This election today will be looked back on in history as one of the few remaining where traditional marketing approaches were used. In the future, the amount of flyers that are sent out through the mail will drop dramatically. Most I’m sure will be like me and take them from mailbox to recycle and never even pay them any attention. The phone calls all go to voicemail and are deleted without anyone listening.
Next campaign, hopefully the up and coming candidates will realize that to reach your audience they need to be using the media that voters are reading – social media and the internet. With the phenomenal growth of such engines as Twitter and Facebook where we can get the opinions of others we trust and know, why would we pay much attention to the mudslinging and rhetoric that is being mailed out? We won’t.
Word-of-Mouth is by far the most dominant way people learn about candidates and get more information. Your friends and colleagues have their perspectives that they have probably picked up on the internet or heard from someone else and this is what they are sharing. If you agree, you share. This can go viral quick and will be the “weapon of choice” for candidates in the future. Once again, word-of-mouth will triumph, only now with the tools and power of social media, it will just be a whole heck of a lot faster and less expensive for the candidates.
The days of the shiny flyers in the mailbox are gone. Now, hopefully we can figure out a way to eliminate all those annoying street signs stuck in the ground? Maybe next time…
