The Power of the Masses

Stonewalling is rapidly losing its effectiveness. I am a political junkie, and am often amazed how quickly info diffuses through the web. Now, not all is accurate, you understand -- witness all the major pols saying China is drilling off the FLA coast for Cuba when in fact no such drilling is occurring.

But the masses also turn up and spread accurate info with amazing speed. On my favorite political blog, TPM, the editors did a story on McCain's advisers. Apparently a month ago they asked for a list of advisers so they could check on their lobbying connections. No such list emerged, and McCain's people said, "show me a list of Obama advisers," as if being transparent only makes sense if both sides do it. Which in politics it probably does, unfortunately. So the story was posted and a list of advisors was requested.

TPM is a major community -- 676K of users per month according to Quantcast. And while the camapigns (for indeed neither is distributing a list on their web sites) can stonewall one small blogging team, they CANNOT prevent word of something getting out.

It took all of 41 minutes for a list to be produced by someone in the community -- actually a list published and constantly updated by GWU. So, likely reliable and accurate. And the picking through of the list began immediately across the community, with people turning up little turds of truth in many places.

I am sure there are turds in Obama's crew as well, so this is not about McCain but rather the power of an egalitarian web to find the story, while CNN finds a pretty white woman's murder to investigate 24/7, and Fox finds someone who hit his dog that lived in the same block as Barack and his "Baby Mama." No wonder DC is so dead set against net neutrality.

What does all this have to do with marketing? Well I think the answer is obvious. Truth will out, so it's better if you just play clean and open.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.