Let’s face it, the Obama Presidential campaign was one of the most successful social media marketing efforts in the history of the internet. I can count on my fingers the number of major US companies that understand new media the way the Obama campaign did.
(Incidentally, how long do you think it will take Firefox to put “Obama” in their spell-check dictionary?)
This is really not that surprising, given the involvement of people like Chris Hughes, one of the founding fathers of Facebook, as Obama’s online organizing coordinator. It also explains why Obama’s web site looks freakishly close to Facebook in design.
So what can we learn about social media marketing from the Obama campaign?
Be Authentic
Authenticity is a big, nebulous term. It’s hard to pin down and explain because it’s hard to pin down in real life, too.
For Obama, being authentic meant calling like he saw it whenever possible, instead of pandering to voter localities.
He understood that in today’s media culture, anything he said in Indiana would be compared to anything he said in Oregon, and he’d do better by just being honest about his policies and opinions than by trying to tailor them too much to the individual towns.
As a company, being authentic generally means being honest and personable. As Seth Godin pointed out, small is the new big.
Suggest social activity
If you donated to the Obama campaign, you would be taken to a confirmation screen after putting in your credit card information, and that screen would suggest that you send a pre-written e-mail a friend a link so that they could donate (you could edit the e-mail as you saw fit, of course).
This is smart for two reasons:
- It puts extra “friend” pressure to donate on any friend who gets that e-mail
- It motivated donors to send the e-mail by making it really easy
I don’t have the numbers, but I bet that was one of their most successful mechanisms.
Be wherever the user is
Where was the Obama campaign? Google Video? If you’re not on Google Video, too bad you can’t watch Obama videos?
No, of course not. They were everywhere.
Companies are obsessed with lock-in, because that’s how you maintain customers when your product sucks. Here’s the news flash: you need a better product, not more restrictive usage rules.
Be wherever the user is, because it’s cheap and it’s easy to be there, and you want more users.
Create an e-mail list
If you think e-mail is a dead end, you’re probably right in the long-term. But for now, e-mail has one thing that pretty much every other form of social web-based services don’t have: massive, unbelievably huge scale.
Everyone and their pet dog Rover has an e-mail address, and they know how to use it. Don’t pass up a gold mine - good copy writing and consistent e-mail contact can be extremely valuable.
Design matters
“Functionally beautiful” is a great thing to achieve. People tend to trust sites that look more professional, which means they’re more willing to put their credit card information into it, and it means that trust is easier to establish.
Like it or not, usability, prettiness, how long it takes to find the donate button, how easy the font is to read—these are all factors that affect how a person reacts to your product and your message. Pay attention to them.
You don’t create the best stuff
The user does. The best thing you can do is get out of the way and let your fans create the viral media that supports you.
Think about all the best viral media from the Obama campaign. The Obama Girl stuff. The Yes We Can video. These were not created by the Obama campaign as viral gambits (let’s make something and try to make it go viral!), they were created by the very enthusiastic supporters who make things viral in the first place.
Don’t plan on making the best stuff. Let your fans do that for you.
There are a lot of iPhone users
And they are more engaged than your average Joe Sixpack.
The Obama iPhone application was a huge hit because it was pretty, it was useful, and it was high-visibility.
Doing something for a high-visibility, highly engaged audience like the apple fanboys and new technology enthusiasts who own iphones is never a bad idea. Don’t underestimate the power of doing something nice for several million potential word-of-mouth allies, like making a free, killer iphone app.
Don’t try to own the brand
Just pick the symbols and let everyone else define it. One of the things that I heard a lot from McCain supporters in the last several months was how “shifty” Obama was, and how that made him hard to trust.
The fact of the matter is that he wasn’t all that shifty, he was just breaking the mold and letting his supporters define his brand instead of trying to push and control the message down the line. His policies were clearly stated on his web site, but his brand was open to interpretation, and he benefited greatly from it.
I also think it contributed to his authenticity. What, a feedback loop? Go figure.
Empower the user
One of my favorite quotes is this one:
“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”
What’s significant about it for is the hard-to-swallow idea that in a good social media campaign, the end-user is part of the process. If you choose to listen, there is a lot that your users can tell you about your product, about what can make it better, about what is already good.
But you have to empower them. Give them the tools to talk to you and to each other. Build a customer community on top of your existing web site. Hold real-life events. Include your customers in your process.
Ask for money
This seems like an odd note to end on. After all, a political campaign is essentially a donation machine for “public good”; a company is a commercial entity, and people don’t necessarily feel as kindly to it.
But the secret isn’t to ask for donations, the secret is to ask for money. So many new web services are trying really really hard to provide marginal value to users so that they can charge a third party (advertisers) to make money.
The going assumption is that consumers won’t spend money on the internet. That is completely and totally wrong. Just look around you; Blog Mastermind, Teaching Sells, Product Launch Formula, Amazon.com…it doesn’t take long to realize that consumers online are still people online, and what many struggling companies have completely failed to do is ask for money.
If your are providing value to people, they’ll pay for it. If not, then it’s time to improve your product. No more excuses.
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