At the beginning of this information I do want to state this misnomer. President Obama is just a lightning rod. Many people love him and many people hate him, but even his biggest detractors need to admit that his social media strategy was a classic. Marketers should study this campaign because it is just a tutorial how modern products should be branded. I hope that the reader will give attention to the marketing and not the politics.
Barack Obama is just a classic case in what sort of brand could be created in a New Media Age. To win the American presidency a candidate will need to have a great deal of money and a great deal of name recognition—a brand. If a candidate does not need a brandname, if voters don’t know who you are, you are not likely to be elected. If a marketer cannot distinguish their product on the market place, that product won’t be bought. This is why modern marketers should study the Obama campaign. Ahead of the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama had no money and was unknown.
In comparison, Hillary Clinton was a well-known senator from a large state. During 2006-2007, it was a foregone conclusion that Hilary would win the Democratic nomination She and her husband had created a vast political network to draw from, and she a lot of money—she had a strong brand. Barack had no brand; even yet in his own household. When Barack broached a possible candidacy to Michelle, her response was, “This is the craziest thing you ever thought to me. Nobody is going to beat Hilary this year…Get over it, kid” ;.Barack and his team did have familiarity with social media and just how to use it in a campaign. This knowledge was his biggest asset.
The campaign of 2008 is analogous to the present day market place. In times past, it was very difficult, and too costly to make a new product and brand it. This is why social media is this kind of important element in modern marketing. A cultural media campaign allows a new product to be created and branded on the market place quickly, at hardly any cost. The modern market place is best explained by author Shiv Singh. There is a huge change on the market place. No more are consumers enthusiastic about engaging with large impersonal brands. Consumers don’t trust brands any longer—they trust their friends. In a recent survey conducted by The Economist half the respondents stated which they don’t trust big business. They trust the recommendations of the friends. Leveraging the recommendations of friends is how you can create brands. This is the reason why the use of social media is really critical to branding. Through social media, friends meet, conversations happen, and brands are created.
Which means that in case a product is going to be selected, the brand must turn into a “friend” to its consumer. This is exactly what the Obama Campaign did and just how he did this would be studied by marketers because it is just a case study in how to generate modern brands using social media. By combining social media that creates micro-targeting, force multipliers are produced which are needed to generate world-class brands.
The knowledge of the present day market place allowed Barack and his team to quickly produce a strong brand and overcome the Clinton campaign. At this time, I wish to clean up one that I produced in a prior article. Recently, I wrote a write-up entitled, “The Perfect Storm: Why Companies Should Adopt Social Media Marketing as the Center of Their Marketing” ;.best reseller panel In this information, I identified David Plouffe, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager as an authentic person in the Facebook management team. This is an error. The Obama staff member that I was considering was Chris Hughes, who served as the Obama Campaign Director of Online Organizing. Mr. Hughes had a great influence on the campaign social media strategy.
The Obama campaign wasn’t the initial campaign to utilize social media. They were the first to ever co-ordinate social media with an entire campaign. They were the first to ever organize the use of social media. For social media to work, it must be organized. John McCain and Howard Dean used the medium before Obama, but Obama and his staff surely could integrate and organize social media into every area of the campaign in a smooth way. Because of this Barak surely could create “conversations” that engaged. He created enthusiasm, however the enthusiasm his sight created was smart enthusiasm. He used social media sights in ways that targeted supporters and voters. This targeting allowed him to comprehend the important metrics he needed to understand in order to win his campaign. He surely could target and give attention to his true supporters.
The potency of Obama’s social media branding approach is that it was constructed to produce and develop “friendships” ;.This is very important to marketers to realize. Whenever you meet someone there’s a veil between you and that person. As you get to know each other better, the veil comes down. As your relationship develops, trust develops, and deeper conversations begin. These conversations bring about deeper relationships on an individual level. On a marketing level, these relationships become strong brands.
The Obama campaign knew that it had to engage people, but that engagement needed to be based on trust. The Obama engaged people in what it called “the ladder” ;.You engage one step at the same time, build the partnership deeper, and each step is just a higher level of commitment—a ladder. The steps of the ladder are based on the level of comfort of the patient in terms of the campaign. A marketer would call these steps creating touch points.
The very first touch point could be Personal. This is the point where a marketer and customer first come right into contact and “friend” each other on a platform like Facebook. In the Obama case, it was as of this stage when folks are learning one another. An individual signs ups for messages and emails. Another touch point is Social. It’s this touch point that people start making posts or comments to a friend’s profile about your product. At this touch point, a pal explains for their friend why an item is a good thing. In the Obama campaign, these profiles integrated using their web site. At the Website, a supporter may create an account. In the marketing area, an organization would integrate with a Facebook or Twitter. At this time, a person may feel comfortable enough with a brandname to become listed on a “group” or create a “group” ;.
In the Obama campaign, the following stage would be to become an Advocate. To drive interest, pictures may be posted, blogs written, or even a video may be created and posted to You Tube, for instance. There are analogies in the advocate stage for a marketer trying to converse about the item with a “friend” (a customer) and vice versa. It’s in the advocate stage that a supporter may have now feel committed enough to Obama to host an event, ask friends to donate money, or to join up to vote. In the Advocate stage, in a marketing situation, an individual might keep in touch with a pal and recommend an item, developing a brand.
Another stage is the Empowering stage. This stage is for serious supporters of Obama. Here a supporter gets heavily involved. The campaign tracked volunteers and could target its most reliable supporters.
These committed people could create social and fundraising groups on MyBO Web site. The Obama campaign could now organize their very own networks of supporters that gave supporters access to the Obama database, where they could pull cell phone numbers for doing phone banking from their living rooms. In reading this information, a marketer has to produce an example with what the Obama campaign did from what each marketer can perform with their very own brand to increase engagement using their customers. Perhaps some organizations could offer discounts for their customers should they introduce their friends to the marketers and solidify the brand. Here a marketer could be flexible in their very own situation to increase their brand.
Exactly why social media platforms are so popular is that friends will have the methods to share video, blogs, pictures, and posts using their friends. This is a god-send for marketers as they fight to generate and expand their brand. Ford Motor Company just did this in a fruitful campaign to introduce their new car, the Fiesta. Ford called this the Fiesta Project. In the exact same way that Ford extended brand awareness for the Fiesta, the Obama campaign provided source material for user-generated content. Here’s where scale makes play. Exactly why Ford’s and Obama’s campaign was so effective was since they both had the scale for “friends” to “converse” to generate the brand. This is why the planning stage is really important in developing a brand. As Napolean said, “Every army has an idea before the first shot is fired” ;.An advertising campaign is chaotic. Things happen. A marketer must be flexible. The main reason Ford’s and Obama ‘s social media campaign was so successful was because there clearly was planning and enough scale was designed to engage “friends” ;.
In the case of the Obama campaign, its web page, MyBO contained videos, speeches, photos and how-to guides that gave people the raw materials they needed to generate their very own compelling content in support of Obama. In return, supporters created more than 400,000 pro-Obama videos and posted them to YouTube. In addition they wrote more than 400,000 blog posts on the MyBO Web site. A modern marketer has to engage their customers to generate compelling content for the company that creates brand awareness. This is why social media is very important in creating modern brands. An organization is going to have difficulty in achieving this, left for their own devices and more to the point, finances. In the case of Ford, Ford didn’t spend hardly any money on the Fiesta launch. Fiesta had a great presence on social media sights, however the presence was produced by private individuals. Once the Fiesta was launched, 38% of the goal market was aware of the car.