Over the last decade or so I think the biggest shift we've seen is sort of the final breakdown
of the traditional channel-based structure, the way we tend to think about communications
as paid media, earned media, owned media, this sort of traditional silo-ed approach
to communications that we still hear a lot from marketing textbooks in business school
and that kind of thing.
I think what has happened is: the process of the 20 years preceding the last decade
was about fragmentation, new types of channels, satellite TV and mobile networks, and just
this incredible proliferation of types of content and channels within the silos that
left people feeling like they had infinite choice but left communicators feeling like
it was impossible to reach an audience.
What social media has done, particularly Facebook and Twitter, have created a glue to knit all
these fragments back together into something that feels like one big graph, one big network
of content moving between channels in unpredictable ways of engaging with people in ways that
we can't necessarily predict, creating more two directional conversational dialogues and
communication between individuals and the people that we're trying to reach and inspire,
which is new behavior for us.
It requires marketers and communicators and publishers to develop new skills like listening
that we didn't used to have to do, we just picked the channel and we picked the right
message and we said something to an audience that was mostly pretty passive, and I think
this is the big shift in thinking and the real challenge for a lot of organizations
is we are now part of a graph with the people that we're trying to inspire rather than them
being a stable audience that we're trying to reach and us being in a stable position
as inspirer or publisher, we now have to participate in this system.
People create content, we create content, they share content, we share content and that
means that we have to think differently about how we communicate, how we tell stories, how
much content we have to create.
We can't reliably predict where that content is going to get consumed so it's really easy
to get into a situation where if we're not really clear about our values and our identity
and who we are and what we're trying to achieve where sort of our values and mission sit as
an organization it can become really easy to sound schizophrenic to the communities
that we're trying to engage.
And I think a lot of organizations are still really struggling with this transition.
It still feels really unsettling to folks because it means whole scale changing of the
way we think about content and communication and publishing, it even means different org
charts rethinking how we shape the organizations and design and staff and how teams work together
and how people collaborate are all different than they used to be in, and that's still
a change process that I think a lot of us in a lot of organizations are still working
their way through.
So when we think about politics and we think about what's changed in communications, one
of the most important changes to the communication landscape is the shift in the necessity of
being able to listen effectively at scale, the necessity of seeing the people that we're
engaging as relationships we're trying to create, and the necessity of empathy and listening
as part of starting relationships is fundamental to communication—now rather than either
orthogonal or accidental or a nice to have, the fundamental nature of many of the communication
mechanisms are bidirectional now and that means our habits have to change.
I think one of the great advantages of digital technologies is the capacity to listen at
scale, the phrase to use even in the question is something that wasn't possible before digital
tools.
The ability to use data, to use smart sort of tools and listening tools, things like
Radian6 and Crimson Hexagon, there are a lot of these platforms out of there for you see
them mostly in sort of the enterprise marketing spaces, but work really well in politics and
social good and these other places to get a sense for what people believe and think
in social conversations, because so much of this conversation is happening in public.
And so the question about listening is mostly a cultural one.
The tools, these tools aren't perfect and some of them are pretty expensive so not necessarily
the easiest things to implement, and building skills and hiring people and thinking about
this as a skillset that needs to be part of your team as part of this process, but before
any of that is a belief that listening is important.
A belief and creating a culture where questioning your own certainty and validating your own
certainty and putting the community first in terms of how you want to be able to reach
and inspire the people that you're trying to engage, whether that's selling a product
or trying to win an election, this is just a function of how the landscape works, this
is not particularly partisan, it's not particularly about politics, but it requires a cultural
believe in the value of listening, which is not something that all leaders come by naturally.
And I think part of this is a discussion about the value of empathy and the value of really
the necessity of understanding the values and beliefs and emotions behind what people
value and believe as part of building real relationships with people.
And this is where, again, digital tools make starting relationships with more people easier
but maintaining relationships is still work.
So this is one of the great challenges of large scale community organizing, which is
the things that we were able to do, particularly back in 2008 with the first Obama campaign
when we were sort of treading a lot of new ground, just because timing has a lot to do
with the success of a rain dance—it created the ability for us to have millions of volunteers,
which we could never have recruited without these new platforms, we just couldn't have
had that many meetings.
We just ran out of hours in the day and time in the campaign and it allowed us to accelerate
the recruiting process and the engagement process by creating more doors and more ways
into the campaign for more people.
But making sure all of those millions of people felt valuable and heard and respected and
part of the process and enabled to do good work that had value that was on-mission is
an enormous commitment of work and there are thousands of field organizers in the Obama
community who did the work of supporting those relationships.
And I think this is one of the big shifts in thinking about from audience to community
where speaking at someone and saying the right thing to you at the right time in the right
channel is a very linear process.
This is traditional micro-targeting and marketing: “I need to figure out what you're listening
to or what you're watching so I can show you the right message and you're just going to
consume it and it's going to change your mind.”
This is a little bit the magic madman idea, like the perfect ad, the perfect sort of great
idea—and there is value to that creativity and content is still super central to how
we communicate and how we tell stories, but the process is not that linear anymore, and
so thinking about how we engage people as a relationship we are building over time rather
than just a transaction at a moment in time is I think the starting point to start bringing
these other ideas into the conversation about empathy and what you think and believe and
feel, and listening to you.
People will tell you what they think if you ask them.
People ask, “How do you know what people think?”
And the answer is: in politics we knock on a lot of doors and we have a lot of conversations,
hundreds of millions of them literally conversations where we are asking questions and talking
to voters and asking what they think and who they support and we keep all that data.
It is a massive listening exercise.
It's a massive exercise in is our view and vision for the future compelling and is it
getting through?
Are we making sense?
Are we reaching people and connecting with people in a way that is relevant to them or
are we missing something?
And people will tell you if you ask them.
It's not actually that complicated.
It's just—it's hard to do at scale.
And this is something that has to be staffed for.
And the piece of this that I think if the first part is about culture, or the last part
is about adjusting to, there is a misconception that you can just start publishing, and just
create a page no one charges you anything you just start doing stuff.
Creating content isn't free, responding to comments isn't free.
Being careful about the ladder of engagement you're creating with people and inspiring
them and engaging with them and answering their questions isn't free.
That requires teams, talent, and energy, and commitment to creativity that you've got to
pay for.
And that's a place that staffing changes, and the way this changes the way we think
about communications departments is pretty profound.