In the beginning of this article I wish to state this misnomer. President Obama is really a lightning rod. Some 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 as it is really a tutorial on how modern products must be branded. I hope that the reader will give attention to the marketing and not the politics.
Barack Obama is really a classic case in how a brand can be created in a New Media Age. To win the American presidency a candidate should have a lot of money and a lot of name recognition—a brand. If a candidate does not have a brandname, if voters do not know who you’re, you’re not likely to be elected. If a marketer cannot distinguish their product available in the market place, that product will not 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.
By contrast, Hillary Clinton was a well-known senator from a big state. During 2006-2007, it absolutely 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 solid brand. Barack had no brand; even in his own household. When Barack broached a possible candidacy to Michelle, her response was, “Here is the craziest thing you ever believed to me. Nobody is going to beat Hilary this year…Get over it, kid” ;.Barack and his team did have knowledge of social media and how to use it in a campaign. This knowledge was his biggest asset.
The campaign of 2008 is analogous to the current market place. In times past, it absolutely was quite difficult, and too costly to produce 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 available in the market place quickly, at hardly any cost. The present day market place is better explained by author Shiv Singh. There has been a change available in the market place. No further are consumers interested in engaging with large impersonal brands. Consumers do not 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 their friends. Leveraging the recommendations of friends is the way to create brands. That is the key reason why the use of social media is so critical to branding. Through social media, friends meet, conversations happen, and brands are created.
Which means if a product is going to be selected, the brand must develop into a “friend” to its consumer. This is what the Obama Campaign did and the way he did this would be studied by marketers as it is really a case study in how to generate modern brands using social media. By combining social media that creates micro-targeting, force multipliers are created which can be needed to generate world-class brands.
The information of the current market place allowed Barack and his team to quickly produce a strong brand and overcome the Clinton campaign. At this point, I wish to get rid of an error that I manufactured in a previous article. Recently, I wrote a write-up entitled, “The Perfect Storm: Why Companies Should Adopt Social Media Marketing as the Center of Their Marketing” ;.In this article, I identified David Plouffe, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager as an authentic member of the Facebook management team. This was an error. The Obama staff member that I was thinking of was Chris Hughes, who served as the Obama Campaign Director of Online Organizing. Mr. Hughes had a good influence on the campaign social media strategy.
The Obama campaign wasn’t the first campaign to make use of social media. They certainly were the first ever to co-ordinate social media having an entire campaign. They certainly were the first ever to organize the use of social media. For social media to work, it needs to 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 part of the campaign in a seamless way. Due to this Barak surely could create “conversations” that engaged. He created enthusiasm, nevertheless the enthusiasm his sight created was smart enthusiasm. cheap panel He used social media sights in ways that targeted supporters and voters. This targeting allowed him to comprehend the important metrics he needed to know to be able 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” ;.That 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 one another 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 an advertising level, these relationships become strong brands.
The Obama campaign knew that it had to engage people, but that engagement had to be predicated on trust. The Obama engaged people in what it called “the ladder” ;.You engage one step at the same time, build the relationship deeper, and each step is really a higher amount of commitment—a ladder. The steps of the ladder are on the basis of the level of comfort of the individual with regards to the campaign. A marketer would call these steps creating touch points.
The first touch point could be Personal. Here is the point of which a marketer and customer first come right into contact and “friend” one another on a platform like Facebook. In the Obama case, it absolutely was at this stage when individuals are getting to know one another. An individual signs ups for messages and emails. The following touch point is Social. It’s this touch point that individuals start making posts or comments to a friend’s profile about your product. At this touch point, a pal explains to their friend why a product is an excellent thing. In the Obama campaign, these profiles integrated using their web site. At the Website, an advocate may create an account. In the marketing area, an organization would integrate with a Facebook or Twitter. At this point, a customer may feel comfortable enough with a brandname to join a “group” or create a “group” ;.
In the Obama campaign, the next stage should be to become an Advocate. To operate a vehicle interest, pictures might be posted, blogs written, or a video might be created and posted to You Tube, for instance. There are analogies in the advocate stage for a marketer attempting to converse about the item with a “friend” (a customer) and vice versa. It’s in the advocate stage that the supporter could have now feel committed enough to Obama to host an event, ask friends to donate money, or to register to vote. In the Advocate stage, in an advertising situation, an individual might keep in touch with a pal and recommend a product, making a brand.
The following stage could be the Empowering stage. This stage is for serious supporters of Obama. Here an advocate 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 particular networks of supporters that gave supporters usage of the Obama database, from which they may pull telephone numbers for doing phone banking from their living rooms. In reading this article, a marketer has to produce an analogy in what the Obama campaign did from what each marketer can perform with their particular brand to increase engagement using their customers. Perhaps some organizations could offer discounts to their customers when they introduce their friends to the marketers and solidify the brand. Here a marketer can be flexible in their particular situation to increase their brand.
Exactly why social media platforms are very popular is that friends are in possession of the way 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 powerful campaign to introduce their new car, the Fiesta. Ford called this the Fiesta Project. In the same way that Ford extended brand awareness for the Fiesta, the Obama campaign provided source material for user-generated content. Listed here is where scale comes into play. Exactly why Ford’s and Obama’s campaign was so effective was because they both had the scale for “friends” to “converse” to generate the brand. This is why the planning stage is so important in making a brand. As Napolean said, “Every army has a plan until the first shot is fired” ;.An advertising campaign is chaotic. Things happen. A marketer needs to 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 created to engage “friends” ;.
In 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 particular compelling content in support of Obama. In exchange, supporters created significantly more than 400,000 pro-Obama videos and posted them to YouTube. Additionally they wrote significantly more than 400,000 blog posts on the MyBO Web site. A contemporary marketer has to engage their customers to generate compelling content for the business that creates brand awareness. This is why social media is essential in creating modern brands. A business is going to have difficulty in carrying this out, left to their own devices and moreover, finances. In case of Ford, Ford did not spend hardly any money on the Fiesta launch. Fiesta had a good presence on social media sights, nevertheless the presence was produced by private individuals. When the Fiesta was launched, 38% of the prospective market was aware of the car.