flowers. This will start a week or two from now. Weed removing is attacking threatening narratives. Again, they have their work cut out for them: Francis is a fucking hero. This thread is certainly a weed to them,
so if one of the board's mods are truly compromised, they will delete it outright. If that fails, the usual suspects will come in and use "conspiracy theory" personal attacks. Interesting history lesson: did you know that phrase (conspiracy theory) was invented by the CIA in order to demonize/generalize all narratives that went against government-approved (or planted) narratives? Nowadays corporations learned from the best, and use it in the same fashion.
5. Narrative adoption: this is the end goal. In the first few days your employees plant the narratives and they're the ones doing the bulk of posting (IF there is no organic fan hate... this case being a rare example of that!), but a month later (if it works) the employees are no longer posting and then 80-IQ fans begin to parrot the narratives. That is why no bashing narrative existed for Francis last night: there is ZERO organic bashing. There will be more bashing a month from now, but THEN the bulk of that posting will NOT be employees... it will be predominantly the moron fans that parroted the talking points being planted now.
So that is how it works. Get a gameplan going, post the narrative online (and if employee is smart enough, plant whatever else he wants on the side to see if it sticks), wait for the most idiotic portion of the fanbase (which is ideally also the loudest portion of the fanbase) to suck it up, sit back and let them repeat it for eternity. Within any of that, personally attack those who threaten that narrative control.
Eventually hope that if the UFC narrative starts at only 10% fan sentiment, it then slowly inches up to 20%, then a year later it is at more than 50% so the contending narrative is eventually defeated.
And that, is PR 101 with corporate posting online. Francis not only knocking down the #1 HW in boxing, but also knocking down the mechanics of UFC's PR machine... go Francis!
