Word of Mouth Really Is Changing Everything
I got a Christmas card today from one of my oldest friends and I looked at Elizabeth and said “she’s wearing a LaRoque dress.”
I couldn’t believe it. I sounded like a complete idiot knowing what kind of dress she was wearing. But how couldn’t I know? Half the girls at the Jr. League party last week were wearing LaRoque. I’d venture to say that more than half the girls at last year’s Cup were wearing LaRoque. Hell, even I was wearing LaRoque. My bow tie was custom made to match my wife’s dress…and yes, I’m pretty ashamed to admit that. But like they say, happy wife = happy life.
If you are a Columbia female, you know exactly what LaRoque is. It’s a dress shop.
Most impressive is that LaRoque is owned by a 25-year-old lady named Annabelle. Here’s how it works. A girl visits Annabelle, picks out a fabric, and Annabelle makes the dress custom for her. Maybe that’s not impressive. I don’t know because I’m not really into that kind of thing. But how can you not be impressed that a 25-year-old girl’s store has become ALL the rage in Columbia?
I believe Annabelle is blowing it up for three reasons:
1. Great product.
2. Amazing customer service.
3. Word of Mouth!
Yeah. Word of Mouth! I’ve never seen an advertisement. Maybe she runs ads in some girly magazine that I’ve never seen, but I know for a fact that Annabelle has created at least 25 dresses just because my wife recommended her or because some chick was super pumped about my wife’s dress. Many of those recommendations happened on the Internet after a friend saw a picture on Facebook. It’s all word of mouth baby.
I’ve blogged before that word of mouth is changing everything because with the Internet, its happening faster than companies can buy advertisements. Remember this fact when designing your website and developing your Internet strategy.
Oh, and one more thing. I just asked my wife “what is LaRoque’s website.” Elizabeth responded, “she uses Facebook and MySpace because that’s where all her customers are.” Very true! Gotta love it!
E-Pending Works
This morning I ran across yet another article about how cool Patrick Ruffini and Mandy Finn are, which forced me to finally read their Rebuild The Party platform.
I have to admit – I just don’t get Patrick’s distaste with e-pending. Mostly because it absolutely works or maybe I’m just more concerned with action than philosophy.
I detailed my reasons here, but I felt moved to comment further after reading these two comments back-to-back from the Rebuild The Party platform:
“The next Chairman must undertake a crash program to grow the RNC’s email file organically — no spam and no “e-pending” from voter files.”
Next sentence:
“…integrating e-mail signups into everything we do at the grassroots level, ensuring that everyone who goes to an event and or is contacted by a volunteer is given the opportunity to join our network.”
Ok, let me get this straight. Debbie is a 3 of 3 Republican primary voter and only 30 years old. We have the ability to capture her email address, but we should ignore it. Instead we should go sit outside of Wal-Mart of three hours like a panhandler and beg for email addresses?
With that same line of thought, we should also stop running television ads except on specialized channels that a voter can tune into when he/she is in the mood to check out some hot political commercials. We should also stop sending direct mail unless someone specifically requests them. I guess we should also stop all robocalls.
Patrick’s philosophy is a nice one…a real nice one. I wish we lived in some perfect world where everyone wants to hear every word a candidate spits out. But we don’t live in that world. We live in a world where ONLY a rock star celebrity candidate like Barack Obama can make those methods work. If you think for one second that a typical Republican Congressional candidate can pull off what Barack Obama has been able to accomplish, you are absolutely 100% crazy.
Patrick is right when he writes “winning the technology war with the Democrats must be the RNC’s number one priority in the next four years.” But we aren’t going to win that war by stealing their game plan because we don’t have the candidate that can make it happen. Yes, the Barack Obama campaign ran the most technologically advanced campaign in the history of our nation and even Republicans should commend their web team. More impressive is that they are continuing their Internet push as Obama transitions into office. What we have to understand is that those Internet strategies and tactics would have been impossible with nearly any other candidate.
I’d argue that Mitt Romney had a far superior Internet strategy than John McCain, but Romney wasn’t the rock star candidate that Barack Obama was. Romney couldn’t pull it off, as much as I prayed he would.
Trying to take Obama’s methods and applying them to our party will not work unless we find that kind of rock star candidate. In the mean time we have to move forward in a direction that will promote our kind of candidates online. Those aren’t the kind of candidates who can grow massive organic lists without prospecting.
Patrick’s philosophy that SPAM backfires is correct. However, you don’t have to SPAM with e-pending. I use it for email prospecting, which grows my organic lists.
This year I used e-pending for South Carolina State Senator Shane Massey. Through an email/voter list match, we acquired 1,932 emails. Because it was matched to a voter list, we were able to target specific messages to individual groups of voters. We sparingly sent emails to each group and in each email we requested that they join our “Team Shane” email list. Within three weeks we had 467 organic emails that we later used to build our phone banks.
Sure, we may have been able to acquire 467 emails if we sat outside of Wal-Mart every day for two weeks, but we didn’t have that kind of time. We did it the productive way… isn’t that the goal of technology anyway?
E-pending works. So do a lot of other annoying tactics like direct mail and robocalls. We should not be releasing plans that restrict our activities if we are going to “rebuild” our party. Every single possible strategy and tactic should be on the table.
Become an Information Drug Dealer
(cross-posted at politicalnetroots.com)
A few weeks ago, SC House member said to me:
“You know what really gets to me Wesley? We cut taxes by $850 Million in the past four years and nobody cares. Voters demanded property tax cuts and we slashed them by half a billion. They didn’t care. We cut income taxes and eliminated the grocery tax. And still, nobody cared. In response they tossed out a bunch of our guys.”
Yup. That about sums it up.
The voters tossed out a bunch of incumbents because they lost trust in them and felt the need for change. That’s because you aren’t sharing your accomplishments.
In The Blogging Church, Brian Bailey writes:
“Information is a drug. Want proof? How else do you explain our insatiable desire to stay informed? No matter how much news and information we have, we’re constantly searching for more.”
You know the feeling too. It’s why you watch the news. It why the 24-hour news cycle became the 24-hour news cycle. It’s why you always look at those trash magazines in the grocery store line and why you listen to gossip around the Statehouse (or whatever your state capital is called). And it’s why you get up and read the blogs everyday. You want to know everything that’s happening.
Well, so do voters. They want to know what you’re doing – the good and the bad. The problem is that you’re not talking to them and telling them the good stuff you’re doing. You’re letting gossip blogs and the MSM tell the story for you! Big mistake! You just expect the voters to read through the voting records and understand what they’re reading. That’s freakin’ ridiculous!
If you don’t give voters the information you want them to know, they will go get it someone else.
And chances are that somewhere else is going to be an outlet extremely biased against you.
The Internet is cheap, simple, personal, and immediate. At a very low cost you can spread all your positive news minutes after it happens.
Information is a drug and most folks are addicted. It’s your job to feed the addiction. If you don’t, someone else will.
Word of Mouth is Changing Everything
(cross-posted at www.politicalnetroots.com)
As I write his post I sit in a hammock in Tulum, Mexico. I didn’t come here because I read about it in a magazine or saw an ad on TV. I didn’t even find it in a Google search for “awesome vacations on the beach.” I came here because my buddy Jay Hicks recommended it. When I wrote about my trip a few weeks ago on this blog, another buddy, Matt Robinson, emailed me saying that he just went to Tulum. He then sent me a bunch of recommendations, nearly all of which I tried.
When I got to Tulum, Jay was actually down here for the first night and I showed him Matt’s email. Jay just laughed and told me that he’s the one who told Matt about Tulum. I didn’t even know that the two of them knew each other.
That shows the amazing impact of “word of mouth” and combined with new technologies and connectivity, it’s killing, or rather changing, traditional marketing and advertising.
In The Blogging Church, Brian Bailey writes:
“We love to tune things out. So much so, in fact, that we’ve turned the ability to tune things out into a skill that we home with enthusiasm, admire in others, and gladly spend money on to make it as easy as possible. We fast-forward through commercials using the latest DVRs, flip past ads in magazines, turn the station when an ad comes on the radio, and pay for satellite radio to avoid as many commercials as possible. Our culture has become adept at ignoring traditional “interruption” advertising.
We listen to our friends, though. Whether it’s a restaurant recommendation, a movie critique, or a tip on a great place to take the kids, we’re eager to hear from people we trust. They know what we like, have similar tastes, and are motivated only by enthusiasm and as desire to share…
Ten years ago, your friends were largely people you knew personally – neighbors, coworkers, former classmates, and your church family. Today, many relationships are formed online; some of our most trusted voices are people whom we’ve never met.”
I agree. People have always talked. Now we are talking around the clock, from nearly everywhere. We are always connected. Because of blogs, social networking sites, and the latest and greatest handheld gadgets, word of mouth is dominating communication and the importance of advertising is diminishing rapidly.
In South Carolina Sweet Tea vodka was all the rage this year. They may have advertised, but I never saw one ad. I just heard my friends talking about it over and over again. I can’t tell you how many times I read about it on Facebook. The liquor sold out in stores across the state because of word of mouth.
Will word of mouth end political advertising? Will direct mail and television ads fall to online connectivity in the coming years?
We will see.
Who Is Stepping Up?
And how many times can I say “stepping up” in one video?
In my new video I talk about how the SCGOP, John McCain, and SCHotline are stepping up their web game and doing some cool stuff on the web.
Purchased Email Address Lists Work
I hate to disagree with Patrick Ruffini. After all, he has been playing on the web a whole lot longer than I have and to compare my online experiences with his would be pretty absurd. But while Patrick has been playing on the web, I’ve been playing on the streets, running the nuts and bolts of state legislative and US Senate campaigns. He probably has no clue what that’s like.
Here’s what I learned:
People get sick of seeing political television ads during CSI commercial breaks.
People get sick of us filling their mailboxes with political junk mail.
People get sick of us calling them during dinner.
Does that mean we should stop? I’m hoping right now that my opponents are saying yes.
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