Because nothing is certain 
The best part of the MA special senatorial election is that it’s over – my home phone has been ringing for the past month with calls from both sides, from Tea Party Republicans to President Obama, urging me to vote for their candidate. And whether or not you agree with the outcome, there are lessons to be learned from the process itself. After all, what is an election but the marketing of a politician, a party, and his/her/its views? That makes it interesting to see what parallels can be drawn between tech marketing and the MA senate campaign. I’m sure there are more but here’s a start – feel free to add to them in the comments section, but please keep it to campaign execution and not political views!
It is nearly impossible to unseat an incumbent without a triggering event – this is something you hear from Steve Duplessie (@stevedupe) fairly often. Certainly the death of the sitting senator qualifies as a trigger for change – in this case it forces change that may not have happened for many years to come. Humans are by nature change resistant, and that’s reflected pretty well in IT environments. Once we have technology in place, we get comfortable with it, it’s predictable, and often the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t. The longer it’s there and the more processes built around it, the higher switching costs become. But then a compelling event comes around that triggers change. Today in IT, the economic crisis has largely acted as a trigger event – budgetary pressures combined with technology advances like server virtualization and scale-out storage platforms have IT considering cloud infrastructure alternatives (both public and private). It will be a long journey, but thanks to the economy and advent of enabling technologies the drive for greater efficiency in the data center has certainly begun.
If you’re coming from a position of weakness or in a vulnerable position, change the discussion. It was a brilliant move on Brown’s part. Scott Brown recognized that MA has a pretty strong Democratic party, so he changed the game from Democrat versus Republican to Democrat versus Independent. Brown understands that despite the fact that registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans in MA by about 3:1, 51% of the registered voters in MA register as Independents. And while most of the country thinks of MA as a solid blue state, for the 16 years prior to 2007, a Republican held the top state office. We are proud independents, and Brown played to that. We can see tech parallels – about a dozen years ago EMC Symmetrix was in a vulnerable position at the top of the storage market – HDS announced its new high-end systems and Symmetrix was getting long in the tooth. Over a number of years EMC bought Data General (and a midrange storage business), Legato, Documentum, and changed the discussion to ILM and to building out an information infrastructure. HDS is still perceived as a high-end storage company.
Leverage all of your available communication channels – including social media. Brown’s campaign used all available communication channels including social media, an area where Coakley’s efforts were pretty much nonexistent. Momentum builds on itself–a small social medial push can snowball because it leverages the voices of everyone you touch, and fans out from there. It’s like the old Pantene shampoo commercial that said “I told 2 friends, then they told 2 friends, then so on and so on.” That was in the world of 1:1 communication. In the social media world, we all have 1:many channels that give us exponential reach. While social media did not win the election for Scott Brown, it certainly provided another communication channel that helped him rally his base – I saw a number of friends who are registered Independent start out as Coakley fans but swayed towards Brown in the final weeks by what they were reading (and pointed to) on Facebook!
The list could go on, from ensuring your message resounds with your target audience to complacency, arrogance and passion. There was certainly a sense of EMC circa 2000 arrogance and complacency in the Coakley campaign, and NetApp circa 2000 passion and drive in the Brown campaign (fortunately for EMC, people are change resistant and that gave them time to respond to vulnerabilities by changing the discussion, and for NetApp, the growth in unstructured data provided a compelling need for big-iron file storage!).
I’ll spare you from more. And yes, I am sure Brown won for more reasons than I am outlining here – but if there hadn’t been a compelling event, there would not have been a race. If he hadn’t used all of his available communications channels, would he have effectively gotten his message out? If he hadn’t changed the discussion, could the sentimentality that so many MA citizens felt about uncle Teddy’s senate seat have played a bigger role? If Coakley spent more time on communications 2.0 rather than 1.0, would she have mobilized her base? Post-mortems and what ifs are much easier than setting strategy – but they always provide an opportunity to learn something – we should all make sure to listen.
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