Give Up Control
’m on an airplane.
I hate airplanes. Have I told you that yet? If I haven’t, there you go. I hate airplanes.
I hear the stats about how flying is so much safer than driving. And I have a fear of heights, but it’s not the heights that gets me. What I hate is the lack of control. In a car I have control. Sure some one can hit me, but I still have a good bit of control. It’s my hands on the steering wheel and my foot on the gas pedal. That’s not the case in an airplane. I’m completely in someone else’s hands. My life is dependent upon a machine. God controls the weather that could force me to the ground.
All the while I can’t do anything but sit here and type on my computer.
So now it’s this idea of control that I want to talk about for a few seconds.
I’m flying to DC right now to attend CPAC where I’ll be speaking on a panel about web politics. Specifically, I’ll be talking about my web product Voter Fetch.
The biggest and really only complaint I hear from campaigns right now is that they don’t like the lack of control with a call from home product. In a phone bank they can manage the callers. That’s not the case with people phoning from home.
I also get this question a lot: how can I make my video go viral?
Listen folks, in today’s world, you need to let go of the reins a bit. Scratch that….let go of the reins a lot. You can’t be truly successful until you let a movement go viral. You have to let people carry your message for you. It’s been happening forever. There’s no difference in someone talking to their friend at a grocery store and phone banking from home. It’s just now you have the ability to actually target and message. If anything, you have more control by giving up control.
The same goes for video. You can’t make something go viral. You can produce something catchy and you can spread it around the web with social networks, but its viralness depends on the people. We didn’t force Senator DeMint’s Code Pink video to go viral, not that we could. We just came up with a creative idea, sent it to our email list, posted it to our social networks, and just sat back. Like that, you have to let go and pray that things just happen and that people start spreading it around. Concentrate on solid content and creativity, not control.
It’s easy for me to give this advice in politics, but I’ll be jumping out of my skin until the wheels hit the runway. I hate airplanes.