CRM, Social Netowrks and Presidential Politics
There is a huge CRM lesson embedded in the results of the Iowa caucuses and it has almost nothing to do with which on-demand CRM application a candidate used to track everything. The story of Iowa is one of new-fangled technologies such as blogging and social networks. Both winners — Huckabee and Obama — as well as some notable runners up like Edwards were able to create buzz and get their voters to the caucuses spending less than well heeled competitors and largely flying under the radar of traditional news organizations.
The Washington Post quoted Obama’s senior campaign manager, David Axelrod saying “Younger voters participated in far greater numbers than ever before," and he credited the youth vote for Obama’s success. The Young Voters demographic is defined as people in the 17 to 29 age group — 17 year-olds who will be 18 at election time were included.
According to various sources candidates used a plethora of social networking sites including Facebook, YouTube and MySpace to organize support. A story on the Wired Blog Network said:
“Iowa PIRG and Young Voter PAC had worked hard over the past few months to turn out young voters. Iowa PIRG used social networking sites such as Facebook to organize and keep each other updated. The group trained 250 college students to prod and poke their peers into showing up at the caucuses Thursday night.”
“The social networking helps — it’s definitely a platform to launch off to get organized," says Ellynne Bannon, Iowa and Student PIRG’s New Voters Project. “But we followed all of that up with face-to-face interaction.”
So what’s going on here?
It appears that money might have proven to be an insulator of the candidates with the most of it (Hillary and Romney). It kept them cocooned in the secure but erroneous knowledge of the rightness of their respective approaches. Actually, money proved to be a semi-conductor since those with lesser amounts of it may have done better because it forced them to leverage the inexpensive social nets.
Ironically, on the democrats’ side the voters wanted change while Hillary was selling competence/experience. She missed understanding which message would be most effective despite the fact that the knowledge was available if she only would have asked people the right questions. When she should have been talking more about change she went on what was largely touted as a “charm offensive” to show the softer side of her competence — talk about blowing it!
Huckabee, on the other hand, had the audacity to challenge the Bush administration’s ham-handed approaches to domestic and foreign policy — was he just lucky or did he know he was on solid ground? Romney, who turns out to have been clueless on the dynamics, said Huckabee owed Bush an apology. Too late, he tried to soften the blunder and create separation between himself and the President.
Social networking covers a lot of ground. Many people still think of it as something you use to reach a lot of people and while that’s true that’s not the most relevant aspect here. The successful candidates used social networking not simply to reach but to influence and what worked for those who chose to experiment was the idea of communities of interest.
You don’t need modern technology to have communities of interest but it helps if you want information to trickle back to the hub rather than being stranded out at the spokes of a group. Eric von Hippel’s book, “Democratizing Innovation” has great resonance here. If you have read the book you might recall a long passage about the impact of communities of interest on the rapid evolution of the steam engine at the beginning of the Industrial Age.
Despite being competitors in other fields, users of early steam engines formed associations where they discussed the latest innovations, captured feedback and presented that feedback to engine builders to accelerate design improvements. Their work took the steam engine from a large and barely useful contraption to literally become the engine of the industrial age in one (human) generation. Retail politics in Iowa and New Hampshire are tailor made for social networking generally and communities of interest specifically.
Closer to home or politics, the American Civil Rights movement can be seen as the result of social networking with churches forming the backbone of political organization. Freedom of religion and freedom of assembly are two ideas ensconced in the US Constitution that even Jim Crow laws could not thwart and they formed the basis for the movement’s eventual success.
The success of social networking in the still-young 2008 presidential race should not be seen as revolutionary — it has been a part of American political life for a long time, even before it had a name. What’s interesting to me is that it has the power to trump even money as both political lubricant and glue. Consider this: in 2004 candidates like Howard Dean discovered the power of the Internet as a fund raising vehicle but the funds were used for a lot of politics as usual. Just four years later, the Internet is being used to by-pass the fund raising to go directly to a new kind of high impact and low cost politics.
Talk about evolution!
Resolutions for 2008
There is a big difference between a forecast and a
resolution and the former is easier to make than the latter. New Year’s resolutions require, well, resolve
— the mental toughness to see the matter through while a forecast is merely something
made by pundits from Olympian heights. The forecaster can walk away from the forecast but the resolution maker
owns the resolution and its outcome.
At any rate, since I have already made a forecast for 2008
I thought it would be fun to make some resolutions too. I didn’t want to bore you so I concentrated
on resolutions that we could all consider.
First, start a blog. This is especially aimed at people who have “chief” in their titles —
like chief executives. It’s not that
chiefs don’t have enough on the old plate already, they do, but I am not
advocating simple busy work either. CEOs
personify their companies and they are, or at least should be, the chief
exponents for their products and the benefits their products deliver. The CEO is or should be the chief thought
leader in the organization — the person who can most knowledgeably speak about
the big picture benefits that his or her organization can deliver to customers.
Perhaps that’s why so many CEOs are so good at helping
their sales teams in the later stages of deal closing. CEOs have enormous credibility, especially
when speaking directly with their peers. So, the only question is why wait until the 11th
hour to insert the CEO into the sales process? A blog is a great way to make the CEO’s thought leadership available to
everyone.
Over the last few years I have seen some amazingly
effective blogs fronted by CEOs and one of the most successful is written by
Chuck Schaeffer, CEO of Aplicor. Chuck
started his blog a few years ago never intending it to be more than his way of
communicating with a limited audience of customers and prospective customers
and he’s done quite well with it. Last
month Chuck’s blog was named to a prestigious top 20 blog list. Aplicor is doing very well in the competitive
CRM world and I’d say the blog is having the right effect.
Next, I think we all need to pay close attention to
marketing this year. Given the success
of last September’s first annual Sales 2.0 conference, it would be reasonable
to think that this would be the year of sales, but I think not. Sales 2.0 looks a lot like marketing’s coming
of age and much of the Sales 2.0 agenda seems to involve incorporating
marketing tools and techniques.
So what can you do?
Resolve to pay close attention to the marketing
process. You know, the objective is no
longer to generate a big pile of suspects that your sales people can summarily
reject; the objective is to generate a short stack of real actionable leads. It all starts with learning how to
ruthlessly qualify out rather than promoting warmed over names that don’t have
any business wasting your sales people’s time.
What it all boils down to is stringing together databases
and tools that attract, nurture and promote leads in your unique company wide
process. If you are still living and
dying by a single tool such as email marketing alone, branch out and include
landing pages, micro-sites, portals and analytics. If you are a marketer you probably already
understand the importance of involving sales in defining the process and the
expected output and if you are in sales you might need to admit that those
people in marketing might be able to help you do your job better. It ought to be a win-win, so get on with it.
Mixed in with all this marketing is the idea of social
networking. I would resolve to learn
more concretely about what social networking concepts apply to marketing, sales
and CRM generally. Social networking has
an unfortunate association with dating, job seeking and Kevin Bacon but there’s
more to it than that. It’s worth making
sure you have a working knowledge of it so that you can apply those parts that
make sense to your business.
Along similar lines, learn the difference between single-
and multi-tenant architectures if you don’t know already. Neither is right for all occasions but multi-tenant
is going to be more right more often than not. There are an increasing number of conventional applications being
repackaged as “on-demand” but in some cases the repackaging simply moves the
computer room from your building to the vendor’s without dealing with the
harder issues of rapid serial deployment, low cost and ubiquity. Know what you’re getting into.
Finally, I’d say, whatever your responsibilities —
especially where CRM is concerned — remember to focus on your role as a
professional practice rather than a job. In a practice you take nothing for granted and every situation is an
opportunity for learning and innovating. We’ve all gotten this far through learning and innovation and there’s no
reason to stop now.
Good luck in 2008!
Rodney Dangerfield and my PC
I was thinking about buying a new computer the other day and naturally my thoughts turned to the late and great Rodney Dangerfield. You see, one of his jokes popped into my head as soon as the idea of buying a new computer entered my mind. I went on-line to find the particular joke to make sure I reference it correctly. Here it is:
It’s been a rough day. I got up this morning . . . put on a shirt and a button fell off. I picked up my briefcase and the handle came off. Now I’m afraid to go to the bathroom.
I am afraid to buy a computer.
I have the money and the need, so this ought to be a no-brainer. Instead, it’s becoming an arduous decision making process. Should I buy a new Vista PC or should I go with a Mac? How did it get to this?
Vista, you might know, is the newest release of the Windows operating system for PCs and it has received some uneven reviews for all kinds of things. One of my big concerns is the availability of drivers for peripherals like printers.
My sister-in-law just got a Vista machine (and a new printer) and told me a horror story about the hours she spent on the phone with tech support trying to get the PC to log onto the Internet. She started in the afternoon and gave up and went to bed around 10:30 PM after speaking with support centers around the world. No one could solve the problem and she went back and forth with Dell, the manufacturer and her ISP for many hours.
On the other hand there is the Mac. My son just went to college and has a Mac notebook which I think is really cool. He went through high school using a PC but seems to have adapted to the Mac really well. I still can’t get the Mac onto my Windows based network at home though and that’s a problem.
The thing that scares me is that I have a small business that runs on computers and the Internet. When it’s down so am I and I like to minimize that problem.
So it looks like I might need to buy more than a new computer. Certainly there’s a printer to purchase and maybe a new router. I don’t know what to do but if I have to buy a bunch of stuff, I am thinking that making a change and going to the Mac might be the smart choice.
If lots of people think like this, what does it say about Microsoft’s chances in the years ahead?
