Lessons from Obama's New Media Campaign

There will be books written about the brilliant use of social media in the Barack Obama campaign for the U.S. presidency. Richard Edelman, head of the eponymous public relations agency (and a competitor), pointed out recently: 

Consider this single statistic from the recently completed Obama for President Campaign. Three million donors made a total of 6.5 million donations on-line adding up to more than $500 million in funds raised. Of those donations, 6 million were in increments of $100 or less. His email list has 13 million addresses. A million people signed up for the text-messaging program. Two million profiles were created on MyBarackObama.com, his social network, plus 5 million supporters in other venues such as Facebook and MySpace.

I don't know if she has a book planned but Canadian Rahaf Harfoush, who was deeply involved in the social networking aspects of the campaign at new media HQ in Chicago, gave a captivating presentation last night at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management on lessons learned from the campaign from the inside.

Here are her six lessons:

1. Give new media a seat at the strategy table.
2. The new digital tools are useless without a blueprint. 
3. As with any communications campaign, social media campaigns require consistency in messaging.
4. Map out the digital landscape of your target audiences (find the conversations relevant to your strategy).
5. Include a call to offline action.
6. Be ready to give up control to your communities

None of the lessons are unique in and of themselves. Our digital team recommends them to our clients all the time . . . as do I. But the success of the social media dimension of the Obama battle may be the final proof needed to get senior executives and Canadian political campaigners out of their obtuse fog and increasingly strained and silly denial of the obvious about the power of a crowd-sourced innovation and influence . . . even in the exercise of democratic action. 

I took four additional lessons away from the presentation that aren't part of Ms Harfoush's list, but are central to her thesis: 

1. Social media strategies should be built on smoothing the progress of intimacy, connection and conversation among target audiences, consumers or voters;
2. A new media strategy slapped on to an old business or political strategy framework will fail (The Obama new media campaign's success was achieved in the context of an innovative political strategy, including a willingness to let online communities create their own offline actions and events);
3. There are no off-the-shelf social media solutions;
4. Find the digital sweet spot but prize agility. 

Comments

[Brendan]

Having read this, I wish (even more so now than previously) that I had seen this... But everything you state rings true, in particular the importance of the blueprint - a framework upon which all activities are integrated and executed with consistency, cohesion, discipline and with a mechanism to manage issues in place (at least that's my interpretation).

[David Jones]

Great distillation. I've heard far too many social media evangelists say that the tools were the reason for Obama's success, when in reality the "innovative political strategy" was the key.

The tools then become enablers of that strategy...and obviously worked well.

[Michael]

And the tools can't work properly without a grassroot culture. In the USA and RoC, it can work.

Here, in Quebec, where grassroot culture is really poor, it is sadly a different story. Maybe these tools can help to create this political culture with younger voters. I hope so!

[Boyd Neil]

Thanks for the comments Brendan, Michael and David . . . Michael and David, an interesting question: Which comes first, the grassroots political culture, the innovative politcal strategy or the social networking tools?

[Media Desk]

"The press is the only tocsin of a nation. When it is completely silenced... all means of a general effort are taken away." - Thomas Jefferson. It seems the Obama Administration is trying to silience the freedom of the press. It is using its own production facilities to flood every channel on the Internet with its own highly produced version of the news. Take a look at how Obama wrapped his speech with the Founding Fathers and the Constitution. http://pfx.me/eX