Business 2 Campaign October 9th, 2008 by Jessica Tsai

Donna Brazile, a political consultant for the Democratic party, has been making headlines with her powerful statement that concluded the New Yorker Festival panel, “If I Were Running This Campaign,” which included other political pundits, Alex Castellanos, Edward J. Rollins, and Joe Trippi.

The panel discussion looked back on the events and contributing factors that shaped the political race we face today. Among these, Trippi brought attention to how the use of the Internet has forever changed the game in politics, a realization that certainly resonates with the challenge businesses must confront as well.

Government’s been known to be slower to adopt technologies that match the sophistication consumers/constituents are used to; but this year, most notably in Obama’s campaign, government is catching on.

Below, a transcript of Trippi’s brief statement:

…What no one seems to really, I think, pay much attention to — we talk about it a lot — but how the Internet…has changed all of this.

What happened was, Barack Obama got — and Hillary [Clinton]…got — that this was gonna be different, that you had to organize from bottom up. The number of people who were on broadband, and the network…is screwing up what the party decides it wants to do.

I guarantee you in 2012 or 2016, the next time we have a contestant race for president, somebody’s going to make the Obama campaign look like a joke — just like the Obama campaign made the Howard Dean campaign look like a joke.

…The network’s getting bigger, millions more Americans are on that network, are watching broadband, are able to see [a] Will.i.am video, or watch Hillary Clinton make her announcement, or watch Obama for 35 minutes make an entire speech and email it to a friend, and that is changing the way you win a primary. I think, it will change the way we’re nominating people in the future.

Watch the full discussion: The New Yorker

Tags: 2008 presidential campaign, Alex Castellanos, Barack Obama, Donna Brazile, Edward J. Rollins, government, Hillary Clinton, Internet, Joe Trippi, marketing, New Yorker, politics, technology, Web 2.0

4 Comments »

4 Comments

how is this related to CRM? Comment by Chris Selland — — October 9, 2008 @ 9:00 pm

It speaks to the idea that social media (fueled by the Internet) is playing a prominent role in how people are making decisions. Customers, or constituents as they’re referred to in the public sector, are more informed and have better access to information than ever before. The more active and involved the government is in communicating with its audience, the more likely the people will be engaged with a system many feel disconnected from. [You can also check out a Market Focus article we printed last June: http://tinyurl.com/3saj9x The degree to which Obama, for example, was active on channels like Twitter and Facebook, even incorporating mobile (e.g., announcing his VP nominee via text message), was one factor that observers say helped him get ahead of Hillary. Hillary tried to compete on this level, holding live online chats and such, but was not involved enough with where many people (particularly the influencers) today are — on the Internet. CRM is about connecting with your consumers, adapting to their needs and preferences, to serve them something they want. If you don’t know where they are, it makes the job a lot more difficult. Today, customer’s don’t want to hear messages and social media is empowering them. It continues to force companies to engage in a two-way conversation. Comment by Jessica Tsai — Twitter: @jesstsai — October 10, 2008 @ 9:22 am

obviously, this journalist was drawing a comparison between the media tactics that politicians use to reach their constituents and the media tactics that businesses use to reach their consumers. political campaigns and advertising campaigns are all about reaching people. and it’s just a matter of staying ahead of the curve, as obama and clinton have done. Comment by William Murray — — October 10, 2008 @ 9:23 am

For the time being, at least, CRM may be more powerful for what it allows constituents to do for and among themselves, rather than how it connects each of them to their representatives. We’ve come a long way in a short time, and Joe Trippi’s been at the center of much of it. (In fact, he may be more relevant and connected than I originally believed. I learned just this past weekend that he was connected to the 1982 Tom Bradley California gubernatorial campaign that brought us The Bradley Effect – which, depending on whom you talk to, may come back to haunt us this election cycle.) Five years ago, Baseline magazine put together a package on Howard Dean called “The Marketing of the President 2004″ (written primarily by Edward Cone), in which Trippi (among others) tried to marshal the strengths of the Internet and of the 2003-era burgeoning social media structure to help (briefly) put Dean in the lead for the Democratic presidential nomination. [You can find the story here: http://snurl.com/baseline1103a (and, in the interests of full disclosure, my contribution to the package, a look at the blogging technology Movable Type, by a company called Six Apart, can be found here: http://snurl.com/baseline1103b ).] As quoted above, Trippi now seems to be of the opinion that “somebody’s going to make the Obama campaign look like a joke — just like the Obama campaign made the Howard Dean campaign look like a joke.” As the architect of that Dean campaign, I’m sure he means that as the sincerest form of flattery — and he’s both deadly serious and absolutely right. Five years ago, Trippi didn’t have half the tools to put at Dean’s disposal as Obama’s handlers have today — and we can say with strong certainty that none of us can fathom what will be in the arsenal eight years from now. Technology just moves too fast, and too unpredictably. The point I’d like to draw attention to is that, even back then, Trippi and his acolytes (a few of whom were classmates of mine) knew that the power wasn’t in the infrastructure, or in the technology, but in the network of people who used them. That’s the lesson companies are still trying to learn today, as they struggle to connect with customers while pretending to (or fooling themselves that they) hold the reins. The technology and tools will inevitably change — the nimbleness to adapt to the new environment is what will mark the successes. Comment by Joshua Weinberger — — October 13, 2008 @ 11:17 pm

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