Lessons From the Campaign Trail

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From my weekly newsletter. Subscribe using the sign-up box to the right.

Businessweek’s Catherine Holahan writes this week about the big lead Barack Obama has built against John McCain in online visibility. While I’m not going to declare a preference for either candidate, I do think it’s worth noting the lessons marketers can learn from the Obama campaign’s success.

Political campaigns have long been about the 30-second television spot. Candidates staked their reputations and their success on a series of carefully crafted (and very expensive) image ads that ran in key markets. The high cost of this approach forced campaigns to bet everything on strategic media buys.

The Obama campaign has challenged this conventional wisdom. While the 30-second spot still has its place, it isn’t with the emerging population of young voters. When young people do watch TV, it’s rarely in prime time and they are usually fast-forwarding through the commercials. Perhaps one reason this group has become so politically disenfranchised in recent elections is that no one is reaching them on their terms.

The Obama campaign, however, has figured it out. Its innovation has been in understanding that mainstream media is no longer the bottleneck of communication. When candidates — or marketers — use all the media channels available, they can create significant impact without relying on traditional media or advertising at all.

The numbers cited by BusinessWeek are impressive. The Obama campaign decided at the outset to leverage every possible channel to reach its audience and to take every possible opportunity to drive home its message. The candidate is essentially broadcasting every waking minute. When Obama gives a speech, a staffer videotapes it and uploads it to YouTube. When the candidate is in the car, aides are delivering messages on Twitter. Between campaign stops, the candidate conducts chats on MySpace or distributes position papers on his own social network.

The cost of these activities is next to nothing and the young audience they reach has been almost completely ignored by other campaigns. Perhaps more importantly, the Obama strategy has centered on frequent repetition, which is a classic marketing best practice. Instead of waiting for the media gods to bestow attention upon the candidate, the candidate chooses to become the media.

What can marketers learn from this? For one thing, you are no longer a prisoner of the media. You can become the media. Secondly, if you choose a strategic combination of channels and then deliver messages consistently and frequently, you can get better results than by renting a half minute on TV once a week.

Finally, the Obama campaign has demonstrated the beauty of small markets. When you aggregate the candidate’s 43,000 Twitter followers, 60,000 YouTube subscribers, 1.1 million Facebook friends, 21,000 MySpace friends and 850,000 members of MyBarackObama.com, you’re quickly over 2 million followers, each of whom has volunteered for that status. If you can convince each one of those people to spread the word to three others, well, you do the math.

Four years ago, the Howard Dean campaign tried to leverage the Internet to run a grass-roots campaign and fell short. There were several reasons for that, but lack of tools was one of them. Today, the problem is how to choose from the bounty of tools that are available. The Obama campaign demonstrates that word-of-mouth campaigns can open a whole new world of possibilities.

Daily Reading 06/30/2008

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  • Telling statistic of our times

    Jeff Jarvis is writing a piece on George Carlin and so looked up the frequency with which Carlin’s famous seven words you can’t say on TV show up in Google. He finds a striking equivalency. You have to click to see.

    tags: daily_reading

  • Google Docs now appears to be an official Microsoft Office competitor

    Among an impressive list of recent enhancements is offline access. Google says you can now edit any word processing, spreadsheet or presentation document when disconnected from the Internet and then synch with your online account when you reconnect. At this point, what’s the difference between Docs and Office?

    tags: daily_reading

Daily Reading 06/29/2008

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  • Is Google Making Us Stupid?

    A lot of people have been buzzing about Nicholas Carr’s brief opinion piece in the Atlantic in which he argues that information overload is making us less able to think in any kind of depth. Are we becoming “pancake people?” I don’t agree, but his views are worth considering.

    tags: daily_reading

  • What it takes for an ad to go viral

    There’s no secret formula for “going viral,” but Tom Hespos draws some interesting conclusions about why some campaigns work.

    tags: daily_reading

    •  Humor in an ad needs to be comparable to that in other content you might find online. In other words, a funny commercial is still a commercial. If you’re hoping humor value will spur a significant viral effect, the content better be funny. It’s not just competing with other commercials
    • Someone high up at Apple understands the value exchange that occurs when a brand fan is among the first to find out about a new Apple product. 
    • This incentivizes the insider to tell everybody and their grandmother that they were among the first to see the new iPhone.

  • This Ad Stinks: Let Readers Vote

    Advertisers increasingly are paying to have website visitors render judgments on their ads in public for all to see.

    tags: daily_reading

Giving Up Control Unleashes Wisdom of Crowds

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From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.

At IBM, podcasts are now a popular form of internal communication. One IBM executive who used to hold an unwieldy weekly conference call with 500 people spread across the globe now podcasts the same information. Listenership has doubled. At a company in which 40% of the employees work primarily outside of an office, podcasting is revolutionizing internal communication.

It wasn’t always that way. Podcasting was introduced without fanfare at the computing giant, but it quickly achieved traction because employees were allowed to experiment and “play” with the new medium, according to George Faulkner, who is one of IBM’s most visible podcasters.  In fact, one of the first successful internal uses of podcasts arguably had no business value at all: it was an IBM “battle of the bands.”

But that experimentation led to experimentation which yielded practical business applications that have reduced internal communication costs and improved IBM’s outreach to investors and the public. This is one more example of how letting go of control can unleash the innovative energy within an organization.

Sabre Holdings learned this point an enterprise Web 2.0 platform that is changing the ways its employees communicate and creating a company knowledge base. The software is known internally as SabreTown and now is being packaged for sale as Cubeless. It’s social networking software that any company can use behind its firewall.

SabreTown was derived from a website called Bambora that Sabre constructed for consumers. Members define their areas of expertise and agree to answer questions from other members in those areas. The more exchanges that take place, the richer the member’s profile becomes and the more useful the travel database.

SabreTown has helped unlock untapped expertise within Sabre Holdings, according to Al Comeaux, senior vice president, corporate communications for Sabre. With Sabre’s rapid evolution into a globally distributed company (only 45% of employees are U.S.-based today, compared to 85% eight years ago), there was a need to break down barriers of location and time.

Getting employees to buy in to the community meant giving up control over how they used the tool. Sabre rolled out the application internally without restricting the topics employees could discuss. “The more we can get people talking, the more we can capture,” says Erik Johnson, general manager of Cubeless.

More than 200 groups have formed within SabreTown and personal blog spaces are available to everyone. Any information entered into SabreTown is processed by the relevance engine and built into employees’ personal profiles. Sabre is effectively creating a massive knowledge base in which employees willingly populate with their own information. And the company is building out SabreTown’s capabilities to make it into a full-blown social network.

A key element of success was giving up control. Sabre Holdings’ executives say that SabreTown would never have taken off internally if Sabre had tried to dictate how it could be used. By letting people play, innovation took over and business applications emerged. SabreTown is a hit within Sabre and it will pay big dividends as employees share expertise.

As I noted last week, large organizations and their managers struggle with giving up control, but that’s often precisely what they need to do to. Web 2.0 technologies have demonstrated that the wisdom of crowds is greater than the knowledge of any one manager. By giving up control, organizations can gain loyalty and respect. Which, paradoxically, enhances control.

Social Media Tools Don't Matter

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From my weekly newsletter. Subscribe using the sign-up box to the right.

Here’s a question I hear from marketers all the time: “We want to launch a corporate blog, but we don’t know how to go about it. Where should we start?”

My answer is that you should start a couple of steps back from where you are. Social media tools – whether they’re blogs, online communities, instructional videos or something else – don’t solve anything unless they address a specific business need. Don’t use social media for its own sake. Use it to accomplish an objective.

Unfortunately, the temptation is difficult to resist. Lots of businesses are experimenting with social media tools these days. It’s natural to think that they know something the rest of us don’t, but the reality is that most people are still kicking tires right now. There are some very successful companies like Apple Computer that are doing nothing with social media because they don’t have to. If the tools aren’t right for your culture or your business, don’t use them.

Whatever you do, don’t start the decision process with technology. The choice of a social media tool is no more relevant to the success of a campaign than is the choice of paint to the structural integrity of a house. Many tools are flexible enough to be used for multiple purposes and some strategic goals require you to leverage many tools in concert.

Stop and consider the problem or opportunity you’re trying to address. Here are a few possible business objectives, with the best tool options listed in parentheses.

  • Build customer community (blog, video, social network, private community, virtual world)
  • Counter negative publicity (blog, podcast, video, customer reviews)
  • Crisis management (blog, video, social network, virtual world)
  • Customer conversation (blog, social network, private community, virtual world)
  • Generate website traffic (blog, video, customer reviews)

Many more examples will be explored in my forthcoming book, Secrets of Social Media Marketing. It will be available this fall and you can pre-order it on Amazon right now. I also recommend reading Groundswell, the new book by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research. It has some excellent advice on how to take a disciplined approach to social media selection.

Note that blogs appear next to every bullet point listed above. That doesn’t mean blogs are a panacea. They are the easiest form of social media to implement, but far greater leverage may derive from more complex tools like customer communities. You should choose media based upon your budget, staff resources and commitment. It’s often best to start small and grow your social media footprint as you become more fluent with the tools. Blogs are a good starting point, but you may need stronger medicine after a while.

Keep in mind the importance of balancing between ease of use, simplicity of deployment and functionality. Many social media tools can be used for multiple purposes. You may be better off starting with a tool that you understand well rather than deploying a somewhat richer solution that carries a steep learning curve.

If you keep the tools secondary and work outward from the business goal, you’re far more likely to reap the rewards of your efforts.

Enterprise Social Networks Are Key to Corporate Knowledge Bases

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From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.

At the Central Intelligence Agency, Intellipedia is challenging long-held views about information propriety.  Intellipedia is an internal application of a wiki, which is one of the most popular enterprise social media tools.  The CIA is using the wiki to capture intelligence gathered from its global network of field agents and internal researchers.  It’s part of a broad effort by the notoriously secretive organization to break down silos of information and create an organizational knowledge base.

It’s also changing the culture of the agency.  In an address last week to the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, the CIA’s Sean Dennehy noted that the success of shared knowledge bases requires giving up control.  “We need to fight against locked down spaces,” he said. The comment drew murmurs of surprise and some applause from the audience, who couldn’t quite believe it came from a CIA executive.

If the CIA can learn to give up control, imagine what your company can do. Social media is all about sharing. It’s based on the principle that participants give a little to get a lot.  The more you contribute to the body of knowledge, the more everyone benefits.  This principle underlines the success of a wide range of collaborative Internet sites, ranging from del.icio.us to Wikipedia. If Web 2.0 has demonstrated anything, it is that most people are motivated to do the right thing.

Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer has made the same discovery. Its Pfizerpedia wiki has more than 10,000 articles as well as numerous how-to videos. A nascent podcasting program is now spreading information by voice, and employees are trading Web discoveries through a giant internal social bookmarking platform. Pfizer is learning the power of sharing.

That’s a difficult concept for some managers to internalize. Traditional organizational structures are based on the idea that employees can’t be trusted to do the right thing.  They need to be constantly monitored and corrected to avoid going off the rails.

Social media is demonstrating that the opposite is true. It turns out that when you remove hierarchy, the community usually takes responsibility for policing its members and insuring quality work. This is especially true within groups of professionals and it couldn’t happen at a better time.

Large organizations need to start capturing their organizational knowledge. There are compelling to do this. Some 64 million baby boomers will retire in the next three years. Over the next 15 years, the size of the workforce between the ages of 30 and 49 will shrink by 3.5 million and by 2015, there will be 16 million more workers over the age of 50 then there are today.

These workers will each take with them years of accumulated knowledge. While some of that knowledge will be obviated by business evolutions, the skills needed to design an assembly line or calculate a cash flow statement won’t change. This makes it more critical than ever for organizations to capture institutional knowledge before it fades away.

Social media tools are an ideal way to do this because people populate the database themselves. In the same way that Facebook or MySpace members continually add personal information to their profiles, business professionals can develop rich descriptions of their skills and experiences by reaching out and helping each other. In the past, enterprises had only rudimentary ways to capture this information. With the arrival of internal social networks, they can now store everything in an enterprise knowledge base.

Over the next couple of entries, I’ll look at how this is playing out in US organizations today and how you can get your users – and managers – on board.

Daily Reading 06/06/2008

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  • IDS says Web advertising to ‘defy’ economic crisis

    Internet advertising will grow about eight times as fast as advertising at large between 2008 and 2012, according to IDC, doubling revenue to over $51 billion. The slow economy will only accelerate the move of advertising dollars online, with video leading the growth. Video advertising expected to grow almost 50% annually through 2012, reaching $3.8 billion.

    tags: daily_reading, advertising, research