I got to thinking while watching, though...Would the US's Founding Fathers blog? And if they did, would they be popular enough to have a following?
Fortunately, the tools exist with which to answer those questions. Here's what we did, step by step:
The first step was to get copies of the United States Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution, volume-of-content wise primarily single author papers, in digital form. Not a problem as indicated by the links in this paragraph.
Step 2 involved using NextStage's TargetTrack tool to analyze these two documents as if they were marketing material directed at today's consumers (and if you don't think politics is about marketing, you're not watching carefully).
We specifically analyzed for
- who these documents would most appeal to age wise
- who these documents would most appeal to gender wise
- what were these documents really communicating
- are these documents communicating that what is written is trustworthy
- what personality type would respond best to these documents as written
Age
Age wise and if the Founding Fathers were writing today, they would be appealing to a largely Boomer and beyond
audience. This means they'd do well blogging in today's world because Boomers are growing in numbers, buying power and clout daily.Gender
What about gender? It seems our Founding Fathers were a lot more interested in reaching the female audience when they crafted the Declaration than they were when they wrote the Constitution. Perhaps they needed to make sure Abigail and Martha were really on their side.
But here we need to ask, is this an unexpected outcome? Yes and no. I'm surprised by the female audience number for the Declaration. The Declaration is creating a boundary, staking out a territory, a written proclamation that "we" are not like "them". It is primarily a male-conceptual document. The Constitution, though, comes from a different part of the brain. It's primary focus is to create consensus, to create a "bringing together", to cause a binding of disparate groups. This is something science has as a differentiator between the female and male psyches. But the fact that these gender elements come down through better than 200 years of history is fascinating.
What Did They Really Communicate?
In keeping with the maleness of the Declaration, it's strongest message can be summed up as "We are Together Against You". Yep, that's both declarative and independent. The Constitution? It's strongest message is "Together, We Say 'Yes'". Okay. I don't know about you, but I'll accept that as the underlying message of the Constitution. Please recognize I'm not writing about political messages per se here. I'm writing about the non-conscious messages communicated by the language of the document itself. In other words, what is the Constitution's brand? The Constitution's brand is "Together, We Say Yes" and that's a pretty good brand, me thinks.
Trust
Are the documents written to cause the audience to trust the authors? The Declaration comes out with a trust value of 69%. Evidently the authors didn't trust each other all that much. The Constitution comes in at 77%, much better. Kind of "3 out of 4 people believe what we've written is true." In either case, today's politicians would kill for these numbers.
Would They Have An Audience?
The last question is, how much of the US would be interested in what the Founding Fathers wrote? Both the Constitution and the Declaration are written for the same personality type (or persona) with one very telling exception; the Declaration was authored by people who didn't have a lot of hope for the future, the Constitution was authored by the same exact people who thought the future was going to get better and better and better.
But how many modern day readers would the Founding Fathers reach out to? Not enough to make a difference, really. The Declaration would only affect 2.58% of the US population, the Constitution only 3.57%. Again, the reason is understandable; the authors were writing for an audience which didn't have TV, computers, MP3 players or electronic communications of any kind. Getting a message across to today's audience requires a visually rich medium.
The take-away from all this? The US Founding Fathers knew how to write and how to get their message across, but bloggers they weren't, nor should they have been.
But had they been born into today's world with the communication skills they had? Watch out, politicos. There might be a second United States.
» It's 2007, time for Politics in NH from BizMediaScience
Politics and the Web: Market Early and Often [Read More]
Tracked on: January 9, 2007 3:06 PM | Permalink to Trackback