PubAffairs Blog
Think big, act small. It’s time to start nano-campaigning.
Dan Fox19 February 2009 5:48 PM
In the title of his 1973 book, criticising technological progress and financial growth, economist E.F. Schumacher declared that “small is beautiful”. It set the tone for much of the pessimism that was to follow in the decade after the OPEC oil crisis and is an attitude still reflected in many environmental and economic analyses today.
So to the more optimistic, it is a little amusing that the pursuit of the miniature has driven the onward march of technology, wealth creation and consumerism rather than acting as their antidotes. For all the new questions raised by the spread and penetration of information and communications technologies, vastly more have been answered.
Professional communicators have been particularly grateful for the advances in ICT. Now, as we experience mobile-enabled, wireless-supported, network-creating, information and communication ubiquity, the question is how we continue to innovate. Just where do we go from here?
The only way is…down. Down to the level of individuals and small groups in a way never previously countenanced by traditional campaign strategies and budgets. Because the significance of social media is not the opportunities it provides for mass communication but what it enables in terms of listening to, speaking to and engaging with a single person or well-defined clusters of people.
Our cousins in marketing and PR have already learnt this, as demonstrated by their presence on micro-blogging phenomenon, Twitter. By using tools such as Tweet Scan and Twitter Search to find out what is being said about their brands, they can respond accordingly. Early problems can be dealt with before they become reputation-threatening and opportunities to communicate can be exploited before they fade. A company’s intervention becomes part of the medium (the, ahem, “Twitterverse”) and is passed on and around, enhancing their profile, building loyalty, and crystallising relationships.
(By the way, as awful as “Twitterverse” is, just be glad I’m sparing you from “Twinfluence”, “Twitizenship” and “Tweetesis”. For now.)
Furthermore, reactivity to what is already happening online is only half the story. Later this year, Facebook will offer more proactive opportunities through the advent of an instant polling tool. As with Twitter, corporate strategies will exploit this first. Political campaigns should not be far behind.
This is not to say that social networking sites have invented customer service and market research (or addressing grievances and polling opinion, if you prefer). But the way in which they have made it so much easier and faster is changing the “shape” of this activity. Campaigns are no longer evenly-constructed pyramids of top-level communicators using mass media to get messages down to a mass audience. Campaigns are getting flatter, straightening out, and elongating.
Individuals communicate with each other quickly, directly and briefly. Short, sharp and occasionally shocking information is passed along through viral e-mails, URL forwards, text messages, Facebook statuses, Wiki-updates, blog posts, SEO, Tweets and ReTweets, photostreams, RSS feeds, you, get, the, idea.
And if it’s done right - with message, context and timing still the most important factors – those chains of communication then start spreading down and out into the far more familiar, but far wider than usual, pyramid-like bands of influence. The campaign becomes contagious. It “tips”.
In 2000, Malcolm Gladwell applied the epidemiological concept of the “Tipping Point” to human habits and communications. Through the use of anecdotes, statistics and social psychology, he demonstrated how small actions have far-reaching consequences. Zero-tolerance approaches to petty crime, for example, lead to overall reductions in serious crime; while the wearing of a previously obscure clothing brand by certain trendsetting groups can unwittingly promote it into the fashion mainstream.
Over the last decade or so, social psychology has helped further explain tipping point phenomena and how behaviours, ideas and even emotions can be transmitted and spread, widely and quickly. Nowadays, of course, the digital application of such techniques means that this potential is even greater. In theory, any campaign could be as far reaching as the last internet connection on the planet. And all from a small start.
Indeed, counterintuitive as it may be, it is the Lilliputian (and seemingly ineffective) nature of such a campaign’s beginnings that make it so big (and very definitely effective) in the end. Not because “command and control” of the message is no longer possible or relevant in the “new media” age (as we keep on hearing from blogging and vlogging evangelists Peter Mandelson and John Prescott). Rather, it is that people like to discover things for themselves and be educated and challenged by the ideas and concepts available to them, starting with basic suggestions and thoughts, developing them as they click-through and cross-reference increasingly intricate layers of information, building their own narratives and coming to their own conclusions.
There are lessons here from more traditional media, especially television. The first series of The Office was, especially by the standards of BBC advertising overkill, hardly promoted at all. There were a few, short trailers and it was given a relatively obscure mid-week slot on BBC 2. Those first few episodes in July 2001 were stumbled across by audiences so small that it nearly got axed. But those who did watch it, talked about it. And those to whom they talked didn’t feel that they were being hoisted onto a bandwagon. The advocacy was peer-to-peer and therefore felt more authentic (probably helped by rumours that it might be taken off the air). When the DVD of the second (and final) series was released in October 2003, it broke the sales records for the medium.
In the meantime, the likes of Lost and 24 have broken the mould of traditional viewership by becoming a focal point for discussion on the web for ever-expanding online communities of fans.
What has made these programmes so popular is the sense of ownership and belonging they engender, by encouraging access and easing entry into their world, facilitated by the original low-key marketing and the participatory effects of new technology. Adapting these principles to campaigns can have similar results.
First, do no harm. Do not put people off from the outset by imposing too many of the campaign’s aims, ideas and structures from the top. Get the membership or grassroots involved as early as possible.
Second, for each individual that signals a willingness to become involved, encourage a personal narrative for their participation. Ask them to do something small and explain what it will accomplish.
Third, allow the narrative to continue by rewarding them for participation (public praise, awards, etc) and giving feedback on what has been achieved so far and what milestones have been reached. And get feedback from them, too.
Fourth, always be clear about what happens next and how they can be a part of that, too, while encouraging their own ideas about future aims and activity.
Fifth, apply positive social pressure by promoting the most compelling and effective examples of individual participation within your campaign’s communities (virtual and real) and wider audience.
As Blue State Digital’s Managing Partner, and Obama adviser, Thomas Gensemer pointed out at his recent City University lecture, this was the approach that underpinned the Triple O’s activity, by “lowering barriers to entry while raising expectations”. Or as his Times interviewers put it, “little and often sums up the approach to community interaction”.
You end up with a mass movement built on little but multifarious foundations. A macro-campaign defined by micro-efforts. Or, because I think such a campaign’s basic activities are better described in terms that are even more elemental, it is, in fact, nano-campaigning.
The phrase was first coined by US marketer and blogger Anne Holland last year when she identified a trend towards increased personalisation and product specialisation in her own profession. For Holland, the “nano-campaign” is the practical application of “nano-niche marketing”. I would humbly suggest that it can also be claimed for the broader spread of communications disciplines, using a working definition of:
The tactical promotion of ideas and messages, tailored to individuals or select groups, with the strategic aim of encouraging a campaign to grow and build momentum beyond a small, focussed audience, enabled by the multiplying effects of communication technologies and social media.
That could be a very small step for a campaigner. But a giant leap for campaign-kind.
Dan Fox is an independent public affairs and campaigns adviser, writer and trainer. He tweets about the links between campaigning, technology and social media at http://twitter.com/Campaigner
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