September 23, 2007

"Of the People, By the People, For the People"

In two months, it will be 134 years since Lincoln spoke those lines. And yet they may embody a prescription for effective marketing and communications in today's consumer-driven world.

At the Aspen Institute this summer, we heard a presentation by Wes Boyd and Joan Blades, the husband-and-wife team who sold their education software company in the mid-'90's and were looking around for another one to start, when they became concerned that our government was becoming paralyzed by the Clinton impeachment proceedings. While they certainly didn't condone the President's behavior, they thought it was time to move on beyond the nation's obsession with it and attend to the much more vital issues of the day.

They e-mailed fewer than 100 friends to ask if they would like to join some kind of loosely defined initiative to urge that the country move on past this discursive issue. And, within two weeks, they had more than 250,000 individuals who signed up to say "Yes. Count us in."

Today they have 3.3 million.

And, of course, that organization is MoveOn.org.

It has become convenient to label MoveOn as a liberal group, and there's no doubt that it's positions tend to be on the liberal side. But that isn't driven by the leadership of MoveOn. It's driven by the members.

And that's what I find so interesting - and instructive - about MoveOn.

It's truly run by the members. Boyd and Blades are merely facilitators...hooker-up-ers. They said, "We're in the service business, figuring out ways for people to be involved. We try to connect up what people want to do with what's possible."

In 2004, for example, they asked members to create ads on issues that mattered to them. More than 1,000 ads were submitted. And the ads they ran came from the members.

Members define the issues, the positions, the communications.

It is the new "public square." Boyd and Blades pointed out that it's increasingly difficult to have a real "public square." Most gathering/shopping occurs in malls, and they are privately owned and generally do not permit distribution of literature. Traditional media are expensive for relatively small national organizations like MoveOn, so the Internet becomes the way to go.

Yes, there are exceptions, such as the recent Petraeus ad that got so much publicity. These are mass manifestations of opinions shared by the many individuals within MoveOn that have said, yes we want to take a position on this, yes we want to invest our own money on it, yes we want to create an ad that puts a really strong stake in the ground.

This is truly marketing and communications of the people, by the people, for the people. And it's very powerful.

If Detroit were as sensitive to its customer base, it would never have gotten into the pickle it's in today. There are lots of other examples of other tin ears out there.

It's a great challenge to develop the mechanism for timely, continuous input from your customer base...to listen to it and respond to it...and let it even take you sometimes to zones of discomfort but great possibilities.