Lessons from U.S. Election 2004: Communications in a World of Blogs, Ballots and Boots

News networks - not the only source of "breaking news"

A presidential election is a fascinating event for those of us who advise clients on communicating with the public and opinion leaders. Looking beyond the issues and personalities provides a sense of how trends in political communications can be adapted to business, finance, consumer marketing, reputation management and crisis communications.

Speed, Speed, Speed
Political campaigns have always been about speed, but this year we saw a shift to hyper-speed. The internet creates an air of impatience and immediacy. It is no longer enough to reach people in the next news cycle, because news cycles have become contiguous. Blogs, websites, and email allow any group or individual to spread information (or misinformation) much faster than traditional media. Even yesterdayęs phenomena - the 24-hour cable networks - were at pains to keep up with the pace of –breaking news”.

This insatiable appetite for news has critical implications for anyone attempting to communicate with specific audiences or the general public. Managing the speed of information flow through various channels - and monitoring how competitors are communicating - has become critical to modern-day communications.

Precise Segmentation and Outreach
Kerry and Bush both made a greater effort in their campaigns to segment political audiences with focused communications efforts. The internet gave them a tool that was more precise, and less expensive, than traditional marketing tools.

Websites, blogs and viral marketing helped both sides tailor messages for select audiences. Smart companies are beginning to adopt many of these techniques to promote products and services with surgical precision, and that trend is likely to intensify. We are already seeing campaigns on legislative issues that use these techniques to successfully target certain member districts.

The Power of One
While anyone can sing in the shower and imagine being a great artist like Frank Sinatra or Elvis Presley, few will ever sing before a paying audience. But today, anyone can be a political pundit, and can make accurate predictions. If you donęt like what you read in the morning paper or see on TV, you can create your own media, find your own audience, and express your own unedited opinions.

As individuals take more ownership of the communications process, they are influencing the strategy and reporting of daily newspapers, TV news and other traditional media. One emerging trend: bloggers as guardians of the truth, scrutinising traditional news outlets. Consider the conservative bloggers who exposed the forged documents about President Bushęs military career used in the CBS report. Perhaps the greatest influence for bloggers is not with the general public, but news outlets searching for stories and checking on the competition. They are sometimes the first source for "breaking news".

Many internet practitioners see themselves as the free market alternative to media conglomeration. Negative messages about an issue affecting a company can circulate with lightning speed. Some caution that thereęs a danger in this trend because the internet is a vast universe of unfiltered dialogue where bloggers and others are not bound to the same traditional standards and ethics as news organisations or even corporate communicators. They are free to spread rumour, gossip and outright lies. They are also free to tell the truth and provide thoughtful discourse. In the end, the consuming public will be the ultimate judge of credibility and will determine which sources will have any measurable impact. The important lesson for companies and others is that as the communications infrastructure changes, you have to engage on a more expansive and faster moving playing field.

The More Things Change...
As important as these new trends are, it would be more accurate to call the election of 2004 evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Despite the speed and the high tech tools, the importance of traditional methods of campaigning can not be underestimated.

Democrats and Republicans had the resources and talent to fight on an equal "technology" playing field, competing ad for ad and blog for blog. But bloggers and others didnęt replace the need for putting boots on the ground: mobilising volunteers, stimulating third party support, organising campaign rallies, and getting out the vote.

New communications tools did not change the need for messages that were persuasive, consistent and repeated. But with sophisticated new ways of reaching target populations, and with powerful new avenues of communications in the hands of individuals, companies and other organisations need to recognise that there are hazards as well as opportunities in these methods. However these methods are deployed, in the end, credibility, discipline and speed will remain essential to communications strategies for political candidates as well as all other communicators.

By Jody Powell and Sheila Tate. Jody Powell, former Press Secretary to President Jimmy Carter, and Sheila Tate, former Press Secretary to First Lady Nancy Reagan and President George H.W. Bush's 1988 campaign, lead the strategic communications firm Powell Tate | Weber Shandwick in Washington D.C.

Reproduced with the kind permission of PRWeek U.S.

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