Every other Friday, starting today, I will be blogging for the Centre for Policy Studies, and for my first post I decided to tackle the incredibly sexy topic of online reputation management (yup, I really am that cool). Here’s an extract:
"We’d all like to think the only thing that mattered in politics was policy and ideas. Of course at heart that’s very much what politics is about. But we’d be kidding ourselves if, even for a second, we discounted the importance of reputation in the battle of ideas.
The reality is that policies and ideas, very much like a new car or chocolate bar, rely on the ability of individuals to sell them. And those individuals in turn rely on their reputations to enable the sell. At the end of the day if the consumer doesn’t like the salesman they aren’t going to buy anything.
And therein lies the challenge for the modern politician – the individuals who ultimately have to sell policy to the electorate – maintaining a reputation in the modern world; a world where Youtube, Wikipedia, and Google are king…"
You can read the rest here.
April 26th, 2008 at 11:29 am
No thanks Shane. I was verging on having a narcoleptic fit by the end of the third paragraph. Your argument:’if i don’t like you, i wont buy from you’ could have holes blown in it than the male loos in Libdem HQ. What about: i)Rupert Murdoch & Sun readers; ii) Tony Bliar’s 2005 election victory; iii) Simon Cowell & pop idol/& other pap. Plus the fact that most people who vote think that most politicians are self-serving liars…
April 27th, 2008 at 8:39 pm
Marketing men, and women, seem incapable of understanding that few other than addicts with addled brains buy products they know to be crap, no matter how ‘fanciable’ the salesman, or woman, is.
People are sick of politics, and they’ve stopped buying what are effectively generic products in drab corporate packages. Flog it as hard as they can, they should never forget that they are flogging a long dead horse.