Monthly Archive for February, 2008

OK, a rather poor play on pop psychology.

But I’ve been thinking about the role of traditional marketing vs social media in the current campaign for the Democratic Nomination. And trying to make some over-arching metaphor to explain it all.

On the one hand you have Senator Clinton’s campaign and its (supposed) genius, Mark Penn of Burson Marsteller.  The buzz-word at BM’s (please don’t giggle) C suite is microtrends. Here’s the low down from Amazon:

From “Soccer Moms,” the legendary swing voters of the mid-1990s, to “Late-Breaking Gays” such as former Gov. Games McGreevey (out at age 47), Burson-Marsteller CEO (and campaign adviser to Sen. Hillary Clinton) Penn delves into the ever-splintering societal subsets with which Americans are increasingly identifying, and what they mean.

I can almost (almost) see the worker bees at BM (stop it!!) preparing their strategic plans with whole pages dedicated to ‘affluant at home moms’ and ‘NASCAR liberal dads’ not to mention ‘gays with minivans’ and ‘opera loving teens.’

As the Rude Pundit put it:

And so it’s even sadder that Hillary Clinton invested so much of her presidential ambitions in this wannabe intellectual, this bloated boob, who says smart sounding things like calling groups of people shit like “Impressionable Elites” and “Permissive Parents,” spouting vaguely coherent pop sociology like, “Numbers help you land on something that is incontrovertibly true.” Well, that is until they don’t.

Link (warning, rude language).

On the other hand, Senator Obama raises millions every day from small donors who span the demographic classes we’ve been stuck with since the dawn of the Soccer Mom era. The most significant viral video of the entire campaign cost the campaign itself absolutely nothing and gets millions of downloads and views. And who is winning in the overall battle for momentum as we approach the grand finale of the primary season?

Penn’s thesis of microtrends might strike one at first glance to be an affirmation of the social media approach. After all, small things or communities eventually make up the whole of us. We’re all just dashes on the Long Tail. But as practiced by the Clinton campaign it’s more like the focus-group approach of traditional marketing. Get me a room full of teenagers and they will tell us what every skateboarder thinks. Or in the case of Clinton, get me a room full of boomer women and they will tell us what we want to hear.

The Clinton campaign’s attempts to portray their candidate as ‘just like you,’ whomever the ‘you’ who’s votes they need happens to be, has been laughable. Like the ‘I worked the night shift’ commercials currently playing in Ohio and Texas.

Does this strike you as the way traditional PR and marketing is done? And how traditional agencies and practitioners approach social media? Pick a ‘community’ you think exists, and pretend to be a part of it while always maintaining the illusion of transparency.

While the Obama campaign is doing it the way it should be done. Appeal to us as people, as individuals and at the same time as part of something bigger than all of us. Stop breaking down populations into ever smaller segments the same way the Nations of Europe split up the map of Africa and Asia in the 19th century.  And let your audience tell you the truth, not what you want to hear. And don’t rely on statistical models and pop socialogy. People are not robots and are likely to do just the opposite of what your model is telling you.