S60 Open to new features

Seth Godin wrote a quick blog post relating the 1% rule to the Iowa Caucuses. His point is that even when the stakes are high, voters, like consumers, don’t necessarily enjoy speaking out or making their voices heard. In other words, word of mouth is “hard” for customers. This thinking rang true, and it especially resonated with me after spending a week with my Finnish colleagues, many of whom like to remind me that Finns, and maybe Europeans in general, may not be as eager to participate in an S60 Ambassador program as Americans are.

But something else about Seth’s post also irked me — and I think it was the tone of inevitability. As in — the figure is 1%, and that’s an immutable law, so don’t try to change it. I got to thinking — is it possible that the growth of blogging platforms, feedback mechanisms, and social media tools in general is actually providing an impetus for *more* people to speak out in favor of the candidates, products, pastimes, and people they love? In other words, is it possible that the figure is 1% today, but that it was 0.6% 4 years ago, and maybe will be 1.4% in 2008?

Thinking along these lines, I dug out an article from the International Herald Tribune that I read on Saturday. Turns out that the turnout in the Iowa caucus, while still a tiny percentage of registered voters, was higher than it was in 2004. In fact, a record number of Democrats turned out: 239,000 in 2008 versus less than 125,000 in 2004. The Tribune attributes the high turnout to dissatisfaction with Bush’s policies. But Republican turnout also grew more than 20%, from 87,000 to 114,000.

The voting process in Iowa has not changed. But the campaigns certainly have. More people are blogging about candidates. More people are posting original videos about candidates. And the broadcast networks are giving more airtime to citizen bloggers — they even turned over two debates to YouTube. The optimist in me thinks that part of this increase in turnout stems from the fact that citizens and consumers, when given a platform on which to speak, are more apt to stand up and do just that.