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Al Qaeda and Online Marketing

Written on
May 25, 2006 
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Kenneth Musante  |
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Al Qaeda and Online Marketing

It’s no secret that the international terrorist organization Al Qaeda uses the internet to promote its actions and its agenda. In the secret game of cat and mouse fought between Al Qaeda and anti-terror organizations, Al Qaeda uses the global reach of the internet not only to communicate and share ideas, but also to promote its ideas, spread disinformation, inspire its supporters, and demoralize its opponents.

Terrorism by its very nature is a marketing enterprise. It’s designed to incite terror in the civilian population of an opposing nation, thus swaying a government’s foreign policy. Germany tried to pummel Great Britain into submission in WWII with their terror bombing campaigns over London. The IRA used terrorism to help push for an independent Northern Ireland. Various Palestinian terror groups have used terrorist actions to promote an independent Palestine. A terror event is designed to be spectacular. It’s designed to bring media attention. Think of it as event planning gone horribly wrong.

It’s only natural that an international terror group like Al Qaeda—one with a global, rather than a local agenda—would turn to a global medium like the internet to publicize its ideology. After 9/11, Al Qaeda lost its safe haven in Afghanistan. Before that they operated a single web site. That site, alneda.com, was used to boost morale following the loss of Afghanistan, and contained images, audio & video from Bin Laden, justifications for the Trade Center attacks, and message boards containing possible coded messages. However, a single public website is vulnerable. According to Wired, in 2002 an independent hacker from Maryland used a combination of traceroutes and anti-cybersquatting tools to snatch ownership of alneda.com out from under them while it was being transferred to another group of servers.

Like any organization that requires a robust marketing scheme to survive, Al Qaeda has gone guerilla. Since 9/11, Al Qaeda’s presence on the web expanded to more than 50, according to Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert for RAND Corp who testified before congress earlier this month.

Like good guerilla marketers, Al Qaeda uses the internet to raise money, recruit, and influence their target audience, the Muslim world. After alneda.com disappeared, Al Qaeda spread messages via several online publications, one of which called for followers of jihad to focus on Iraq to defend against American aggression in 2003, when an Iraq invasion was certain.

In 2004, the Al Qaeda organization in Saudi Arabia ran an online campaign, launching a web site that provided ‘operational information’ on how to run your own terrorist training camp, and focused on striking economic targets. The campaign led to an increase in terrorist activities in Saudi Arabia and Iraq in 2004, according to Hoffman.

By last March, according to European law enforcement officials, there were more than 5,000 pro-jihad websites on the internet. Most of those are probably not run by Al Qaeda, but they were most certainly influenced by Al Qaeda’s online propaganda machine. That’s the very essence of Viral. One thing sparks something else, sparks something else, etc.

Taking a queue from Al Qaeda, the Iraq insurgency is also promoting itself on the internet. Al Qaeda in Iraq, the branch lead by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and local insurgent groups release regular “mujahideen” videos giving tactical advice, portraying the use of IED’s, and publicizing footage of kidnapped foreigners.

Terrorist actions are detestable. But it’s also clear that Al Qaeda uses many of the same tactics used by benign online marketers. If you’re an online marketer, while you shouldn’t be applauding the terrorist group, you might at least be able to learn from them. Like it or not, their methods are your methods. But they are in a war, and you are not. They are forced by the law of survival to push creative online marketing strategies to the edge.





Reader Comments.

Insightful article and nioce new advertising source.

Posted by Shirazi | 12:06 pm on June 8, 2006.

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