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Campaign 2.0 Goes to Washington

Posted by Jane Barratt on November 12, 2008 at 05:26 PM PDT

Even though the topic is almost a week old, the brilliance of the campaign by Barack Obama serves as a great lesson for all marketers. Obama is the first presidential candidate to be marketed like a high end consumer brand. From the consistent use of brand imagery – his iconic rising sun logo – to the masterful application of social media techniques to drive fundraising and attract new voters, Obama’s campaign set the “gold standard” for all marketing campaigns seeking to launch a breakout star – whether it’s a candidate or a product or service.

The remarkably decisive victory speaks to the power of a cohesive, disciplined marketing strategy driven by cutting edge, yet consistent execution. I know that a lot has been said on this topic – in fact he’s already being dubbed the “marketer of the year,” so I’d like to zero in on a specific strength of his campaign and namely its use of online marketing and social media and what corporate marketers can learn from his success.

There are four online marketing techniques that Obama used brilliantly to score voters and raise a big chunk of his $100 million+ campaign war chest. These are techniques and strategies that you, too, can implement to score big victories of your own:

Strategic use of online advertising
Obama spent $8 million on online advertising through the end of October with $3.5 million of that spent on Google ads. Obama’s ads also appeared on Yahoo, Facebook and on news sites such as CNN.com, Politico and Gothamist. He also placed in-game ads. In short, Obama was ubiquitous on the Web. The lesson – leave no stone unturned. Yes it is a lot harder to execute a multi-touch online campaign – but when you’re going broad, and need to connect with customers that are moving away from traditional channels – you need to get creative!

Leverage other channels such as cell phones, text messaging
Obama’s campaign excelled at leveraging modern technology – cell phones, text messaging and email – to reach voters and turn them out at the polls. In fact, when Obama picked Joe Biden as his VP, he sent a special text message to thousands of people who registered on his web site so that they would be the “first to know” about his choice. This made millions of potential voters feel truly connected to Obama and his cause – ultimately resulting in millions of votes. I was pulled aside on Wednesday morning by a few different people who had received the midnight thank you email. To connect in such a personal way, with such a personal message that makes people want to talk about you, represents the ultimate success in marketing. And doing it through such low cost tools as email and texting is even more impressive.

Intelligent, targeted use of social media to attract key demographics
My.barackobama.com site was a huge boon for this campaign, attracting millions of registered users who wanted to learn more about the candidate and stay abreast of his campaign. This was one of the contributing factors to Obama’s massive online mindshare and formidable presence in the blogosphere. According to Trendrr – an online statistics mashup tool – Obama generated close to 500 million blog postings since the beginning of the conventions at the end of August. During that same time period, McCain only generated 150 million blog posts.

On social networks, Obama secured 844,927 MySpace friends compared to McCain’s 219,404. This use of social networking helped Obama attract the youth vote and the coveted 18-24 age demographic. The degree of involvement by the audience was astounding and although there wasn’t a huge amount of social media outreach, the lesson for marketers is that people are going to talk about you. It’s better than being ignored! So join the conversation! It will be interesting to see how actively volunteers are deployed into conversation mining and social media outreach in the next campaign. By then, more marketers should have bit the bullet and figured out how two-way conversations can work within, and for, their organizations.

Video and YouTube.com
Obama’s campaign released web videos at an aggressive pace. Some of these videos were simply traditional campaign ads but others served as public service announcements by giving basic information about how to register to vote. For example, comedian Chris Rock appeared in a video explaining the voting rules and process to first-time voters. Other videos armed supporters with facts to counter any attacks or misinformation disseminated by the McCain campaign. Obama’s Web videos dominated YouTube, with the Bruce Springsteen performance in Cleveland predictably capturing the interest of thousands of viewers. The success seen by YouTube is not a passing fad. Online video is going to grow in importance. They key question for marketers is, are your processes and people ready to be able to capitalize on this? Can you make a timely impact with online video, or are you applying old (i.e. TV standard) processes to this medium?

I hope that one day Obama’s campaign battle plan gets published – I am still in awe of everything that his team accomplished over the past few months. It was truly a great effort.

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