Five Steps To Turn Your Customers Into Political Advocates — And Win

TikTok's adventures on Capitol Hill reveal how to and how not to mobilize a user base into a political force.

TikTok, in its effort to stop Congress from enacting a forced divestiture, rallied its users to tell members of the House and Senate to leave their app alone. So many people reportedly called their representatives to lobby against the bill, a number of Congressional offices had to shut down their phone lines altogether. The flood of calls didn’t stop the House from overwhelmingly passing the ban, but the legislation has slowed in the Senate and while President Biden has said he would sign the bill, he has otherwise kept his distance. Both of those may be a reflection of the reaction caused by TikTok’s decision to enlist its users en masse as lobbyists. 

TikTok isn’t the first tech company to turn its customers into political advocates, and while I have found the method to sometimes be incredibly effective, especially in legislative and regulatory campaigns we ran for portfolio companies like Uber, FanDuel and Bird, it takes a very specific set of circumstances for the approach to work. And based on the overwhelming vote in the House, it didn’t work for TikTok. 

Here are some questions to answer before mobilizing your customers to become advocates.

1) Do customers really care about your product? When it came to Uber, our customers were evangelists for the service. Overnight, their worlds opened up. They no longer were stuck in a transportation desert or were plagued by drivers who didn’t want to accept certain trips.  In the case of FanDuel, our customers were so passionate about fantasy sports betting, they not only were willing to advocate digitally, they were also willing to protest in person, which changed the narrative of each fight significantly. While TikTok users are very passionate about the product, that couldn’t fully save TikTok in the House and that’s not really the case for most startups. Consider an on-demand housekeeping service. A product positioned as a luxury won’t translate into grassroots mobilization.

2) Do you have enough customers to move the needle? TikTok certainly does. But while their call to action didn’t stop the bill in the House, it clearly got people’s attention. A lot of it depends on whose support you need. State legislators, for example, usually don’t get that many calls or emails about any particular bill, so if four hundred constituents suddenly weigh in, that matters. Congressional offices get more feedback than that about a rudimentary post office renaming. Not every business model relies on scale to make money. And startups with a smaller scale will have a harder time pulling this off.

3) Do the elected officials being lobbied care about your customers? Because of gerrymandering, the only elections that typically matter are primaries. Primary turnout in most elections is 10-15%. So if your customers aren’t likely primary voters, elected officials may not really care what they think. This was always a challenge for Airbnb. By definition, the scale in their business comes from the guests, not the hosts. A guest may love Airbnb and may be happy to send an email to a state representative saying so. But if that guest isn’t a constituent? Doesn’t matter. Since people typically don’t stay in Airbnb’s in their own hometown, the vast majority of the customer base was rendered useless and their mobilization efforts largely didn’t work.  And in the case of TikTok, members of congress were getting inundated with calls from teens who aren’t yet old enough to vote. This surely took off some of the pressure.

4) Can you credibly threaten to turn your customers into a political force? In the case of FanDuel, our customers had largely not voted in primaries — but then they became a threat. As they propagated the outside game with calls and emails and texts and rallies, our lobbyists on the inside told elected officials, “Let’s be honest: our customers don’t know who you are. But they love this product. And if you take it away from them, we are going to make sure they know what you did and we’re going to make sure that every one of them is registered to vote and we’re going to turn every one of them out in your next primary.” It worked – our opponents backed down pretty much everywhere. 

5) Are you one of the good guys – or at least good enough? This has been a challenge for TikTok. Yes, their customers are passionate. But a social media app controlled by the Chinese government that spews propaganda directly into the hands of our kids? That’s hard to defend.  In the case of Bird, citydwellers wanted a more environmentally friendly way to get around town.  In the case of Uber, our customers were so excited about an alternative to the dysfunctional and discriminatory taxi system that they were more than willing to call, text and email their city council members, state senators, mayors and other local electeds to tell them to leave ridesharing alone.

Turning your customers into a political force can be incredibly powerful. So few real people participate in the legislative process that when they do, especially at scale, it gets attention. But you can’t ask them to fight for you more than once or twice. And you don’t want to make the ask at all if you’re not positioned to succeed. Trying and failing to mobilize your customers tells elected officials the exact opposite of what you want – that there’s nothing to fear. 

We’ll see what happens in the Senate. Hopefully, TikTok’s efforts will fall short and Washington will do the right thing by our country and by our kids. But at the very least, TikTok has put the idea of customer political mobilization back onto the map. For many startups and for even many established companies, it’s a strategy worth considering. Just make sure you do it right.