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Small Talk Comes Up Big in Iowa

Fri, January 4th, 2008 by Michael Cornfield | 0 comments

Surely this has happened to you, too: you rent a DVD because friends have told you how funny it is, but you watch it in surprised silence, smiling now and then as an act of will, but mostly staying quiet and puzzled.  You stay with it until the end and then ask yourself, what did I miss?

The answer, of course, is the company of other people.  Laughter is contagious.  Your friends saw the film in a theater.  And that’s just a handy example of a phenomenon with many more manifestations: our susceptibility to the tacit influence of the people we are with.

Pollster Mark Mellman wrote recently about an experiment in which pairs of subjects watched the same “Saturday Night Live” sketch and reported their feelings moment by moment via instant response joysticks.  The control groups watched by themselves; the treatment groups could see the others.  The result was that the treatment groups’ ratings displayed less variation.  They took cues from what they saw and heard from the audience.

You may have guessed where I’m going with this.  Mellman surveyed likely Iowa caucus attendees in mid-December and found that whereas 38% trust information provided by TV ads, 69% trust comments by friends, colleagues, and relatives.  More than 80% of the Republicans talked about at least one candidate with others; the percentage topped 90% for the Democrats.  Mellman subtracted the percentage of people hearing unfavorable talk about a candidate from the percentage hearing favorable talk to arrive at a “net information flow” number.  The Republican with the highest number was Mike Huckabee (+46).  Mitt Romney finished a distant second, at +26.  On the Democratic side, the numbers were John Edwards (+47), Barack Obama (+41), and Hillary Clinton (+22).

There are multiple causes behind these peer-to-peer buzz valence figures.  Media strategy is one of them.  Mike Huckabee relied on social networks to attest to his character, encouraging the word to go forth from a huge list of people who saw the film “The Passion of the Christ.”  Mitt Romney, meanwhile, relied on huge purchases of television ads and direct mail.   John Edwards spent months in Iowa engaged in retail politicking; Barack Obama trained his Facebook/MySpace-staffed army in grassroots organizing; Hillary Clinton was the last to arrive on the Iowa scene and, like Romney, leaned on mass media and endorsements from officials.

The Iowa Caucuses are not like primaries or general elections.  We don’t know a lot about how interpersonal influence stacks up against mass media influence when lots of people are voting in private.  So I’m not making any predictions about the nominees.

However, the caucus setting, with its emphasis on frequent and observable conversation, does resemble the structure of a legislature.  That’s something to keep in mind for your next lobbying campaign.  If you can’t get into the room with decision-makers and staffers, you can at least devote more time and effort to generating conversations in the social media and places they frequent.  Conversations trump advertisements and news stories.  If you don’t believe me, consider how you decide which movies to see –and, more importantly, how you respond to them.

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