Have you ever wondered which words work better when trying to communicate a Progressive idea (or value)?
I wish I had the equipment to do dial testing (as we see during Presidential debates on CNN & msnbc) but I don't. Then I could record audio of Progressive ideas and see which parts people like and what they don't. Then over time they could be fine tuned to communicate our values to the general public. There would be no more guessing or wondering, it would be a science and we would begin to win more and more.
Late last night a light bulb went off in my head. Here is what I came up with...
A few months ago I discovered what is called A/B testing. It is a method to make a web page and then add a slight (second) variation. The variation could be the title, the call to action, the buy now button. It is used for online lead generation and e-commerce. So when someone goes to a site they see one page and another person sees the other page. Then you can see the data of which page (generally referred to as a variation) had better results. An example of this is for a Progressive broadband phone company I am working on. You can see the landing page at http://join.talkforgood.com
My thought was this. Unbounce.com offers this service for free (up to 200 impressions). Why not create two short persuasive articles on the same subject. Post one to one of the page variations and the second article to the other. At the bottom have a short poll. Perhaps "Do you agree with the above statement?" and "If yes, how strongly do you agree?"
I feel that this could be important in helping to develop the best language for Progressives to use.
As a side note. If anyone knows of or wants to make an online dial test, that would be amazing! The user would create a simple account and then listen to an audio or video clip. They could use their UP and DOWN arrow keys to indicate if they like or do not like it. This could be great for Progressive candidates running for office to test out their messaging. It could also be key to helping develop the best Progressive language. Perhaps most important of all would be to help Progressive talk radio hosts fine tune their messaging, to see what works best.