ObamaNation - Lessons from the Front Lines of Social Media

As promised, here is the presentation that Team 5 gave in our Strategic Marketing course on advances in marketing.

As I mentioned before, there was so much that could be covered. We felt like these 5 powerful concepts played a

major role in the success of the Obama campaign. We also believed that those items could be translated to most

businesses, which was the other key goal we had for the project.

After the presentation, as good set of questions and discussions ensued around how to apply this to other

businesses, where we think the next social media trends will emerge (start-ups emerging

from all the layoffs), would this work if it extended beyond 2yrs (most marketing campaigns don't go

that long), and how to create a spreadable message (keep it simple, inclusive and positive).

NOTE: Several people asked this was done to push a specific political agenda. The answer is no. Our team

is made up of Republicans, Democrats and Independents. We chose the Obama campaign because of its

visibility. Since few of our classmates plan to run for political office, our ultimate goal was to help the class

learn concepts that they could apply to their businesses.

ObamaNation - Lessons from the Front Lines of Social Media

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What isn't in our ObamaNation presentation...

As with any project, some ideas or concepts don't make the final deliverable and are left on the cutting room floor. Our presentation is next weekend, but I thought I'd highlight some of the areas that didn't make it. It's not that they weren't important, it was just a matter of getting down to something that was powerful and could still fit in the 10-15 minute timeframe. It was a tough call, because our research uncovered so many interesting and valuable concepts that were used to drive the Obama campaign.

Here's a list of things we would have loved to cover in more details:

• How to migrate a company's existing marketing / advertising culture from internal-centric to community-centric (transparency, brand ownership, brand variations, etc.).
• Edge Economies and how to let data "into the wild" to achieve results you never could have with existing internal personnel.
• Partnerships - how to engage stakeholders across your value chain to create greater breadth and variety of your offerings, without additional costs to your business.
• Breaking the rules and blurring the lines between traditional STP-based Marketing (Segmentation, Target, Positioning) and the uber-STP and micro-STP Marketing used throughout the campaign.
• PR management during crisis, across various media types.

We'll figure out a way to get our notes on this areas publish somewhere, because they were created through many hours of research and late-night discussions. We actually discussed this topic prior to the class and had both hoped it would be the focus of our studies. It wasn't covered that much in class, so the project became the highlight of the course for us. We're just hoping to do justice to such an important trend in marketing.

Strategic Marketing Project - Lessons from the Front Lines of Social Media

I'm pretty excited tonight because we got our mid-term Strategic Marketing project approved. (The abstract is listed below) Portia Mount and I had actually talked about a concept like this prior to the class starting, so we were glad that we'd be allowed the flexibility to choose the topic and scope.

Portia is VP of Marketing for her company, so I believe she's been thinking about aspects of this since last summer.  I got the original idea while reading this article from Umair Haque, as part of a continuing series he's doing on Edge Economy and the need for radical innovation to break us out of the challenges of the current economic crisis.  It also connected for me as I reflected back on stories from both Wikinomics and The Future of Work, as they looked at the value of sharing information externally, building communities, building partnerships, and truly building companies that can survive in the pace of the 21st century.  Listening to Seth Godin's podcast on Tribes and Leadership today completed the circle for me, showing how all of these pieces and ideas came together in the 2008 election.

The other element of the project that I'm excited about is that we're hoping to show how this 21st century approach can be applied to more traditional brick & mortar companies.  Portia and I felt like this would be an interesting challenge to research, as well as our way of giving something back to the rest of the class.

The paper and presentation aren't due until mid-April, but I'm already looking forward to starting on this project.  I'll be sure to post updates as we move along.

=======ABSTRACT========

ObamaNation: Lessons from the front lines of social media.

This presentation will look at how the Obama campaign used social media strategies to mobilize grassroots audiences to win the White House and what business might learn from this success. In this presentation we'll highlight noteworthy examples including:

1. The use of Social networking sites such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter that created new online communities.
2. The Campaign website and its use of targeted messages to create urgency to generate record breaking campaign donations
3. How mainstream newsmedia outlets took advantage of the unprecented online presence during the campaign season to connect to new and younger voters
4. How the rise of the citizen journalist and an expanded blogosphere allowed Obama, a virtual unknown at the start of the campaign, to gain global recognition in one campaign season