Startups wanting to learn anything from Donald Trump should heed this: GO LOUD
If Donald Trump was a Startup, and frankly in terms of politics, he is. Then is there anything to learn from him?
Right now, every morning across America and Europe people are waking up to a new statement from Donald Trump. It’s on your Twitter feed, on your Facebook, it’s on the TV news and in the newspapers. It must be worth billions.
There is no escape.
So how does he get that kind of coverage? The easy, lazy answer is that he’s gone out and trolled like crazy. He’s identified liberals and now he’s just trolling away, fingers in his ears, until they can’t help yelling back on mass. But that isn’t all Trump is doing. Sure he’s aware that each of his statements will get noticed by liberal commentators and denounced but by then he'll be on to his next topic. He’s also positioning his messages perfectly: he is unscripted. He talks to fear (and right now there’s a lot of that about). He has positioned himself - to his supporters - as the only sane voice in a sea of apologists. As a new kind of presidential candidate.
Right now there are 925k tweets about Donald Trump… the hashtag #DonaldTrump is also closely followed by #DonaldTrumpRacist but also #DonaldTrump4President so he's splitting the audience. But then he owns the audience. In the long run his strategy may well fail or change but right now does anyone else know who the other candidates are? Or anything else that’s happening anywhere? Trump has hijacked the news agenda and you don’t have to like it but you can stand back and wonder.
The lessons from this are simple to my mind. If you have a message and want to get noticed. Do just that: target your audience. See how they talk. See what they are saying and go and do likewise and louder. Find out what your audience are worried about and talk to that. Take points of view to logical conclusions. Stretch ideas to their extremes. Go All In on everything. For a startup to go out and challenge every norm in its marketplace to drown out the competition you’ll have to do some research but when you switch to broadcast mode: GO LOUD.