The Network 2008: “There IS Nothing So Powerful As An Idea Whose Time Has Come”
We are in the final countdown in the campaign that has eaten us whole over the past two years and it seems a foregone conclusion that Barack Obama will be our next President.
To some, this is a deferred dream, finally fulfilled; to others it is a nightmare of constitutional proportions. If nothing else, Mr. Cool evokes passion in his supporters as well as his detractors while McRage, the candidate formerly known “as a man of character and experience“, evokes passion in his detractors and something more like frustration in his begrudging supporters.
So, how did we get here? To quote Henry Jenkins “Obama has constructed not so much a campaign as a movement.” To quote me, McCain didn’t really even construct much of a campaign. He even let what at the time seemed to be a stroke of genius, his choice of Sarah Palin as VP be re-framed as a kind of csenior moment. Nothing was more illustrative of this than last nights SNL.
And a slight digression since I mentioned Governor Palin….and the is she “ready” to be President question? Perhaps we would all be better off if there was a job description for both the Presidency and the Vice Presidency…with a paragraph called “job requirements”. Maybe there should even be a qualifying exam. Some psychological testing? I mean after all, these are jobs and “we the people” are doing the hiring.
In my opinion, George H.W. Bush was the last VP that I can recall who had the resume for the top job….businessman, Congressman, head of the CIA, Ambassador to the UN. He should have been a distinguished president but I am hard pressed to recall much about his single term that would qualify.
OK, with a tip of the hat to Victor Hugo, let’s return to the thought that there IS nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come…..because I think that statement defines this election. No, not to worry my friends…I am not talking about the campaign itself, I am talking about the construction of the campaign.
Back in the dawn of this campaign, I wrote a blog post titled, “President John McCain Delivers the State of the Blogosphere.” Yeah John Edwards. When I am wrong, I am wrong. Well, wrong guy. Barack Obama has driven the use of the social web all he way to the White House (I will issue a retraction tomorrow if the outcome is different).
We will be told by the pundits and likely come to believe that Barack Obama’s message of change is what propelled him to victory. Just like conventional wisdom says that JFK’s message propelled him to victory rather than Cook County, Illinois. But it is the medium that delivered the message that made the real difference in Obama’s message of change versus Hilary Clinton’s or John McCain’s. And that is not meant to detract from Obama’s achievement rather it is said in admiration of the fact that he put it ALL together and did something that few believed could happen when he began.
Joe Trippi saw the power of the networks when he managed Howard Dean’s campaign in 2004 however Dean self destructed and social networks was just an idea without an infrastructure, not an idea whose time had come. Actually, thanks in large part to the Dean campaign, it was the year 2004 when Merriam Webster named “blog” the word of the year…how quaint. Obama as my kids would say, dominates social….Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and YouTube.
David Talbot writing in the MIT Technology Review on the topic of Obama’s social networking strategy quotes Trippi paraphrasing James Carville, “This year it was the Network stupid.”
As Talbot explains, Throughout the political season, the Obama campaign has dominated new media, capitalizing on a confluence of trends. Americans are more able to access media-rich content online; 55 percent have broadband Internet connections at home, double the figure for spring 2004. Social-networking technologies have matured, and more Americans are comfortable with them. Although the 2004 Dean campaign broke ground with its online meeting technologies and blogging, “people didn’t quite have the facility,” says Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford law professor who has given the Obama campaign Internet policy advice, “The world has now caught up with the technology.” The Obama campaign, he adds, recognized this early: “The key networking advance in the Obama field operation was really deploying community-building tools in a smart way from the very beginning.”
And not only did he use the network….he “got” the essence of the network: The people formerly known as the audience. The candidate formerly known as a community organizer understood a few things about community organizing. As we in social media know, community is not online versus offline. And the flow is not top down. Everyone is a publisher and as Obama knows, participation is powerful….the enlisted five thousand $5 donors, versus the one $5000 donor.
Both The Machinery of Hope in Rolling Stone and The MIT article referenced above provide great details of the power of an idea whose time has come. And see Social Media Lessons from the 2008 election.
St. Louis County Putting Kids First: Please Vote Yes
With the presidential election just a few weeks away and the candidates continuing to make their cases that the other guy is bad (or worse) versus telling us why we should feel good about voting for them, it is good to know that there is something on the ballot in St. Louis County that one can feel good about voting for: Proposition 1.
Proposition 1 calls for a 1/4 cent sales tax to be used for providing necessary mental health services and substance abuse prevention to children in St. Louis County, Mo. It is on the ballot this November due to a bi-partisan collaborative campaign initiated by non-profits serving children and families in St. Louis County.
An assessment done in Spring 2007 ( 2007-st-louis-county-needs-assessment-1) revealed the extent of the unmet needs resulting from the decline in services resulting from continuing budget cuts for mental health and prevention services such as:
- More than 12,000 St. Louis County children and youth in need of services were going without help!
- Over 151,000 children and youth were not receiving beneficial school-based prevention programs.
- Nearly half a million lives are negatively impacted by the unmet mental health and substance abuse needs in the St Louis County area.
It will appear on the ballot as: “St. Louis County shall, solely for the purpose of establishing a community children’s services fund for the purpose of providing services to protect the well-being and safety of children and youth nineteen years of age or less and to strengthen families, be authorized to levy a sales tax of one-quarter of a cent in the County of St. Louis.”
When you see it on your ballot, St. Louis County, vote YES!
Thanks to Kathleen Buescher, President and CEO of Provident, Inc for making me aware of this.
Is John McCain A Marketing Genius?
Ad Age wants to know, “Was it marketing genius for John McCain to pick Sarah Palin as his running mate?” According to their poll as of Day 1 (the poll ends of Friday), 67% of Ad Age readers that responded said “yes” John McCain is a marketing genius.
Well, McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, told the Washington Post that the election is not about issues but about personalities…”a composite view of what people take away about the candidates.” So, to paraphrase James Carville, “it’s her {personality} stupid.”
As any Account Planner or marketing strategist worth their Venn diagram will tell you, if you can capture the essence of your marketing message within an “it’s” and a “stupid” you are on your way to genius. I frequently call upon the Carville/Clinton analogy when trying to make the it point….borrowed genius.
The most recent USA Today Gallup poll puts McCain at 54% to Obama’s 40% anong those most likely to vote. The latest CNN poll shows Obama at 44% and McCain at 43% but this is a 4 point gain for McCain. Are these numbers support for the marketing genius award? Is this the Palin effect?
Who do you think of when you think “marketing genius”? Steve Jobs? Howard Schultz? A.G. Lafley? (I am reading The Game Changer…highly recommended.) That’s who comes to my mind. And what do they have in common? The words innovation, different, change are usually applied when describing their brand of genius.
So is the choice of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate a stroke of marketing genius?
Well, if no other reason than that the current unpopular President is a Republican, Obama owns change but of course that is just beginning; his race, his age and he has made it his own. OK, the Biden choice was a bit off message but maybe reassuring to some.
McCain, despite George Bush’s uncomfortable satellite reference to disagreements with McCain, “I Know”is not only a Republican but as Obama reminds us, has voted with Bush 90% of the time. ( Some disagree.) And then there is that annoying enthusiasm gap.
Enter Sarah Palin. Definitely unexpected. Definitely different. Definitely change. Definitely a “personality” move. But what is “it” exactly?
I think Peggy Noonan nailed it with, “She has the power of the normal. And that is change in American politics and especially this year with the leader of the sisterhood of the traveling pantsuits the only choice to put a woman in the White House. If you believed that there should be a woman president but just didn’t like Hilary Clinton you might have felt disloyal, or at least conflicted.
So, yes, by making normal the new change, McCain is a marketing genius.
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