Image: ©iStock/efenzi
Follow Epolitics on Substack, Bluesky, Threads, or Twitter/X. This post was also published on Substack
Hi folks, be sure to check out the third installment of Will Robinson’s series exploring how Democrats should be adapting to today’s digital media environment. I foreshadowed the piece in Saturday’s How Democrats Ended Up in the Digital Ditch, and it’s worth the wait. Also to help us dig our way out:
- Join my next training webinar Thursday at 3 Eastern: Digital Advertising in Politics, Part II: Political Campaigns
- Watch the five(!) earlier installments of my spring series on YouTube.
Working with Influencers? Do This One Thing, Even If Makes You Cringe
Spurred by the realization that Democratic digital tactics of the last ten years aren’t working so well anymore, campaigns, causes and political organizations are waking up to the idea that influencers can provide powerful channels to reach voters and potential donors through voices they already trust.
But political communicators can easily default to a habit that’s positive most of the time but hurts when they work with independent voices. Political professionals tend to prize “message discipline”, having every spokesperson using the essentially the same words, phrases and examples when they speak about an issue or story. In the age of broadcast news and cable, disciplined messaging helped talking points break through to the general public. Our political media system long rewarded those who could stay on message despite pesky distractions from the press or the opposition.
Naturally, the results were sometimes so uniform as to tend toward the ludicrous, and satirical outlets like The Daily Show delighted in compiling clips of different politicians repeating the same lines verbatim. That kind of repetition paid off in practice, though, as those segments played throughout the day and onto the exalted territory of the evening news. Republicans were particularly good at message discipline, to the point that Dems often expressed envy at their ability to stick to each day’s script.
The influencer ecosystem works under a different logic. Listeners, readers and viewers tend to follow influencers because they see them as authentic voices using their own words with their own passion. Many influencers do shill for corporate brands (I once worked in a office that had a closet full of giveaways for mommy bloggers), but those who stray too far from their usual topics or the values that their fans ascribe to them risk alienating their audiences and losing the attention they depend on.
Naturally, when political communicators reach out to podcast hosts, YouTubers or TikTok stars, they tend to bring the assumptions of the political world with them. They’ve all heard horror stories about candidates and surrogates going off on a tangent and the times those unscripted moments have ended up in an attack ad. As a result, their messages are typically tested, polled and approved from on high as-is, and the pros are generally deeply uncomfortable when someone steps outside their focused-grouped boundaries.
Since influencers traffic in a different currency — authenticity — message discipline can actually backfire in their world. When an influencer reads an organization or campaign’s script verbatim, it will too often sound wooden and flat compared with that person’s usual delivery. It can also completely miss the subjects that the influencer and the audience actually care about together. At heart, a canned message will come across as inauthentic, making it as likely to boomerang as to attract positive attention. When that happens, neither the political organization nor the influencer benefits — and both may take a hit.
Instead, whether political communicators are paying influencers or leveraging their preexisting passion for an issue, they have to learn to relax. Yes, they should give their new messengers all the support they can in the form of content and (maybe) cash, but they must let them tailor the presentation for their own unique groups of followers. The professionals can and should provide talking points, stories, images, video and interview opportunities, but they have to let influencers work the results into their own streams in their own ways.
Which of course goes against every instinct beaten into the political community by the hard force of past example. But when I’ve talked with people who often work with influencers and independent voices, they rarely find that people color too far outside the lines. After all, influencers usually want to keep these relationships intact, whether because they’re being paid, because they’re passionate or because they enjoy the access they gain.
With podcasters, YouTube streamers and video clippers now reaching far more Americans than network and cable news, political communicators must choose. Will they try preserve message discipline even in settings where it’s anathema, or will they embrace more open and participatory ways of communicating? Pithy version: suit and tie, or freak flag fly?
Conservatives have already shown that they’re quite comfortable with today’s digital media environment — they’ve embraced it. Can Democrats, liberals and progressives follow their lead? Doing so will take plenty of time and money, but it will also take a cultural shift. Power to the people means power to the people, after all, even when they’re not precisely on-message.
– cpd