In politics, you’re either on-message or you’re losing. Let’s get to it.
Welcome to On Message, a weekly look at where the battle lines are drawn and who is winning the war of words.
This week… Take out the Trash.
I’ve been thinking recently about how much strategic communication has changed over the past decade or so.
Now, the fundamentals remain the same: know your message, know your opposition’s message, identify and target your audience, etcetera. But some of the “tricks of the trade have evolved significantly, just as the way we consume media has changed drastically.
Case in point: Friday has traditionally been known as “Take out the Trash” day. This was the strategy of holding all the bad news you didn’t really want people to hear and dumping it all on the media on Friday afternoon. The idea was you flood them with several things so they can’t do a real deep dive on any one thing and that whatever they cover would end up in the Saturday paper and Sunday TV news, which doesn’t have a big audience compared to the rest of the week.
Think of it as proactively minimizing any damage.
But that strategy was based on two things that are less and less a part of our media diet in 2021: TV news and printed newspapers.
I would argue the opposite may very well be true today.
On Friday night and through the weekend, much of that same audience now has time to sit and scroll on phones and iPads. So it may be that now people are more likely to see what gets dumped over the weekend.
The Friday trash dump may need to be a Sunday night or even a Monday morning trash dump to coincide with people getting back to work and back to information overload. It may be your best strategy to get lost in the shuffle.
Another element I’ve been thinking about is the press release.
For decades, this has been the fundamental element of a media strategy. You write out what you want the press to know and send it to them. While there’s still definitely a benefit to crafting and sending press releases, catching the media’s attention (presuming you or your organization are already on the radar) is so much simpler and often more effective with a tweet or other social media post.
What’s interesting to me about it all is that Twitter has emphasized the importance of being concise. Instead of a 600-word news release, you can get the attention you want with a well-crated 280 character tweet. Even the ability to string together a thread forces you to focus your message differently than in the past.
The ability to include photos or videos on Twitter or other social media feeds also gives you a direct pipeline to your audience, and can be amplified by media outlets that expand your reach by sharing what you’ve posted or doing a story about it.
That can be both good and bad depending on the situation.
But done right, it can also humanize a politician and eliminate some of the filters and gatekeepers between you and your audience.
So, what’s the lesson?
The way you get your message out has to evolve with the media consumption habits of your audience. If you are still playing the communication game the same way you were a decade ago, you are falling behind. In fact, if you are still doing it the way you were two years ago, you should definitely take the time to re-evaluate your approach and make sure it is still working for you.
Media is getting more complex and attention spans are growing shorter. The ability to get your message delivered to the audience you need to connect with is still essential, but the rules of the game are more dynamic than ever.
That’s it for this week.
More On Message in the next issue of the Utah Political Underground.
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