HealthCare.gov Mess Has Lessons for Campaigns

What can the Obamacare website debacle teach a political marketer, or a brand marketer for that matter? A recent online post by David Heitman, president of a Colorado branding and PR firm, lays out some cogent lessons for campaigns and causes. The first obvious lesson, he writes, is that it's better to launch late than launch badly. The second lesson is to put a premium on critical feedback. Apparently, pre-launch issues with the HealthCare.gov website didn't get to the top, or the top didn't listen. Next, when something goes wrong, remember that the media and the voters can forgive a mistake but not a cover-up. Trying to deny or hide the truth only incites the media and sours supporters. And don't underestimate the intelligence of your audience by trying to mislead in a world of click-speed data sharing. As Heitman points out, when HHS boasted that 15 million visits showed the popularity of HealthCare.gov, Pew Research could quickly counter that 70% of those visitors had insurance and were not serious shoppers. The impact of technical errors on the Obama administration's credibility also underscores the vulnerability of candidates and campaigns to their high-tech advisors. Make sure your campaign has invested in a proven, trustworthy technical team! But perhaps the toughest political lessons are how failure in the details can undermine the larger vision, and how a launch stumble can risk the race. See the full post at http://www.bcbr.com/article/20131108/EDITION0806/131109942/-1/DigitalEdition

Campaign Message Control Tough in the Twitter Age

The days when a political campaign could control its message by catering to the journalist "boys on the bus," with handouts, press briefings and prepared sound bites, has vanished. Now every campaign must face a blogging, tweeting, sharing mass of professional and self-appointed reporters everywhere, all the time -- which makes it hard to sustain a controlled narrative. A recent New York Times article sums up: "Because of the relentlessness of the schedule, the limited access and the multi-platform demands, many of the boys and girls on the bus are in fact boys and girls. And the bus they ride is Twitter." The media has become "one giant, tweeting blob," in the words of Peter Hamby, a political reporter at CNN. "With Instagram and Twitter-primed iPhones, an ever more youthful press corps, and a journalistic reward structure in Washington that often prizes speed and scoops over context, campaigns are increasingly fearful of the reporters who cover them," Hamby wrote in a report quoted by the NYT story. Mitt Romney's campaign failed to handle this social media-driven journalism by trying to fence off the candidate and alienating the young, inexperienced reporter "embeds." The Obama campaign did better with a proactive social-media-attuned approach. It's an important lesson for campaign marketers looking to the next elections. For the rest of the story, see http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/02/business/media/campaign-journalism-in-the-age-of-twitter.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0