This year’s election could easily be summed up by two words: Joe the Plumber (ok, make that three). Joe’s small business story became not only a theme each candidate leveraged as part of their campaigns, its viral nature catapulted everyday citizen Joe (aka Samuel Wurzelbacher) to national stardom.
Joe the Plumber illustrates the word-of-mouth power of human interest stories, and how, planned or not, they can have a huge and typically unplanned impact on marketing and branding. This is a concept Alex Kazim, former president of eBay’s Skype division and co-founder and CEO of story-sharing site Tokoni, knows all about. Over a glass of Staatsweingut Weinsberg Sie & Er Troken (a Pinot Meunier from Germany – can you tell?) Alex and I discussed how future elections will increasingly tap the power of personal stories in a more programmatic and strategic way.
As a former eBay executive, Alex’s knows a thing or two about the concept of community. According to Alex, what is so compelling about the eBay value proposition is not so much that it enables you to buy and sell online, but to do so in the context of a connected community. eBay is literally the birthplace of the most inspiring personal anecdotes – like the one Alex tells about an eBay customer who purchased military memorabilia and ended up searching for the owner of some dog tags. He eventually found him in a nursing hom, and physically delivered the long lost tags (lost on the beaches of Normandy decades ago) to their rightful owner.
But what happens to these stories? Most of the time they float out into the ether, rarely being captured, sustained or built upon in any real way. With Tokoni, Alex has created a way for people to collect, share and extend the lifecycle of the personal anecdote – and use stories as a way to bridge viewpoints and philosophies. Case in point: Tokoni’s News and Politics channel doesn’t take on the usual negative, ranting tone of most politically-oriented forums or blogs. The story-telling format creates a a dialogue that leads to greater understanding and empathy. Tokoni already works with organizations like WomenCount.org to serve as the organization’s de facto storytelling platform. In four years we may just see one of the candidates do the same as a means to organize and super-charge the kinds of stories that win the hearts and minds of potential voters.
Check out the discussion here and visit Tokoni to post your own story.