Talk directly to 'chattering clans and tribes'....

Brands are dead long live the Internet.....

Both Barack Obama and John Mc Cain have given up on their brands - Democrat and Republican respectively - as they endeavour to talk directly to the digital age clans and tribes. The clans want change. They want an end to Bush. They want an end to the mindless handouts from Washington DC and the meaningless political games politicians play on Capital Hill. Obama and Mc Cain know this and they are doing precisely what your business should be doing - they are going directly to their customers with their messages of change.

I coined the term Chattering Clusters. On closer inspection I noted that these clusters were either clans or tribes.

The clans are early adopters - you would think that means they are young (generation y or x) and they are in large part. The emerging truth of the matter though is this is not an age or generational issue it is an access and connection issue. If you have broadband access and a reliable connection to web social networks you can be a clan member at any age. The change you are looking for if you are a retiree maybe different to those you seek as a teen nonetheless you both want change and you both are advocates for a point of view. Blogs tell the story as their creators, in all age groups, pound out their messages of change.

The significant feature of a clan is it can form and dissipate quickly. The tribes are slower to form and more long lived. They are clusters that have a clear and present purpose. They are working hard to achieve an outcome with the content of their blogs or the formation of a social network. Within these tribes there are rules, taboos, protocols, etc that do not exist within clans. This makes the tribe a more stable entity as a social networking cluster. However, a common side effect of their stability, focus, and purpose-driven nature is that their chatter is repetitive and stale. Tribal conversations, on the web, are often a digital version of 'group think' what we might refer to here as 'cluster think'. Cluster think makes the tribes much more coherent and manageable than clans.

Obama and Mc Cain will spend the next ten weeks or so before election day talking directly to their clans and tribes. Their aim is to have those clans and tribes work for them as viral marketing agents to convey the most meaningful parts of an Obama, or a Mc Cain, election platform to their peers.

Obama will do this job better because he has set up a web-based social network of clans and tribes the like no one has seen before. He has harnessed the power of the internet to motivate a range of disgruntled voters who are forming into political clans and tribes to support his candidacy. Because Obama has organised the 'Chattering Cluster' to hear his conversation above and beyond that being presented by Mc Cain he will win the upcoming election for the White House.

What Obama will do with and for his new digital electorate as their President is hard to know but if he continues to talk directly to them then he will get himself re-elected in four years time.