This post will respond to the second part of WindKiller's What McCain said about Obama and Palin to Hillary and Biden comment, "If you were to device a PWB group (where P stands for Political), would these be their communication style? Is it possible (although unintentional) that these web sites are targeting other professional politicians? How would you change Obama's web site to target that valuable V19 demographic from your pie chart?"
WindKiller is (I think) alluding to NextStage's Language Engine technology, an aspect of our Evolution Technologytm that understands different languages and jargons. For example, when analyzing a site targeted to an Hispanic audience (even if the site is in English), ET needs to "think" in Spanish hence we have an Hispanic Language Engine. ET also understands lawyerese, investorese, researcherese, ... . Here WindKiller is asking if we have a Political Language Engine and, if we do, are the campaign websites designed (intentionally or otherwise) to appeal to an audience that "thinks" like a politician.
Is there a universal "Political" Mindset?The first question to me is to learn if all politicians think a certain way. I'm not going to analyze every campaign and PAC site on the planet and I will offer that there's another great North American election coming up, in Canada. Let's analyze the "campaign" sites of Harper and Dion. It's a limited test and let's see what we can find.
Listing alphabetically, we start with the Dion English site for 23 Sept 08. The main communication style of this page is V16. Key factors for the V16 communication style are:
- These people need to have information presented to them in pictures, charts or graphs
- They finalize their decisions by using internal dialog
- They need information framed in a positive manner before they can accept it
- They have no sense of time or process
I should point out that as recently as 2005 there was a very distinct difference between English and French websites in Canada even when they were for the same company in the same location. This difference was due to each version of the website being designed for how that language culture thought and internalized information. An emotional argument in English won't use the same strategy to get its points across as an emotional argument in French and vice versa.
The similarity between English and French sites is more an indication of the "democratization" of the internet and how -- in an attempt to reach everybody equally -- it denies each person their uniqueness and individuality.
The Harper English and French sites also share a specific communication style, this time K10. Key factors for the K10 communication style are:
- These people learn by doing and tend to be risk-takers
- They tend to have a positive outlook on life
- They can be convinced by demonstrations of positive outcomes
- They take action when they believe there'll be a reward for their endeavors
So first, if there's a universal political mindset, it doesn't show up in the top two-thirds of North America (just for comparison, Senator Obama's website communication style for today is K8, Senator McCain's is V15. More on this in following posts).
Can we guess based on this how Dion and Harper will fair in Canada?
Probably, with more time and interest. But what we can take away is that these two Canadian politicians communicate their messages about as well as do their US counterparts. None of them are doing a particularly good or even mediocre job of reaching the majority of their constituencies.
What about other US politicians? Fortunately NextStage has lots of historical data to pull in order to answer that question.
Senator Clinton's site used K9, V10.
Governor Romney's went from V7, to V1 to V10 to K9 to K9 from 10 Feb 07 to 7 Sept 07.
Senator Thompson's went from V8 to V7 in less than a week's time at one point.
Senator Edwards stayed pretty much a V2 for the entire time we were watching.
So is there a universal political mindset? Maybe and it's not obvious from this little study here. Hence on this evidence alone, if the campaign sites are designed for other politicians... I'm guessing they're not. At least they're not at a level that ET can determine at this level of analysis.
That brings me to the last part of WindKiller's question, "How would you change Obama's web site to target that valuable V19 demographic from your pie chart?"
Sorry, WindKiller, that I won't share in a blog post. It's an easy answer, simply one we'd charge for. If that's an option, do let me know...
Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.
Links for this post:
- Politics Blog posts
If some of the communication styles directly translate to to specific audiences or classes, do the K8, K9, K15, V15, V16 (identified Barack/McCain site communication styles) communicate to any of ET's known/recognized audiences (e.g., lawyers, inventors, hispanic dog breeders, or offspring of Iditarod contestants)?
Political web sites are a bit of an unusual breed in that they seem to incur significant updates on a daily basis. The sites also seem to fluctuate in communication styles. Do the sites change communications styles frequently because of the regular updates or is it an indicator that any one of multiple individuals might be updating the site on any given day? If I were updating my site with significant content regularly, would my communication style fluctuate as much (assuming I was not making a conscious effort to be consistent/inconsistent)?
Lastly, you mentioned the V19 style would reach the greatest number of people. If I were managing a political site for a presidential candidate, would I want to keep my communication style consistently on V19 to try to own that group or would I want to fluctuate between the top 3-5 communication styles to try to make at least one connection with a broader base of people? Any suggestions for how to maintain one comunication style when so many factors impact the communication style and so much content turns over on a regular basis?
You know, if I were designing a political web site, this would really come in handy. ;-)
Posted by: Windkiller | September 23, 2008 1:37 PM | Permalink to Comment