Some Thoughts on Barack Obama and new media

Barack Obama scored many firsts in becoming the 44th president of the United States. Those milestones have been well covered in many outlets.

What I want to talk about is how Obama became the first social media president. And, the failings of the pollsters - with one exception - to understand just how big the president-elect's victory was going to be.

Of course, it wasn't Barack Obama and his people who first realized the power of the Internet and social media. That first belongs to 2004 Democratic candidate Howard Dean. It was Dean's campaign who first used the Net to get their message out. Ultimately Dean failed in his attempt to win the nomination, but he showed the way for a more savvy campaign.

Then in 2006, the junior senator from Illinois decided he wanted to be president. At the time, no one gave him a chance. After all, wasn't this Hillary Clinton's time? 

Very early on though, the Obama campaign realized they had to do things differently. In February, 2007, Robin Hamman noted in his blog cybersoc. com that Obama's campaign "has pulled all the stops to embrace social software. From the main index, visitors can join the site and create a profile which they can use to network, find or plan events, or write a blog. Obama's site calls their suite of social networking features 'My Barack Obama.'"

That was simply brilliant. Why? Because Obama was reaching people who have never before been touched by conventional campaigns. 

How do most conventional campaigns reach people? There are four ways:

• Mailings. Here in Wisconsin, I think more trees died for the 2008 campaign than any campaign ever. Everyday when I came home, my doorstep was covered with literature and my mailbox was stuffed. What happened to all of that slickly produced information - it got recycled without being read.
• Word-of-mouth. Joe Smith tells neighbor Jill Jones about candidate Paul Politician. Jones gets excited. The problem with that is the country is so polarized right now, with a few exceptions, no one is going to cross over to help someone of the other party.
• Advertising. Yeah, like anyone believe a political ad anymore - if they ever did.
• Telephone calls. That was the biggest failure of all. Forget robocalls, as annoying as they are. Look at a simple fact: According to IT Facts, in 2007 14 percent of Americans had only a cell phone. That means approximately 44 million Americans did not have a land line. The number is probably even higher now. No land line means no listing in a directory of any kind, so there is no way for campaigns or pollsters to reach those people.
  

That last bullet is especially important. Most of those 44 million people are under 30-years-old. They voted for Obama in huge numbers. But no pollster ever found them. I suspect this is  why the McCain people were saying right before the election that things appeared to be trending their way. They never saw the change  coming because they had no way to see them.

The same thing happened to a lot of polls. They just didn't talk to the people who were under 30 because they had no way to reach them. The one web site that got it right was fivethirtyeight.com. Smart people there. Of course, they also run the Baseball Prospectus, where being right really counts.

However, the Obama people knew where those under 30-year-olds spend their time. They are on the web using applications such as Twitter and Facebook. That's where Obama's campaign went looking for voters and that's where they found them.

Of course, Obama's people did not turn their backs on conventional media. They knew they need to do that too to also reach supporters. In other words, they had a two pronged attack.

What's the lesson for those involved in marketing and public relations? Well, just substitute a client's name for Barack Obama. You want to reach your client's potential customers - make sure you don't leave social media out.

What do you think? Let me know.

on convincing CMOs to use new media

It's a cliche, but social media is the tsunami of public relations' and marketing's future. The problem is a lot of CEOs and CMOs have their backs to the beach. They assume if they can't see, it isn't happening. 

Or, they know they are about to get really wet, but they just don't want to deal with it. For anyone in public relations or marketing, this presents a conundrum. At least if you are savvy. Let's face it, with fewer and fewer people either reading newspapers or watching television, the best to reach them is social media

So why won't people in positions of authority embrace social media? Well, I think a lot of its generational. The average CEO is probably in his or her 50s and CMOs are not much younger. These are men and women who went to college at the very dawn of the computer age - pre-internet. These are not people who grew up googling their favorite bad.

I am over 50. I can still remember trundling over to the computer lab at Bradley University with my stack of punch cards. Each card has a pattern of holes punched out. The computer would "read" each card and print out a very simple page. Today, the average five-year-old could do better.

And woe to the person whose cards were out of order. That bollocksed everything up. Or, one of the holes was not punched through cleanly (think hanging chad). There were hundreds, sometimes thousands, of cards that had to be sorted through to find the bad one. It was not fun.

And the idea of the Internet was something out of science fiction. So although most executives have been working with PCs and the Net for at least 20 years, it is not stamped into their DNA. In their early careers, when many of them were most open to new ideas, they were not exposed to any of this.

  Although they probably wouldn't admit it, many of them probably still view the whole thing with suspicion. They often don't really understand the potential.

According to the Feb. 6, 2008 issue of Knowledge@Wharton: while the Internet provides a way to closely track behavior by measuring ad clicks or other online behavior, the reluctance to embrace the Internet may be due to uncertainty over how well it can shape broader messages.

So what to do? Design a campaign using the traditional elements of press releases, media events, interviews etc. with social media elements such as Facebook and Twitter. 

This way of doing things has been named straddle, by George Howard, an assistant professor of management at Loyola University in New Orleans. In his blog, 9GiantSteps, Howard details how "marketing today is a straddle between the offline world and the online world. Only those who straddle right will survive. Err too far online, you fail. Too far offline, you fail." 

Howard notes there are infinite possibilities for straddling, yet few companies are taking advantage of it. For instance, why wouldn't a restaurant use Twitter to send out its daily specials to its customer list? Why aren't retailers using Twitter to feature sale items? Why aren't B-to-B companies using Twitter or Facebook to troubleshoot problems?

Consumer companies could buy ad space to feature their on-line links. They could encourage customers to join a social media site to take advantage of specials. B-to-B companies could send out emails to their customers touting their on-line presence. It's not that hard.

It all comes back to that reluctance on the part of senior management to embrace a technology they don't understand. That's where savvy marketers enter the picture. It is our job to show clients just how to do it.