Intelligence Marketing
Doctors Evil and Strangelove are no strangers to the War Room. The
image of key personal sitting around a huge table with a world map,
seems so Cold War.
I re-encountered the idea most recently during a thesis presentation by Matthias Schmidt at the Berlin School of Creative Leadership.
Matthias reviewed campaign strategies for Clinton and Obama and among
other things, he highlighted the use of the “War Room” as an effective
structure for managing a campaign. Almost 16 years ago, a documentary
by the same name, showed in part how such as room functioned to manage
the battle which is US Presidential campaigning.
No doubt the tactic and tools have been refined, most notably
because of the fragmentation introduced by the internet. Where “spin”
might have meant the ability to convince a core group of TV and news
reporters, now that group is greatly expanded by the social media landscape. Obama and Clinton can draw on an increasing array
of tools o understand what might be going on in “the cloud”. What are
people saying? What are their concerns? From Google Alerts to Daylife
news trends. From Nielsen Buzz Metrics to various polls and reputation
management tools.
Its getting easier to reach into the Cloud and see where the
conversations are happening, that you might care about. But then what?
These tools seem to make sense in the context of feeding a War Room.
But have the tools evolved to manage this growing deluge of inbound
traffic? I had the opportunity to see a demo recently which suggests
that help might be on the way. Companies such as Amplicio are working to help large geographically distributed groups organize this data into actionable analysis.
Drawing on tools developed for military applications, much like the
original War Rooms, these tools enable groups to easily sift through,
organize and share their observations. Perhaps more important, as
participants work, various reports and analysis are created on the fly
indicating everything from level of participation to emerging critical
issues.
As marketers face a dizzying array of channels and options for
tactical responses to their customer and competitors, perhaps military
approaches might point the way, once again.
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