Politicians Have a Lot to Learn from Business

If Li and Bernoff make one thing clear, it's that you HAVE to pay attention to the groundswell. There's just too much to gain, and too much to lose. You need to listen to the groundswell as much as you need to participate in, and engage with it. For the most part, it seems companies have caught on to this. As Li and Bernoff point out, TiVo is a perfect example of engaging with the groundswell. TiVo supported an independent forum about their service, listened to it and changed accordingly.  

Naturally, companies are better off once they listen to the groundswell. What is there to lose when stakeholders are telling you exactly what they want?

There is a deeper way to think about the groundswell though. There are so many ways social media has changed our world. Almost every company is actively involved in it now. But maybe the groundswell's biggest impact is yet to come, or maybe it's just started. In 2007, we saw the first example of a politician truly using social media in an effective way. Remember this?

There even used to be a feature where you could color a picture of your own in the same way as the picture above. Then people started to make it their Facebook profile picture. Talk about free publicity. To be fair, politicians learned some lessons from Obama's groundbreaking campaign. 

The two most successful campaigns of the last presidential campaign (if you consider the expectations going into the campaign), were, by far, Bernie Sanders' and Donald Trump's. There's a lot of different reasons for the success of those campaigns, but one obvious common thread between them is how they totally dominated social media. Have a look at Bernie Sanders' Facebook page, or Trump's Twitter. The number of likes or retweets on either's page is astounding. They've clearly struck a chord with their supporters on social media. 

More importantly though, they listened. While all their opponents went on to all the conventional TV shows, Trump and Sanders recognized the demand for them to appear on Youtube shows, to engage with online platforms. Li and Bernoff argue that you need to find your base (your most loyal and enthusiastic stakeholders) and empower as well as reward them. That is exactly what the two politicians did when they granted popular right and left wing shows interviews that other candidates didn't. Trump went on Infowars (a popular right-wing Youtube channel) whereas Bernie went on The Young Turks (a popular left-wing channel). Both interviews are very long, but you can check them out below if you're curious.

Many people ridiculed Clinton's and Cruz's attempts to attract millennial voters, and with good reason. They didn't listen. They didn't take the groundswell's advice either. It would be bold to argue that this social media savvy didn't play an enormous role in Sanders' and Trump's campaign success. It almost certainly did. 

So will all politicians learn from these lessons? It's never been easier to know what your constituents want, nor has it been easier to communicate with them. It's possible Trump was even better than Sanders on social media because he responded to others posts (though the caused a lot of backlash, but also a lot of publicity) whereas Sanders simply provided a lot of content. It would be wise for politicians to respond to people on social media the same way corporations do. 

Engaging with and understanding the groundswell has worked incredibly well for companies across the world. So why haven't politicians caught on yet? In this age, with all the data available to us, no politician should ever be criticized for being out of touch with the people. The tools to stay in touch are just too easy to access. It's only a matter of time before we see more dramatic changes in how campaigns of all sorts, all around the world, fundamentally transform. Though the groundswell has already been affecting politics, politicians have not yet engaged with it in a nearly effective enough way.