Yes I Did (Hear a Talk on the Obama Social Media Strategy)

Last Thursday evening I was fortunate enough to attend an excellent talk at Rotman School of Business in Toronto. The speaker was Rahaf Harfoush. Harfoush is a young Canadian who played a key role on the Obama ’08 Social Media Team. The speech was in support of her recently published book, “Yes We Did; An Inside Look at How Social Media Built the Obama Brand.” As a young marketer with an interest in social media, I found that the talk, as well as the book, provided a lot of insight into how companies can harness the power of social media to build their businesses.

The main message I took away from hearing Rahaf speak, and reading her book, was that the Obama Social Media team didn’t do anything thoughtlessly. Every step taken, from individual “tweets” on Twitter, to the videos chosen to be posted on their website, was designed to serve a purpose. The team sought to take ordinary Americans and turn them into fans of Barack Obama; to take fans of Obama and turn them into volunteers for the senator; and to take volunteers and turn them into volunteer leaders for the campaign. They executed this process of engagement, while at the same time using the ever growing base of supporters to raise large amounts of money. Needless to say, they were successful.

There are three key areas of the Obama campaign’s approach to social media that I think apply particularly well to business marketing. First is the need to recognize that online relationship building takes time, and requires a sustained effort to achieve goals. Secondly organizations must know how important it is to connect online participation with offline action. Lastly, the conversation needs to transition from occurring between organization and customer/volunteer to taking place between individual customers/volunteers.

The first point is that building an outstanding online network takes time, and work. You will not have a network of thousands of people after just a few weeks. Furthermore, having thousands of people as “friends” on Facebook or “followers” on Twitter does not in and of itself mean you have a valuable network. The key is building relationships. Just because someone is following you on Twitter does not mean you have a relationship with them. The Obama campaign did not simply set up accounts on the “right sites” and call it a day; they used these channels to constantly provided content that was of interest to their followers. They posted pictures of campaign events, videos from candid interview with Barack, information about local activities for Obama supporters, and released insider information to the supporters before they submitted it to the press. All of these initiatives were done with an overall goal in mind. They wanted to engage as many people as possible in the campaign.

The idea of goal setting in the world of social media is important. I spoke with Rahaf briefly after the talk and asked her what would be the first thing she would say to a business looking to develop a social media strategy. She said that the key thing is to set up goals and ensure that they can be measurable. Defining “social media goals” does create a bit of a challenge for organizations, but it is nothing that a little creativity can’t solve. It is not always easy to define things like “engagement” or “participation” in quantifiable ways. For this reason it is necessary to choose worthwhile metrics to evaluate the success of the initiative. How many people are replying to you on Twitter? How many individuals are sharing your content on Facebook? How many people are linking from social media sites to your website? From this point organizations can take a cue from the Obama team and use online tools such as Google Analytics to help them measure how well they are accomplishing their specific goals.

The second key idea that I took away from Harfoush’s talk and book was that online engagement needs to be coupled with offline action. The Obama team excelled in this area. The polished look of their sites, and the quality of the content they produced, helped bring people in. In order to take the next step though, they chose to encourage people to take action in a variety of ways. The team certainly realized that in order to make people feel more a part of an initiative it is best to get them to perform tasks. In particular, they did this using their in-house created social media site my.barackobama.com (This site was similar to Facebook, as supporters would join, have their own profile page, and use the site to find ways to connect with other Obama supporters). The individual profiles on this site had a feature where people would be rated on how strong of a supporter they were of Senator Obama. For instance, individuals would get 3 points for joining an online group or creating a blog post, whereas they would get 15 points for hosting an offline event or making a donation. On the basis of the points the individuals accumulated they would be given a rating out of ten, which would show how strong their support of the campaign was. The higher their level of support, the more privileges they would receive. For instance, people with a rating of ten might be able to listen in on a conference call from the senator in which he addressed his volunteers. The whole idea of this initiative was to give people an incentive to take action, and in particular to take action offline. People who take time out of their lives to go to a local event, or even host an event themselves are more likely to give money, and more likely to talk to their friends and family about the campaign and encourage them to be supporters. These principles can be applied to other organizations in any number of ways. Having people paint a picture, make a video, or sing a song about your organization, or encouraging people to use the company’s product (say pizza) at an event they are hosting, and giving them a prize or coupon if they send in a picture or video of the event or artwork. The main idea is to lead people to find ways to make your organization a bigger part of their lives and finding creative, easy ways to reward them for it.

The last point I took away from Harfoush’s account of the Obama social media strategy was that it is important to encourage supporters to engage with one another, rather than just engaging with you. The team encouraged people to make blog posts, host events, talk to friends on Facebook, knock on the doors of people in their neighbourhood to talk to them about the campaign, and do many more things to support Senator Obama. Other organizations have chosen to encourage peer-to-peer promotion, but the Obama team was particularly successful because they made it easy for people to take these steps. They had a calling function for people to use on their my.barackobama account that would give them a list of people to call, as well as a script to follow, so that they could spread the word from their home. Another interesting initiative was the IPhone application. This application made talking to people about the campaign very easy. Individuals could chose from a list of issues on the app, click on a button, and receive a short, concise bulleted summary of Obama’s position on the issue. The common theme with each of these steps was encouraging people to interact with their fellow citizens around the campaign message, and making it easy for them to do so. Some insight that an organization could take away from this is that if they are going to do a referral campaign over the internet, send the customer a template email that can be easily passed along to a friend. Another idea would be to encourage people to write a blog entry about their experience with the company, while providing them an incentive to do so, and show them examples of other people’s blogs that have been similarly constructed. The main idea is that people often need to be pushed a bit to become advocates for your brand, and you can find creative ways to do this.

Overall, I found that Rahaf’s speech and her book offered a number of examples of innovative applications of social media communication that were used by the Obama campaign. Though few companies have the monetary and human resources that the Obama campaign had, companies can certainly find inspiration in hearing what the campaign did. Therefore, I would strongly recommend people take a look at Miss. Harfoush’s book, “Yes We Did” (which is available on amazon.ca) or if possible listen to her speak in person.

When Ad Buys Don't Make Sense

On Easter Sunday evening I was driving in the car, while listening to sports radio. It was just about 8p.m. and a Sunday night baseball broadcast came on from Milwaukee. The announcer who began the Milawaukee Brewers' program was Bob Uecker, of "Major League" (the late 1980's baseball film) fame. Generally, I mentally tune out the introductory portion of any radio sports broadcast, because of the poor content that is offered at this time, but the presence of this prominent baseball personality caused my ears to perk up. Uecker began to set up the broadcast, and then went into presenting the organizations who were its sponsors. This somewhat cheesy form of advertising is very common in local sports radio coverage. Though it is a nuisance, the pain generally does not last very long, as there are usually just one or two companies that get mentioned. This occasion, however, was quite unusual, as 15 - 20 different sponsors were rhymed-off in succession.


In the past, perhaps I would not have thought too much about hearing a long stretch of advertisers referred to at the start of a baseball game. I have been studying Marketing for a number of months, though, and am now more critical of the use of advertising. The thought that crossed my mind was, "If you paid me 20 bucks to recite the names of half of the companies mentioned, I couldn't do it." So, if you couldn't pay someone to keep the names of these companies in their head for a matter of seconds, why would any company pay money in the hope that average listeners would remember the names of their business after the 3 hour sporting event had been completed. This thought made me start thinking. How many obviously useless marketing expenditures take place everyday, even at this time when companies are supposed to be watching their balance sheets?


No doubt, the baseball game sponsors paid relatively little money to have Mr. Ueker refer to their company. So, this is a cheap form of advertising. Furthermore, we are in a recession, so choosing cheap advertising is good, right? Well, as far as I am concerned, choosing to buy this ad space, no matter how little it costs, amounts to throwing money out the window. Just because something is cheap does not mean you should buy it. These companies would have been better off saving the money they spent on these ads, and either contributing it to other, more productive marketing ventures, or using it for some other company purpose. It's like when you go to Wal Mart and you see a whole bunch of DVD's on sale for five dollars, and you buy four of them, for a total of twenty dollars. You think to yourself, wow, I saved 5 dollars a piece (assuming full price is 10 dollars) on these DVD's. If a year down the road those DVD's are all still in their plastic wrap, you didn't save any money, you wasted twenty dollars. On the other hand, assume you had found two ten dollar (full price) DVD's that you were truly interested and purchased them. If a year down the road you had watched each DVD a few times, enjoying the entertainment you received, you would have got value for your twenty dollar purchase.


It is true that it is difficult for many companies to find cash in their budget to fund large advertising initiatives in this economic climate. At the same time, companies still need to reach their target consumers. Under these conditions, marketers shouldn't be hunting in the "bargain bin" for marketing ideas, as this will only make their situation worse: they will afterwards have less money to work with, and still need to communicate with their target market in a strong way. What they should do is be open to new ideas, and evaluate their potential marketing choices on the value it will offer to the company.

Is Twitter Simply a Passing Fad? It Doesn't Matter.

The question of whether or not Twitter will be a mainstay in the internet world is a difficult one to answer. I think, though, this is the wrong question to ask. No one can really predict the future, so we can't know today who will win the 2009 World Series, and we surely cannot predict what will be the most popular sites on the internet in 1, 2, 3 or 5 years time. Sure, there is good reason to believe Google will maintain its position atop the internet hierarchy, but that tells us little about a relative newcomer to the internet scene, like Twitter. If we abandon this idea of trying to predict the tweeting birdie's future, as an organization or website, and instead focus on the influence it has had on communication over the internet, our inquiry is sure to yield much more worthwhile results. We can then see how it has changed things. The way it has impacted how the internet is used is something that has great significance, regardless if the site is still around in a couple of years.


One thing that I think Twitter has contributed to is making the blogging culture of information sharing much more accessible to a greater portion of the general public. Actively searching for blogs is not an activity that a large percentage of the population is inclined to do. The process takes time, and most people are not willing to devote time to an activity unless they have confidence that it will bear fruit. Unfortunately, this sets up a chicken and egg problem: you are not going to be motivated to find new blogs unless you have the experience of reading engaging blogs, but you are not going to be reading engaging blogs unless you have put the effort to find these blogs. Twitter helps people get over the hump of "information-community" participation because of its simplicity. Individuals can follow the "mini-blogs" of individuals they find interesting, learn of the individuals that they find interesting, and before too long, with very little effort expended, a network of individual mini-blogs is developed. The two key elements here are how short the Twitter updates are, and the ease of access to all Twitter "mini-blogs" because of their central location at twitter.com.


The idea of making the "blogging culture" more accessible also functions from the other side of the things: Twitter makes it much easier for people to contribute information in a blog-like manner. No longer do people have to go through the process of spending minutes or hours creating an article on a conventional blog in order to participate in a open online conversation. Individuals can in seconds share a small piece of information that has been on their mind, or link to other pieces of information that are online.


So what? What is the overall significance of these developments? In principal, the main change is that no longer will blog-like information sharing be confined to the relatively small community of journalistic individuals. More people are becoming accustomed to sharing pieces of information with the general public that in the past they would have kept to themselves or shared with their off-line contacts. Sure, a considerable amount of what is going to be shared is useless information (see the excellent Twouble with Twitter video on YouTube for an excellent demonstration of this). However, many people are sharing interesting thoughts they have and even more so providing links to internet resources that they find engaging. Furthermore, if people want to develop a strong following of their own (as most people do) there is a strong incentive to post worthwhile information, in order keep people interested.


Regardless of whether Twitter itself stands the test of time, a large number of people have now become accustomed to sharing information with the general public online, because of this phenomenon. This certainly has augmented media use habits, and has changed the way people use the internet.

Confusing Times

To say that we are living in a time of uncertainty is, really, to add nothing new to any discussion that you are a part of. You can flip through the television network news broadcasts, or shuffle through any number of articles online, and find many people discussing the "uncertain" economic times that we are living in. In most cases, however, the analysts who make their commentary within these pieces, are reasonably "sure" about some things. "The economy is in shambles because of X, and Y is likely to happen," or "'So and so' must do Y in order to prevent X". These people all seem to have some ideas in their head of what might happen, and why it might happen.

The real uncertainty, as far as I can tell, lies in the minds of the general public, who rely on the economic experts in order to understand the present state of affairs. The analysis that I have encountered, in recent weeks, from mainstream news organizations, have covered the entire spectrum from, "we are going to re-live the Great Depression", to "get ready for the economic recovery that is only a matter of months away". Do you accept the "pessimistic" view, do you accept the "optimistic" view, or do you adopt a seemingly "balanced" view and suppose that we are somewhere between these two extremes?

In many circumstances, choosing an intermediate view between two extremes is prudent. Using an economic example, consider the financial prospects of an average, university educated, middle-class individual, in a normal economic climate. Assuming this person is average in every way for her demographic, hard working, and reasonably intelligent. Now should we suppose that this person is likely to wind up poor and destitute, ridiculously wealthy, or of moderate wealth. The natural response is to assume that the third choice is on target, and this seems reasonable. Given our knowledge of the significant characteristics of the individual, and the environment that she is living in, we feel confident in predicting the outcome. In the current economic setting, however, there is little reason to feel confident that any of the media experts know how to characterize the state we are presently in, and thus predict where things are going - at least it is very difficult to form a conclusion about which ones are possessive of this knowledge. So few of these people were able to characterize the economic state of things a year ago, and predict where things would go, so how do you put any confidence in their assessment of the current situation?

I just find the whole thing perplexing. The only conclusions I can draw from the information is that I have little confidence in any of the media economic analyst in particular. Conventional wisdom seems to say that things are likely to get better in a couple of years, so that is likely the hypothesis that most reasonable people will subscribe to. But, it is hard to hold that position with any degree of confidence.