Using social media to deliver strategic business goals: Obama’s example
As Social Media are constantly evolving, a new environment is emerging in which businesses can learn how to evolve and expand their communication and client network by engaging social communities and thus gain a strategic competitive advantage against their competitors.
It is very interesting to look at the example o Barack Obama’s election campaign and how the public engagement through social media has helped him, as many claim, to win the presidency.
Social media lessons from the Obama campaign:
- Start early
- Build to scale
- Innovate where necessary; do everything else incrementally better
- Make it easy to find, forward and act
- Pick where you want to play
- Channel online enthusiasm into specific targeted activities that further the campaign’s goals
- Integrate online advocacy into every element of the campaign
What Obama campaign understood well from the very beginning was that it needed to develop an online strategy which would allow them to get close to online prospective voters and give them the opportunity to express their opinion through social media sites, such as Facebook, YouTube and MySpace. That is why the Obama campaign put a lot of effort into understanding every type of prospective voter and target its actions based on the unique characteristics of each type.
The Obama campaign did not target every social media site that exists. Instead it targeted only the most significant and important social network platforms. By creating profiles in every single one of these networks the Obama campaign created the advantage of having quick and easy access to millions of prospective voters with the aim to direct them to the main website of the campaign.
But knowing where to go in order to attract prospective voters was not enough. Internet users should have the opportunity to have access to Barack Obama’s website and in general to any relevant content and information generated by his campaign crew through search engines. In order to achieve this, Obama campaign performed Search Engine Optimization by optimizing the content of its websites with popular search terms and keywords in order to achieve the highest position possible in search engine results for those terms. In addition they created online advertisement campaigns as well targeted on the same keywords in order to attract even more traffic to their sites of interest.
Finally, the Obama campaign used analytics in order to create statistical reports from the traffic generated on each social network and website it appeared. The use of analytics was proven valuable for assessing email variations, ad variations and newsletters and helped understand which content, headers, buttons, videos etc were the most successful and attracted more prospective voters. Thus it allowed them to continuously track and improve the effectiveness of every activity and every campaign and to improve conversion rates.
The main approach used during Barack Obama’s campaign was to “Crawl”, “Walk”, “Run” and then “Fly”. This depicts that a company in order engage to the social movement and attract prospective customers , must first show presence online by creating a website, then to enrich the website content to make it more presentable and attractive, then to engage into blogs, advertising or any other social networks and finally to proceed to have a more aggressive engagement with the online community.
If you are looking to promote your business in the social media network and create your own advertising campaign for attractive prospective customers do not hesitate to contact us or to request for a quote from WabbieWorks.
You can read the full “Social Pulpit” report here
Source: Guy Kawasaki, Baekdal.com