Presidential Candidates Use Linkedin to Talk to Market to Community of Educated Professionals, but Are They Listening?

Educated professionals are a key constituency for every successful campaign, as they tend to be both civic-minded and have the disposable income necessary to make campaign contributions. This constituency is building an online community on Linkedin, and all three major presidential candidates are using the site’s Answers feature to ask those constituents questions.

Seven months ago, Senator Obama asked, “How can the next president better help small business and entrepreneurs thrive?” Yesterday, Senator McCain joined the conversation by asking, “What is the biggest challenge America faces?”

In their new book, Groundswell, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff outline five major objectives in online community building:

1. listening
2. talking
3. energizing
4. supporting
5. embracing

If I had to wager, I’d say that the candidates’ efforts on Linkedin fall neatly into the second category. It’s unlikely that the candidates are actually paying attention to the thousands of responses pouring in, but that’s a smaller part of the political equation. The important thing from where the campaigns stand is that these outreach strategies make people feel heard. But, as we online community geeks all know, there’s a big difference between making people feel heard and actually hearing them.

Actually hearing online communities would require a perception of competitive advantage that is at best nascent in campaign culture. Campaign best practices are changing at a glacial pace to include online conversations that hit objectives 2, 3, 4 and 5 very nicely. But objective 1 is still the most challenging and most elusive.

Why? Because political campaigns are still more about manipulating public perception than anything else. The core goal of a campaign isn’t long-term, two-way engagement with a grassroots group. That’s the goal of political parties and 501.3(c) organizations. Campaigns want to talk to those networks, but they rarely build them from scratch.

After all, campaigns are finite things by their very nature. They exist for one purpose, to turn a person into a product and then sell that product to the American people. It creates a very top-down situation wherein — with a few notable exceptions — the candidate is sequestered from most meaningful conversations in favor of polished rhetoric and staged conversations.

I’ve always said that organizations can learn a lot from political campaigns, but I think that in this case, the shoe is on the other foot. If candidates are a product, then product development requires an understanding of the market’s long-term needs. Any ambitious political figure should begin building his or her online community long before they seek higher elected office. And they should continue to listen to that community as they climb the ranks of American governance.

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