I have a guest post up today at Monica's blog, Life in the Middle Lane. Check it out and leave a comment. Don't be a lurker! :)
Republicans Need a Brand Makeover
0 Comments Published by Nisha Chittal on Sunday, November 30, 2008 at 8:50 PM.
The Republican Party is at a crossroads. The mainstream media is speculating that this year could be a historic, realigning election. That the Republican Party might have fallen.
So, they lost. And they lost pretty badly. McCain-Palin won a mere 173 electoral votes. And between the 2006 and 2008 elections, the Democrats won at least a dozen Senate seats and at least 50 house seats, took control of both Houses of Congress, and now have 4,090 members in state legislatures, compared to the Republicans' 3,221.
But now is when, if the Republicans know what's good for them, they can seize the moment to makeover their entire brand by 2012. There are many things they can do to achieve this, but these are three that I think they should pay attention to.
Stop letting everyone else brand you and brand yourself. An Associated Press-Yahoo News survey earlier this year found that the first word that came to people's minds when they thought of McCain was "old" and the first word that came to mind for Obama was "change." These were the responses of one in five people -- the most popular responses. Obama picked the "change" message early on and stuck with it, and branded himself before anyone else did. McCain's campaign slogan, country first, didn't appear till much later. And by then, it was too late-- other people had already branded him as the "old guy."
In the age of personal branding, branding yourself before someone else does is no longer just smart, but necessary to beat out the competition. Instead of letting everyone else brand the Republican party as tired, damaged and out-of-touch, reinvent and rebrand yourselves. Now.
Get social-media savvy and reach beyond your base. To win the support of the people, you have to reach them where they are. Obama's campaign got Barack Obama on nearly every social networking website on the web. Now, his weekly radio address is also being video taped and archived on YouTube -- a first for an American President or president-elect. But when you consider the millions of hits a day that YouTube gets, it seems like a smart way to reach an audience that may not typically listen to the weekly radio address, and encourage civic engagement.
President Bush, however, has no plans to turn his weekly radio addresses into a video. When asked about it by reporters, a Bush spokeswoman said: "It's called a radio address for a reason." McCain's social media presence, too, was always lagging behind Obama's. He should have gone for a social media strategy of both deep and wide, and used it in new and innovative ways to connect with the audience whose votes he was seeking. This slowness to change with the times and reach out to voters using the technology they use is holding back Republicans.
You need the young people. Last summer I was writing a piece on both the campaigns' college outreach plans, and called each campaign's press office to find out what their college outreach strategy was. The Obama press office told me all about Students For Barack Obama and what they were doing. When I called the McCain office, I was told that they didn't have any information for me. Some quick research online told me that McCain's campaign did, in fact, have some Students For McCain chapters, but information about them was hard to track down.
College voters should have been a major part of their efforts. They should have been throwing more resources into appealing to young voters and talking directly to them about the issues that matter to them. Then they should have broadcasted to the world, and to little writers like me calling their office, that they had a strategy to reach out to the millennials. Yes, young people may lean left-- Obama won 18-29-year-olds 66 to 32 percent --but maybe all the Republicans need to do to narrow that gap is make them more of a priority.
So, they lost. And they lost pretty badly. McCain-Palin won a mere 173 electoral votes. And between the 2006 and 2008 elections, the Democrats won at least a dozen Senate seats and at least 50 house seats, took control of both Houses of Congress, and now have 4,090 members in state legislatures, compared to the Republicans' 3,221.
But now is when, if the Republicans know what's good for them, they can seize the moment to makeover their entire brand by 2012. There are many things they can do to achieve this, but these are three that I think they should pay attention to.
Stop letting everyone else brand you and brand yourself. An Associated Press-Yahoo News survey earlier this year found that the first word that came to people's minds when they thought of McCain was "old" and the first word that came to mind for Obama was "change." These were the responses of one in five people -- the most popular responses. Obama picked the "change" message early on and stuck with it, and branded himself before anyone else did. McCain's campaign slogan, country first, didn't appear till much later. And by then, it was too late-- other people had already branded him as the "old guy."
In the age of personal branding, branding yourself before someone else does is no longer just smart, but necessary to beat out the competition. Instead of letting everyone else brand the Republican party as tired, damaged and out-of-touch, reinvent and rebrand yourselves. Now.
Get social-media savvy and reach beyond your base. To win the support of the people, you have to reach them where they are. Obama's campaign got Barack Obama on nearly every social networking website on the web. Now, his weekly radio address is also being video taped and archived on YouTube -- a first for an American President or president-elect. But when you consider the millions of hits a day that YouTube gets, it seems like a smart way to reach an audience that may not typically listen to the weekly radio address, and encourage civic engagement.
President Bush, however, has no plans to turn his weekly radio addresses into a video. When asked about it by reporters, a Bush spokeswoman said: "It's called a radio address for a reason." McCain's social media presence, too, was always lagging behind Obama's. He should have gone for a social media strategy of both deep and wide, and used it in new and innovative ways to connect with the audience whose votes he was seeking. This slowness to change with the times and reach out to voters using the technology they use is holding back Republicans.
You need the young people. Last summer I was writing a piece on both the campaigns' college outreach plans, and called each campaign's press office to find out what their college outreach strategy was. The Obama press office told me all about Students For Barack Obama and what they were doing. When I called the McCain office, I was told that they didn't have any information for me. Some quick research online told me that McCain's campaign did, in fact, have some Students For McCain chapters, but information about them was hard to track down.
College voters should have been a major part of their efforts. They should have been throwing more resources into appealing to young voters and talking directly to them about the issues that matter to them. Then they should have broadcasted to the world, and to little writers like me calling their office, that they had a strategy to reach out to the millennials. Yes, young people may lean left-- Obama won 18-29-year-olds 66 to 32 percent --but maybe all the Republicans need to do to narrow that gap is make them more of a priority.
Labels: barack obama, branding, gender politics, john mccain, republicans
Politicians can be funny. Sometimes...
0 Comments Published by Nisha Chittal on Monday, November 24, 2008 at 2:27 PM.
Some great quotes of the day-- I kept posting these on my Gchat status and twitter, but they were too good to forget...
Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee: McCain picked Palin for VP because "she looks better in stilettos than I do!" http://tinyurl.com/674244
Obama's senior economic advisor, Austan Goolsbee, on Face the Nation on Sunday, discussing the proposed new economic stimulus package: "It's going to be a number big enough that when they spell it out it will look like, 'ooooooooooooh.'"
538's Nate Silver discussing who Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich might appoint to take Obama's place in the Senate: "since this is Illinois, we can never be quite certain just who has which skeletons in their closet."
Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee: McCain picked Palin for VP because "she looks better in stilettos than I do!" http://tinyurl.com/674244
Obama's senior economic advisor, Austan Goolsbee, on Face the Nation on Sunday, discussing the proposed new economic stimulus package: "It's going to be a number big enough that when they spell it out it will look like, 'ooooooooooooh.'"
538's Nate Silver discussing who Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich might appoint to take Obama's place in the Senate: "since this is Illinois, we can never be quite certain just who has which skeletons in their closet."
Labels: politicians are funny, quotable quotes
Does anyone read print newspapers anymore?
5 Comments Published by Nisha Chittal on Sunday, November 23, 2008 at 5:52 PM.
Do you? I don't. As avid of a news reader as I am, I can confess to not reading a single thing in print. I get everything online now, like everyone else. The big media companies are definitely feeling it -- and the impending recession is making the situation even worse.
For my dad's generation, print newspapers were an important part of everyday life. My dad still reads the Wall Street Journal every morning on the train to work and treasures it, but I think he's of a dying breed. Yesterday he was showing me some stock quotes in the WSJ and I was struck by how long it had been since I had read a print copy of anything to get the news. Especially for something as rapidly changing as stock quotes, it seemed futile to me to look at a print newspaper published only once a day, when those stocks would fluctuate constantly throughout the day and the most up-to-the-minute updates could only be found online.
Last week the New York Times, still my favorite for news, announced that it sharply reduced its dividend -- which will save the New York Times Co. about $97.8 million a year. This is after years of increasing its dividend. Some think that page by page, section by section, the NYT's influence is fading away.
PC Magazine is shutting down its print edition and going completely digital.
And did you know over half the Washington Post company's revenue comes not from WaPo or Newsweek...but from its Kaplan test prep division?
On the other hand, in July, Gawker Media got twice as many pageviews as the LA Times website. And Huffington Post has supposedly raised $15 million in capital.
AdAge questions whether print can even survive another five years -- a little pessimistic if you ask me. But then there's been so many media layoffs lately, that the blogging giants are trying to seize an opportunity by offering free blog accounts to laid-off journalists. So who knows.
One thing I do know is that mass media is changing. No one wants a one-way message from the media anymore; they want a two-way conversation that they can participate in. They want to be able to comment on news stories, they want to be able to discuss the news as it happens, they want rapid updates every minute, and they want to be environmentally friendly and save paper. I'm taking a mass media course right now, and I'm surprised by how little we have even touched upon the topic of the internet -- we've studied nearly every kind of old media, but barely even touched upon the effects of the internet on the media establishment.
What I'm interested to see next is: which big media company will actually keep up? Or will they die out and be completely replaced by internet media?
For my dad's generation, print newspapers were an important part of everyday life. My dad still reads the Wall Street Journal every morning on the train to work and treasures it, but I think he's of a dying breed. Yesterday he was showing me some stock quotes in the WSJ and I was struck by how long it had been since I had read a print copy of anything to get the news. Especially for something as rapidly changing as stock quotes, it seemed futile to me to look at a print newspaper published only once a day, when those stocks would fluctuate constantly throughout the day and the most up-to-the-minute updates could only be found online.
Last week the New York Times, still my favorite for news, announced that it sharply reduced its dividend -- which will save the New York Times Co. about $97.8 million a year. This is after years of increasing its dividend. Some think that page by page, section by section, the NYT's influence is fading away.
PC Magazine is shutting down its print edition and going completely digital.
And did you know over half the Washington Post company's revenue comes not from WaPo or Newsweek...but from its Kaplan test prep division?
On the other hand, in July, Gawker Media got twice as many pageviews as the LA Times website. And Huffington Post has supposedly raised $15 million in capital.
AdAge questions whether print can even survive another five years -- a little pessimistic if you ask me. But then there's been so many media layoffs lately, that the blogging giants are trying to seize an opportunity by offering free blog accounts to laid-off journalists. So who knows.
One thing I do know is that mass media is changing. No one wants a one-way message from the media anymore; they want a two-way conversation that they can participate in. They want to be able to comment on news stories, they want to be able to discuss the news as it happens, they want rapid updates every minute, and they want to be environmentally friendly and save paper. I'm taking a mass media course right now, and I'm surprised by how little we have even touched upon the topic of the internet -- we've studied nearly every kind of old media, but barely even touched upon the effects of the internet on the media establishment.
What I'm interested to see next is: which big media company will actually keep up? Or will they die out and be completely replaced by internet media?
Labels: journalism, newspapers, social media, technology
I just found this on a blog somewhere, and I love it:
Labels: gen y, social media, technology
Here's some numbers for perspective.
"The United Nations World Food Program appealed more than two months ago for $140 million in donations so it would have enough money to feed the third of Zimbabweans in need -- 4 million people -- at the peak of the hunger season in the first three months of next year. But so far, the program has not yet gotten any firm commitments, said its spokesman, Richard Lee." [NYT]
The US can spend $700 billion bailing out our financial system, $25 billion bailing out automakers, $12 billion a month fighting a needless war in Iraq; we can send $30 billion in aid to a country with a population smaller than that of New York City.
But a mere $140 million could feed FOUR MILLION people in Zimbabwe -- and the UN can't even get the $140 million it would need to feed those 4 million people.
What is wrong with that picture?
"The United Nations World Food Program appealed more than two months ago for $140 million in donations so it would have enough money to feed the third of Zimbabweans in need -- 4 million people -- at the peak of the hunger season in the first three months of next year. But so far, the program has not yet gotten any firm commitments, said its spokesman, Richard Lee." [NYT]
The US can spend $700 billion bailing out our financial system, $25 billion bailing out automakers, $12 billion a month fighting a needless war in Iraq; we can send $30 billion in aid to a country with a population smaller than that of New York City.
But a mere $140 million could feed FOUR MILLION people in Zimbabwe -- and the UN can't even get the $140 million it would need to feed those 4 million people.
What is wrong with that picture?
Labels: international politics, poverty, the economy, UN, zimbabwe
