June 17, 2009 10:22 PM UTC

The Changing World of Political Campaigns

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• by: DavidThi808

Marketing has radically changed over the last 5 years. And we, like everyone else, are trying to figure out what we should do to market Windward. But this change is equally gigantic for another system – and that’s political campaigns. A lot of these changes hold equally well for both. A candidate is a product. And a political campaign is a marketing effort. This is not meant to denigrate candidates (my mom is a representative in the Hawaii state house), it’s just pointing out that there are great similarities.

Here’s the thing, how a candidate uses the web will make a substantial difference in how they do in the election. It presently has greater impact than anything except paid TV ads. And by 2012 it will probably surpass TV. Candidates in close races will win or lose based on their Internet strategy.

But “use the web” can take many meanings. A candidate needs to have a good website, but that has little impact. A video like the “Macaca” one can kill a candidate, but that is a rare event – and the real lesson from that is you need to respond to what comes out on the web. Posting tweets are a part of this, but again a small part.  

continued at Here from the start

Note: We now have a requirement to actively blog on something interesting at work and so this is what I’m discussing. So the series on this one topic will be partially posted here to suck in viewers to the Windward blogs.