Remember when politics was about democracy in America? Now it’s about the consumer and the candidate’s brand cloud.
It used to be that if you loved a candidate’s values and ideals, you put a sign in your front yard or in your condo window and you quietly talked about it with your friends over coffee, or in the line to pick your kids up from school. The choice, at the end of the campaign, was yours. You cast your ballot, and the leader with the best ideals, the ones you thought would run this country well, would win. At least, you hoped they would win. But you knew, at least, that you had done your civic duty.
Now, you really haven’t done your civic American duty unless you’ve set up a Twitter feed for John McCain, or posted Barack Obama wallpaper on your laptop, or set up a Furries for Obama page on Facebook.
I knew something was going on when I visited the Barack Obama website store: Obama offers you hisYes We Can: Voices of a Grassroots Movement cd, which spins lively dance and soul music tracks with the voice track of Obama talking about change we can believe in. The price, though. $19.99 for a download and $24.99 for the physical cd. Those are not grassroots prices.
Indeed, this is high end consumer goods selling. And people are buying it.
Someone in campaign headquarters knows that the brand cloud is the catalyst for change these days. Though she may be concerned about the abortion issue, and though he may debate health care, the average American is a consumer first. With inflation on the rise and a global market meltdown threatening even the most liquid of mortgage holders, the only thing worth spending time and money on is this political campaign.
These days, Obama parkas and McCain belts are only the tip of the iceberg. Technology has cast the pall of the all-encompassing conservative or liberal brand clouds over everything.
Let’s start with this: Since this article was written stating that John McCain and Barack Obama were using Facebook as a campaign platform (no pun intended), Obama has taken the lead in Facebook supporters, numbering over 2 million. McCain has secured a meager 557,000+.
It’s not just the candidates who are tirelessly pursuing their goals through social media.
The electorate — you might actually call them the consumer base for each candidate — spend what must be a constant, 24-hours a day vigil reporting on, commenting on, spinning for and debating on the campaigns.
They send limitless tweets to the Twitter Election 08 feed. There’s even a CurrentTV sponsored “Hack the Debate III”, which will run a live feed of tweets over the live stream of the third and final presidential debate. Hack the Debates I and II were a huge success. The results run on an archived video feed and give the viewer a sense of how tied-in the consumer class is to each candidate. It really has enabled the campaign supporter of either camp to unlatch the campaign from the hands of the candidate and spread it around through mobile, social networking sites and elsewhere.
In fact, the campaign has become so viral marketing-focused that it’s nothing for mobile users to send their SMS quesitons (clearly biased against the Republicans) to the California Democratic Party billboard during a recent Alaska Governor Sarah Palin visit to Los Angeles without too much thought put into how or if the guerrilla messaging event would be effective.
I may be cynical, but while the mobility of these campaigns may mean that more people are exposed to the campaigns, the ideas and the backgrounds of the candidates, it does nothing to change the actual outcome of the election. There’s a zero sum here. Only one candidate will be elected.
It would only really be something if one candidate loses and then the losing candidate continues to use social media to run a shadow government. Hey, it could happen.
It would truly be democracy at work; a marginal and scrappy underdog, believing in his virtue and the values he espouses, linked into his constituency and freed from the constraints of regulated candidacy frameworks, would run his own system and speak to his own people.
Stay tuned for more stories on how governments intend to use p2p software to connect to their constituencies and departments.
October 14th, 2008 at 3:09 am
Brand clouds – interesting concept but I’ll have to wait and see if it sticks.
On another note – Verizon’s decision to hike their rates for SMS from enterprises that send SMS to customers will put a long term kibosh on Twitter’s use of SMS. Both Obama and McCain will have to find another way to leverage Twitter.
October 14th, 2008 at 3:26 am
Allan, you state a valid point. I’d love to know more about how you would react to the SMS hike, and what you think the result would be on the branding through phones methodology.
It seems to me that operators are focused too much on how to make money and not enough on how to make SMS a long-term use across the spectrum, probably because their business model is wack.
October 14th, 2008 at 4:22 am
There are a ton of startups out there that promise to use the cell phone to help big companies market and advertise to end users. I think more and more people will be getting full Internet access with the growth of smart phones like the iPhone, GPhone, and even the new Blackberry devices. I constantly surf the net with my Blackberry Pearl. The original Blackberry devices were a lot better than pagers because you could type on a full keyboard and it had smart integration with email. But now, the smart phones are offering a lot more value. I think SMS will decrease in usage and marketers will need to find startups that can help them through the mobile web and not SMS.
Does that sound right to you? I’d like to know what your take is. Where are you located? What are your long term goals with this blog and what else are you involved with?