Web 2.0 Expo: my.barackobama.com: The Secrets of Obama’s New Media Juggernaut
Session Description: Marketers and activists alike have taken notice of the strategies and tactics that helped put Barack Obama in the White House. Jascha will discuss the tools and techniques used by the presidential campaign’s record breaking online efforts. In addition to telling the inside story of the campaign’s online engagement efforts, he will also discuss how these strategies and tools can be applied to a variety of other sectors beyond politics.
This session took place Friday, April 3, 2009. The speaker:
- Jascha Franklin-Hodge, Blue State Digital
This was a great session and was packed to the gills with people, of course! The My.BarackObama.com site has been hailed as one of the chief reasons Obama won. It was great to hear the creator of this site speak.
Bullet Point Review!
- Blue State Digital – design, technology, strategy.
- Obama 2008 By The Numbers
- 1 billion emails to 13 million email addresses.
- Over 1 million SMS subscribers.
- 200,000 offline events planned via the website (non-official).
- 35,000 local volunteer groups.
- 14.5 million YouTube viewing hours (this is a conservative estimate; it doesn’t include embedded or UGC.). This would have cost $40-50 million had it been traditional, purchased air time.
- $770,000,000 raised (35% offline, 65% online).
- Professionals tapped into the grass roots efforts.
- How we did it?
- Drive Action
- No such thing as too much email, just too much unwanted emails.
- Match the action to the medium.
- Doesn’t work to just shoehorn your existing web experience to every medium.
- Set high expectations.
- Be Authentic
- No Press Releases and people don’t read newsletters.
- Personalize communications
- Example: personal note from Al Franken after donation.
- Go behind the scenes.
- Create Ownership
- Turn users into advocates.
- Traditional donation matching is one wealthy donor <-> existing + new donors.
- Grassroots donation matching is existing <-> new donors.
- It’s not about me + large organization; it’s about all of us together.
- Recognize your leaders and engage them.
- Invite people to participate.
- Create user content and share the best.
- Solicit ideas from people and use the ones that make sense.
- Connect people with each other.
- Be Relevant
- #1 Obama fundraiser: Sarah Palin.
- Within 24 hours after the end of her first speech, campaigned raised $11 million via email and some organic donations.
- Don’t just react, anticipate.
- Build a Strong, Open Brand
- Brand professionally
- Brand consistently (don’t forget your plane!).
- Empower people to do interesting things.
- They might paint their barn.
- Or illuminate their bike.
- Or create iconic artwork (Shepherd Ferry HOPE Poster).
- Measure Everything
- Emails, online advertising, engagement, fund raising, persuasions, election activities.
- Do at least A/B Testing, if not multivariate.
- Drive Action
Points brought up during the Q&A
Have you considered a grass roots tool kit for local organizations?
- As a business, Blue State Digital isn’t at the point where they can do that.
- 1 or 2 most unexpected lessons?
- How important it is not to underestimate people.
- Was there also traditional marketing to drive people to the website?
- Not really, but there were Google PPC ads.
- What one thing would you have fixed retrospectively?
- Start earlier and work on scalability. Build with a longer term vision in mind.
- If the other side level the tech playing field and catch up, will Democrats keep an advantage?
- Yes, Republican’s challenge isn’t the tech, it’s their culture.
- They need to recognize this cultural gap before they can keep up.
- Democrats will keep innovating to keep an advantage.
- Did you measure demographics?
- Yes, average age of website user was 37. Surprised by age diversity.
- Bounced ideas of his own mom to make sure they appealed to a broad audience.
Overall this was a great session to end the conference on.
Read MoreSocial Media Marketing Summit: James Lamberti
This should be interesting, as the topic is on the intersection of social media marketing and search. The speaker is:
- James Lamberti, Senior Vice President of Media and Technology, comScore.
Started with a comScore plug – that’s kind of a turn off for me personally. I’m the kind of person that is savvy enough to look you or your company up on Google if I didn’t know about you before and actually care to know more going forward. Seems like something a search guy would understand, right? I know that obviously people accept speaking engagements, in part, because it brings attention to their company, but to use it as a platform for a mini commercial is a faux paux – or at least should be – in the conference world.
I digress, overall it was informative if just a bit dry.
Bullet Point Review!
- In 1996, 2/3 of the world’s online population is in the US. Now it’s more spread out.
- Most commonly used internet categories include Search, Entertainment, and Retail.
- Social networking sites are exploding, so are multimedia sites such as YouTube.
- Community and Personals sites are seeing negative growth, likely a result of social networking sites replacing a large part of these sites’ functionality.
- America is slowest growing area given internet maturity, but there’s explosive growth internationally.
- 25.3% year-over-year increase in queries on search.
- Eyeballs -> Awareness, Consideration, Preference, Action, Loyalty -> Buy.
- Most consumers admit to being receptive to more leisurely products like music and entertainment being advertised on UGC sites than necessary items like financial services and utilities.
- MySpace monetization nearly 6x that of Facebook.
- Search is everywhere, not just on search engines but within the communities themselves, like YouTube, MySpace, Facebook.
- 2.5 billion queries within YouTube.
- 68% of web users never click on a display ad, and only 16% drive 80% of all clicks.
- Clickers are predominately younger with lower income.
- 90% of site visitation is view-through with no engagement.
- There are free tools lying all around the internet to help.
- 83% of the sales impact of Search is latent or offline.
- Brand advocates represent about 40% of online buyers.
- Advocates are very avid searchers – 104 queries vs. 72 for non-advocates per month.
- Hasn’t seen anyone really leverage search to create an advertising campaign or tie it to a social media strategy.
- Identify search query points-of-origin to determin optimal markets for print, TV, radio ads.
- Search intersects with EVERYTHING.
- Search is a logical and desired outcome.
- The value of search is almost always dramatically underestimated.
- A lot is being left on the table – too concerned with ROI metrics sometimes.
- Search is an under leveraged asset in the strategic and creative process.
Points brought up during the Q&A
- Engagement mapping trying to measure touch points, undervalued. Shave money off your TV campaign and make sure your search is solid. There’s no more an expression of human interest than someone actively looking for your brand.
- Ways to take this knowledge and make it actionable?
Last complaint, I swear! If you have a lot of interesting data points with numbers and facts, don’t skip through them in nanoseconds. There was a lot of interesting data presented, but no time to write it down. Jumping around slides is a bit awkward as well, but if you’re a data nut that wasn’t as concerned with writing things down as I was this was a valuable presentation to be sure. I enjoy sharing facts and percentages with others because they have more weight, but can’t share them when reviewed at 90 miles per hour.
Read MoreOnline Marketing Glossary: Web 2.0
Web 2.0:
- Also referred to as the Semantic Web. In this iteration, sites, links, media and databases are “smarter” and able to automatically convey more meaning than those of today.
Okay while I’m not going to argue with Alexandra’s definition here, I will say that it’s different from the explanation I’ve always been given about what “web 2.0” is. It’s my understanding that web 2.0 is all about social interaction and user generated content. Sites like YouTube and Yelp are great examples of content-rich sites that are reliant entirely on the users who submit that content.
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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine
