Barack's Social Media Pulpit: models for social media spreading

[Ewan McIntosh]

I'm only about six months late with this entry, but the contents of Edelman's analysis (pdf or slideshare presentation of highlights) of Barack Obama's campaign through social media eyes is coming in handy with one of my projects at the moment. It states in a few pages some of the tactics and strategy that led to Obama blowing the competition out of the water.

Social majority issues

There were a few things that jumped out at me. There was conscious use of known and well-understood issues as a means of crowdbuilding, with crowdsourcing of opinion coming afterwards around more complex issues - after trust had been gained through easier, less problematic issues understood by the "social majority" online.

It's not all about bottom-up

Far from being all about bottom-up or "about the conversation", Obama's team recognised the importance of the clear messaging that comes around through top-down communication and talking "at" influencers, all in order to make sure that the conversations and bottom-up activity that followed did so along lines that resembled the ones the team desired:

Time-limited interactions

Also, in a break from the 24/7 "we're always open" nature of the social web, Obama has made conversations and consultations about policy time-based: he offers only five days to make your views known. Taking a look at last night's deadline for applications to 4iP's current tranche of funding (the deadline past at midnight) you can see a clear example of the pareto principle in action: the last hour was a flurry of proposal activity:

Appeal to the lowest common denominator: generally email and text message

One of the frictions when dealing with the innovation the web offers is that we still want to appeal to the vast majority of folk on a lower common denominator. The Presidential hopeful's team made massive use of email - 13million people on the email list - and carefully monitored how those people used it. They created differentiated email pushes and looked to see which versions worked best before continuing with everyone else. There were 7000 variations made on over 13 billion emails during the campaign.

SEO ain't dirty

His use of Search Engine Optimisation tactics was deep rooted, and responsive to what naysayers were saying about his campaign. If the McCain supporter was criticising Obama policy in a blog post, then the Obama campaign would post positive reinforemcent and facts around the message in a blog post with a similar end to the URL, thus meaning both popped up in search results, side-by-side.

Push through Ads

In another tactic sometimes seen as futile or even 'dirty', the team aggressively bought Google Ads, knowing that most internet users can't tell the difference between a sponsored link and a naturally found one.

Content made the King... erm, the President

Finally, content was a crucial ingredient among the different platforms used by the campaign, including its 15 social networks. Having created a basic website as a point of reference, a hook to place at the bottom of newspaper articles and publicity material, the Obama team then went on to create fairly 'old'-new-media content: podcasts, games, widgets and hours of YouTube videos. The next stage was to start reaching out to the social media community, those who could embed that content and spread the word. It was only towards the end of this "crawl, walk, run, fly" approach that social networks were harnessed and mobile apps were produced - the things we remember most, arguably, from the campaign.

Sometimes I feel that new media ventures which make mention of analytics, SEO, Google Ads and Content Production can be talked down: it feels unsophisticated and "pushy", instead of just naturally good enough to find its way in the wild west of the web. Sure, Obama had some pretty tantalising messages in behind these tactics, but at the end of the day it was grunt work underneath the effervescence that led to the victory of the social media campaign.