I’m a firm believer that you need to look beyond your sector and learn good ideas brewing up in apparently unrelated areas. So, this week, I’m going to talk politics.
Well, sort of. I’m not going to discuss policy or start shouting for particular parties or candidates. But I am going to write a little about how political parties and candidates are using Web 2.0 tools to sell themselves more effectively and I’ll highlight areas that I think are applicable to the travel community.
Lawn Signs - the old approach to marketing
Before, I do that, a little history.
It was only a couple of years ago that our good friends at PublicInsite published a report on online political campaigning called Still Virtually Lawn Signs: Benchmarking Canadian Political Web Sites During the 2006 Election. The title says it all really and reveals that politics was an area that was essentially behind a lot of sectors in its use of the web. However, the current political cycle in the US has shown great developments and a lot of the innovative campaigns have moved from old fashioned ’scattershot’ marketing approaches (but online) to using the same modern tools used by the best companies and organisations in the world.
Can we make social networking work for us? Yes we can.
Two recent posts were the inspiration behind this article, Barack’s Boring Website and Three Innovative Republicans Running for Congress, both from the right learning blog The Next Right. While the posts are undoubtedly partisan in perspective, I thought there were some interesting messages that came through and were worth repeating.
Firstly, the Barack Obama campaign site. Discussing how the Obama site has more opportunities for engagement than the rival McCain site, the author notes,
- “I don’t disagree as far as BarackObama.com’s depth of content goes. But let’s not kid ourselves. At its core, BarackObama.com is not truly interactive. It is transactional.”
Now, in my view transactions are interactions but I guess that the difference between a transaction and a discussion is the difference between a haiku and a prose work - both forms might ultimately contain as much insight but one says it in a lot less space than the other.
But such thoughts ultimately divert us from the central insight which is that the Obama site is an incredibly focused piece of social networking that channels interest in a strong product into a set of tangible and desired actions. Barack Obama is clearly a highly desirable product and the website enables this desire for the product to be translated into meaningful, measurable outcomes.
But let me clarify the point still further: this is a social networking that makes money (and I include in that the time volunteered by members of the public to become campaigners for Obama). How many other companies are doing this as successfully at the moment?
The next section that caught my eye is related to that notion that the social network facilities are there for a specific purpose - there not there as a ‘nice to have’ but for a fully thought out purpose.
- “Conventional wisdom holds that major websites should change daily. But Obama flouts this conventional wisdom by hitting every user 1) once with a signup splash page, and 2) with a constant ask for money as the prime feature on the homepage, even if there are more current or important stories to tell.
- This is neither good nor bad, but suggestive of the fact that the Obama homepage is compulsively metrics-driven. The campaign would not use this graphic if it did not produce more money than the alternative — even if the alternative was newer and made more sense intuitively.”
To my mind, this sounds as though the Obama campaign in doing A/B or multivariate testing to see which pages produce the best responses as well as doing their webanalytics to back this up.
I’ve noticed that this approach is pretty standard fare in North America although I sense that it has some way to go to make a breakthrough to a wide audience in Europe even though Google have free tools for all of this.
Either way, it sounds again as though the Obama site has its eyes on the prize and knows why is is doing what it is doing and converting eyeballs into dollars. And if web analytics and A/B testing is god enough to get a man into the White House, then it’s certainly good enough for every other business and organisation out there to improve their website. I’m not in the business of boosting certain products either but if Google Analytics and the Google Website Optimizer is good enough for Obama, then it’s probably going to work for a lot of the rest of us as well.
For all that, however, the article’s author notes that email appears to be the prime method for the Democrats’ fund raising initiatives - mostly because it works. And he notes that these are usually emails asking for money whereas the Republicans are fighting a better guerilla campaign that replies less on email solicited contributions:
- “In my experience, Republican campaigns tend to be hungrier because they aren’t as wedded to the email cash cow. Most of the campaigns I see experimenting with user-generated policy, with next-generation campaign websites, with Twitter, or with money bombs are Republican.”
The second post (Three Innovative Republicans Running for Congress) highlights some examples of how the Repulicans in other spheres are rewriting the rules as well as taking advantage of the 2.0 world. I particularly like the Marty Ozinga page, from its URL (”http://www.iamnotapolitician.com/“) through to its design and approach that says, “look, lets not worry about the folks on 28K dial-up modems.” However, I think the follow up is less impressive - as Vicky expressed it after about 10 seconds of the site, “Shut up already, I’m ready to do something now!”
I haven’t been able to spot event tracking code on any of these sites yet but they all appear to be ripe for this.
So what has this got to do with the travel industry?
In a brief, these examples say to me:
- Social networks can be focused to provide a tangible R.O.I (whether in money or, for example, volunteer resource terms)
- You have the tools to know what works - use them!
- Good design counts for a lot and mavericks can make an impression.
It is often said that ‘people buy people’ and this is probably more vital in politics than in many other sectors. However, in reality, this is only part of the picture and politicians, like the travel industry, need to have some substance behind the look. For example, a successful politician must have policies that are aligned to public demand and successful travel company must have a destination aligned to their customer demand (and I use destination in an extremely wide sense to include choice of transport as well as the more usual meanings).
I’m also aware that politician campaigns provoke a passion in their participants that it is unlikely to be found in other areas (sport is probably an exception to this). Public events like these ride on a mild wave of hysteria that is great for momentum at the time but often leave people looking back and admitting that their reaction was a little silly in retrospect. On balance, I would say that it is a good thing that this attitude does not prevale widely among people making travel choices. But travel is not something that people feel completely indifferent about - it is clear that lots of people have passionate views.
So, my conclusion is that it is possible for social networks to work more effectively than they are at present as long as you understand why you are using them. If you are happy to use them as a customer feedback tool, fine. If you are happy to feel that they enhance your brand by making you more transparent, also fine. But if you can get people doing these last two things and committed to actions that align with concrete KPIs and you can measure whether this is making a cent’s worth of difference to your business, then you really are going places.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 at 8:27 am and is filed under Future trends, Online customer behaviour, Opinion, Research tools, Travel 2.0, Web analytics and web measurement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.