Lots of people are talking about the collapse of the Dean campaign – and a collapse it certainly has been. While the race to the nomination isn’t nearly done, there’s no other word for what happened to him. I wanted to toss in my $0.02 by suggesting a few things to consider.<\/p>\n
First, people have talked about the ‘echo chamber’ effect of the online tools the campaign used; I think it’s not so much the fault of the tools as a misinterpretation of reality on the part of those who used them.<\/p>\n
Here’s the model:If there is 1.5% of the market that’s predisposed to buy what I’m selling, and I have good tools to get to that 1.5% – because they already read the media that I advertise in, or already use the tools that I intend to reach them through – I can go from 0 – 1.25% of the market pretty damn fast. The mistake, of course, is in assuming that I can continue that trend in any kind of a linear fashion.<\/p>\n
The busted dot-coms typically made the same mistake; they went from 0 – 10,000 customers in six months, so obviously in 36 months, they’d have 60,000 – or even more as they built momentum! Not quite so obvious. I call that ‘the miracle of compound interest. If I model the future and assume a growth rate of W<\/i>%\/year on a base of X<\/i>, relative to a growth in costs of Y<\/i>% on a base of Z<\/i>, well it’s pretty clear that I ought to be ordering my G-IV<\/a> in about 2009. <\/p>\n Dean got a huge lift because he tied into an existing base of people who share certain political and social characteristics, and could build his support in that group amazingly fast using new peer-to-peer techniques enabled by web technology.<\/p>\n