1. Relationships are the most important driver of results.
Wasting money on political campaigns is nothing new. But what set Obama on his path to victory in 2008 was his emphasis on relationships. For the first time, a presidential candidate opened an office in my tiny home town of Durham, and started by bringing in college students to talk to their friends and neighbors. Rather than sending people like me into random territories, they sent me out on streets and roads where I was a known entity to most of the residents. He maintained those relationships for the next four years and in 2012 and while Romney was blowing a fortune on TV, Obama hired buses to get the students to the polls.
2. Building relationships is cheaper.
In 2008 Obama spent just $6,023 per electoral college vote, focusing primarily on building networks and relationships and data collection. Hillary spent 24 times that on each electoral vote (no doubt because her campaign was run by an ad guy) and in 2012 Romney spent a whopping $2,389,464 per electoral vote won, mostly on expensive TV ads.
According to Joshua Darr, assistant professor of political communication at Louisiana State University, it’s cheaper and more effective to round up boots on the ground: “It takes $670,000 dollars in ad buys in a general election to get the same number of estimated votes as you would by opening a field office which is about $21,000 dollars to maintain throughout an election season.” So sure, we can spend a lot of money to get impressions or even raise awareness, but if it doesn’t bring in money or achieve some other goal that helps the business, it doesn’t count.
3. Don’t count on impressions.
There’s a ton of publicists out there that would kill for the “ink” that Donald Trump has received since he entered the Presidential race. They’d drool over the gazillions of impressions, the name recognition, and the crowds. And all those impressions and name recognition definitely increase awareness and preference according to the polls. And that’s the goal, right? Get the most impressions up, boost preference, and the rest will take care of itself. Except it didn’t happen that way in Iowa. Here in New Hampshire, perhaps.
4. Relationships take time and nurturing.
Networks of door-knocking, lawn-tromping volunteers aren’t something you can just whip up overnight. And the people who build these networks are not a dime a dozen. You need to identify them, cultivate them, and keep them engaged, or they’ll vote (or buy from) the other guy. One of the reasons bosses believe that a press release or a paid ad is the right way to go is that they see it as a quick way to make a splash. The trouble is that all you make is a splash. Sooner rather than later the giant pond that is society goes back to the way it was before.
5. Relationships can’t be automated.
Read my post on why automated pitch letters will make you more enemies than friends. In the same way, robot calls have gotten so annoying that voters, at least in New Hampshire, write off candidates entirely if they get too many of them. Nor can Twitter lists or Facebook outreach be anywhere near as effective as the personal touch. Research shows that many people like a page only because they want to get closer to the person who forwarded it to them. Meaning that they have a relationship with the person, not your brand.
So stop the spamming and go back to the basics. Be nice, be interesting, be funny. Be the person you’d most like to talk with at the cocktail party. ∞
>>>Want to learn more about relationships that received a boost after measurement was used? Check out 50 Shades of PR ROI.<<<
