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.
