Live Blog: Constituent Relationship Management | Digital Political Strategy Course, November 2

This is a live blog of notes from my Digital Political Strategy course - largely for my own notes, but also for anybody interested - from November 2.  Today's topic focuses on CRM - constituent relationship management, as well as customer relationship management.

As with all live blogs, I am paraphrasing and these notes should be taken in that context.

5:32 - Karmaloop and Threadless have reached a point where the metric of their success is not revenue, it is connectivity.

5:37 - SalesForce is the leading software platform to do customer relations.  They're making a big play in the non-profit and political space in the last couple of years.  You have your list of customers, audience - all of the people you have relationships with.  And for each of them, you have records of what interactions you've had with them - so when you've called that person, the person on the phone should be able to pull up your record and see the entire history of your interaction with the organization or company.  Then the conversation is a conversation between people that know each other on some fundamental level.

5:41 - Something on the order of 300 million emails are sent to Congress every year.  What shows up in the office is 120-200 million emails a year in each office.  It is something like 5,000 per day per office on the House side - but its a lot.
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When I submit a comment on a regulation as its being considered, the regulatory agency must by law consider my comment.  That doesn't mean they have to do what I asked, but they have to be able to document the fact that they read it, they considered it, and why they accepted or rejected it.  On the Congressional side, there isn't a whole lot in the Constitution that says that offices must read [our messages].

The concern on the regulatory side to ensure that they never miss an email is huge.  All of a sudden the regulatory side was faced with a large deluge of emails - often form emails - that they had to legally consider.  When you have thousands of of emails that are coming in as form emails, and some 30-40 people are modifying parts of that email, the regulatory agency is legally obligated to catch those 30-40 emails.

5:44 - The e-Rulemaking Project is working with a National Science Foundation grant with a group of scholars to start doing focus groups and research to try and develop what was necessary to process all of these incoming e-Rulemaking comments.  So [they] built a system that the email comes in - and it reads all of the emails and groups them into those that are identical, those that are similar and have modest changes, and those that are unique.  It allows you to sort through them spreadsheet wise, in an online interface.
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This system would be fantastic for Congress to sort their emails coming through.

5:47 - Congress.org - which is the public site that you can go to to contact Congress - is powered by Capwiz.  Capwiz is a software that allows you from the user-side to put in your zip code to send an email or print a letter to send to your member of Congress.  If you send an email, the interface is set up so that it interfaces correctly with the form requirement on your Congressman's website.

5:50 - Aside from how hard it is to monitor [social media], you don't know where the person posting it comes from.

5:53 - The culture on Capitol Hill is to discourage pen pals.  Constituents that write you all the time - they try and discourage that.  In business, those are the people you cultivate.  Those are your bread and butter people.  Those are the people that are going to go out and tell people to buy your product.

5:55 - We live in a world now where any one of the people you piss off could organize a huge counter campaign in the District or the State of the member.

5:57 - One of my favorite points that Paul Greenberg often says is that Congress has long been under the impression that we need to bring in the private sector and companies because they're better at using this technology than the government.  The truth of the matter is that the private sector companies and the public sector government are both trailing the audience in terms of the technologies and what it is used for.  Both of them are playing catch up with their customers and their constituents.

5:58 - The audience is more sophisticated at using communications technology than the company or political figure, and that's a very different reality.

6:00 - Social CRM is about the relationships you have with your customers, with your constituents, which is the thing you're trying to manage.  When it first came out CRM was all about the technology.  Now its back to being about the relations.

6:03 - YouTube is way to take that product, that exchange, that interaction and take it out to the entire world.

Note: This whole CRM discussion reminds me VERY much of my experiences dealing with Dell via Twitter.  Read here and here.

6:07 - Every single Congressional office is like a business in its own right.  Each one must come in and spend their budget to build their office from scratch.  When Obama came into the White House, the entire White House was set up with computers that were so old that they couldn't run social media.

6:09 - They typically say that a freshman member of Congress takes office in early January and is unable to process email until August.

6:12 - The Defense Department still has four branches of the military that has computers that can't talk to each other.

6:22 - In the political space, with cycles of two, four, six years, you don't see the lag and the damage the lag is causing you until it is really bad.

6:30 - When it comes to a social network strategy when we have to rely on our audience to put things in their own words, the deeper the relationship you have with your audience, the more they understand the issue, why the issue is important to them as well as to you, the more they realize that you have shared goals, and the more you can rely on them to use words that are equally reflective of your message - they're authentic, from the heart expression of their own desires.

6:56 - Even after they figure out what's allowable and what's not under the rules as they're written, there is a further debate over whether they need to update them. [Related to rules governing messages put out and received by members of Congress and government officials]