Which Candidate is Talking About You?

It’s fascinating to watch.

As the presidential campaign comes down the homestretch, the candidates and their surrogates are making their pitches to the electorate. To watch the messaging and positioning of the candidates on TV, in print, and on the web from a marketing perspective is just fascinating to me.

As some of you probably know, I came up with the idea of adding an About You page to your website. It’s a page that talks about your prospects, not your company.

The most effective marketing messages are the ones that focus on the prospects and show how your product or service can improve their lives. Adding an About You page to a website forces companies to do that (on at least one page of their site) as opposed to the egotistical, company-focused marketing that seems to be the norm.

So as I was listening to Barack Obama’s acceptance speech the other week, you can imagine how this line got my attention:

“But I stand before you tonight because all across America something is stirring.  What the nay-sayers don’t understand is that this election has never been about me.  It’s been about you.“

And while John McCain didn’t utter the exact phrase “about you”, he did say this:

“I don’t work for a party. I don’t work for a special interest. I don’t work for myself. I work for you.”

In thinking about the two speeches, I started to wonder which one focused more on the voters (ie. About You) as opposed the candidates themselves. Luckily, there’s a handy tool to help me do just that.

Internet marketing optimization firm FutureNow also understands the importance of focusing on the prospect. To help companies figure out if their web copy focuses more on the company or the prospect, they put a handy little tool on their website called the “We We Calculator.” To use the calculator, simply enter the URL of a webpage and the calculator will look for certain words on that page to determine whether the copy focuses more on customers or the company.

I decided to use this tool to evaluate the text of both John McCain’s and Barack Obama’s acceptance speeches. I copied the text of each speech onto their own page on my website to strip away any advertising, commentary, comments, etc. that could impact the results. Then I entered the URL for each page into the We We Calculator.

Here are the results:

John McCain’s Customer (ie. Voter) Focus Rate: 12.14%
Barack Obama’s Customer (ie. Voter) Focus Rate: 19.29%

MCain’s Self Focus Rate: 87.86%
Obama’s Self Focus Rate: 80.71%

According to the calculator, McCain had 51 instances of voter-focused words and 369 instances of self-focused words in an acceptance speech that had a total word count of 3912.

Obama had 65 instance of voter-focused words and 272 instances of self-focused words in his acceptance speech which totaled 4610.

By focusing on the voters about twice as much as Senator McCain as well as focusing on himself much less, Senator Obama seems to get the About You concept more than Senator McCain (at least as far as acceptance speeches are concerned).

What does all this mean?

First, it’s probably no surprise that in evaluating the speeches of politicians, both spent the vast majority of the time talking about themselves (I’m not saying this is necessarily a bad thing in politics, just not surprising).

Second, I’d make no assumptions about the outcome of this presidential campaign based on the voter-focused vs. self-focused language in just one speech from each candidate.

However, I would make the assumption that if you applied this calculator to the pages of your website and got results similar to either candidate’s speech, your marketing needs some help. If your copy focuses on your customers less than 20% of the time and on yourself over 80% of the time, it’s time to get some new copy!

To see how your copy scores on the We We Calculator, put it to the test here.

And one last thing, please keep any comments focused on marketing – not the virtues of the candidate you support or the lack of virtues of the candidate you don’t!