Social Media and Political Telephony

I was at a dinner on Saturday night, and one of the fellows at my table was one of the co-founders of Broadnet. We asked him for the elevator pitch as to what the company did. He started with, “We do mass automated calling for political campaigns.” As a collective groan rose from the group, he continued, “But, what we do that is really unique is that we do something called ‘teleforums.’”

It was a new word…so we put aside our bucket of pitch and sacks of feathers and allowed him to continue.

Teleforums, it turns out, are both similar and quite different from the excruciatingly frustrating autodialers that interrupt dinners for millions of U.S. households every four years (and, to a lesser extent, every two years in between). Rather than simply having an automated voice prattling on about a candidate or an issue, the automated voice invites the caller to stay on the line and join a live forum. On the forum, the candidate (or an expert on the issue) speaks for a few minutes and then starts taking questions from anyone who has chosen to join.

As it turns out, this is wildly effective. All of the U.S. Presidential contenders have used them with good results in their campaigns. The calls go out to tens of thousands of people, so it is not uncommon for 1,000 people to join the conference. Obviously, they don’t all get to ask questions, but the system supports various ways of filtering (or not) who gets to ask what and when.

The co-founder of the company — an engineer by training — made some interesting observations:

• The number of households who actually chose to stay on the line and join the conference was eye-popping (when heard through the ears of an e-mail marketer) — very comfortably into double digits consistently
• The comfort level of the politicians who used the system varied widely — some relied on a team of aides to work the technology and screen the questions, while one member of the House of Representatives from the South ran the entire show entirely by himself
• Heavily entrenched incumbents had a harder time just letting someone speak their mind without cutting them off…especially if the person speaking opposed the incumbent’s own views and positions (there were definitely exceptions — apparently, John McCain simply never cuts anyone off, no matter how negative they are towards him and his views)

I couldn’t help but think about social media and the way that marketers are shifting from “messaging to” their target audiences to “engaging with” them. I, of course, asked if they did work with businesses rather than political organizations. His short answer was, “Not really” for two reasons:

• It’s an election year in the U.S. — they are growing rapidly just with business from political campaigns
• They’re really geared towards high volumes — 50,000 phone calls is “normal,” and there just aren’t that many businesses where this approach needs that sort of scale

He gave a couple of examples of experiments they have done or considered that, to me, sounded like they came straight out of an e-mail marketer’s handbook of best practices:

• Pre-recording a variety of personalized intros: “Good afternoon, Tim. This is…” “Good afternoon, John. This is…” Obviously, there become diminishing returns, so, even if half of the calls wind up with a personalized intro because their names are sufficiently mainstream, the other half would get the default, “Good afternoon. This is…”
• Pre-calling each household during daytime hours (when there would be a greater chance of getting an answering machine) to let the person know that the teleforum would be occurring at a certain date and time so they could block the time off if they were interested in participating.

It was an interesting discussion. Heck…another guy at the table works for Communispace, and he talked about some of the interesting work they’ve done. But that will have to be a topic for another post!