What If Democrats.com Held a Fox News Boycott and Nobody Came?

Even though we're all familiar with attempts to boycott advertisers on Fox News' Glenn Beck Show, Democrats.com chose yesterday to re-launch an old offensive: an organized boycott of all Fox News advertisers. So far, however, it doesn't look like many people are noticing, or caring.

Yesterday -- the day of the last round of primaries -- the organization sent an email out to subscribers urging them to boycott, as part of an ongoing drive that seems to have gotten its start last year after the Beck boycott resulted in advertisers including the mighty Procter & Gamble, running for safer advertising ground. Yesterday's initiative picked three specific targets: Amazon, Orbitz and FoodSaver. A special Web page devoted to the campaign includes "action links" to help people email the three companies, and, where possible, to spam their Facebook pages and Twitter accounts with admonitions for them to stop advertising on Fox News. It also urged people to follow two Twitter accounts @StopBeck and @StopFoxNews that don't seem officially allied with Democrats.com.

But 24 hours later, it looks like the initiative fell flat -- maybe it's because people are too distracted with the news that the Tea Party has actually made inroads in a few key primaries? Whatever the case, only a few people have called out Orbitz and Amazon's Twitter accounts to register that they were boycotting. On the two company's Facebook pages, a general sentiment seemed to be confusion, as a smattering of protesters resorted to throwing their comments into threads that were wholly unrelated to the boycott initiative. (FoodSaver doesn't appear to have any social media presence. ) Sample exchange from facebook.com/orbitz:

Orbitz asks: "Where do you like to go for budget-friendly getaways?"

User #1: "Somewhere where I won't be subjected to Fox News or be using the services of someone who does."

User #2: "vegas, baby!"

User #3: "Quit being a crybaby about Fox News, its very annoying. Orbitz is a good company and its prejudice to hate it just because of where they advertise, not like orbitz is advocating killing babies or anything :P"

User #4: "I'm dying to go to Dominican Republic probably will finally visit next summer."

Even if the initiative's backers point to the petition as signs of success, the fact remains clear: despite all the digital tools at their disposal, the Democrats.com initiative yesterday didn't go anywhere. There could be several reasons for this, beyond the distraction of the primaries, but one is this: that even though social media makes it technologically easy to start a movement, that doesn't mean that people will act on it.

The difference between the Beck boycott and this one is specificity. Even though many people can draw up a laundry list of Fox News distortions in the name of the Republican agenda, it's not the same as targeting an individual (Beck), who, at the time, had put himself in the midst of a firestorm, having called President Obama someone with a "deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture."

In a world with too much information and too many options for what to do with that information, specificity is one key to moving people.

Related:

• Clorox Won't Advertise on "Glenn Beck," or on Any Other Political Talk Show
• Glenn Beck Poised to Become the Next Howard Stern -- From an Advertisers' Perspective