To make a modern brand a marketer must have a “conversation” among “friends inches. Okay, now the way in which does a marketer create those “friendships” to have those “conversations” to create those strong, effective, brands? A case study in how to do this is the presidential campaign of Barack Obama in ’08.
At the beginning of this article I want to state this misnomer. Leader Obama is a turbo fishing rod. Some people love him and some people hate him, but even his biggest detractors have to admit that his social media strategy was a classic. Marketers should study this campaign because it is a tutorial on what modern products must be branded. I hope that the reader will focus on the marketing and not the nation-wide politics.
Barack Obama is a classic case in how a brand can be created in a New Media Age. To win the American presidency a candidate must have a great deal of money and a great deal of name recognition—a brand. If a candidate does not have a brand, if voters are not aware who you are, you are not likely to be selected. If a marketer cannot distinguish their product in the market place, that product will not be bought. This is why modern marketers should study the Obama campaign. Before the ’08 campaign, Barack Obama had no money and was unknown. In comparison , cheapest smm panel Hillary Clinton was a well-known senator from a large state. During 2006-2007, it was a foregone conclusion that Hilary would win the Democratic nomination She and her husband had created a massive political network to draw from, and she a lot of money—she had a strong brand. Barack had no brand; even in his personal household. When Barack broached a potential candidacy to Michelle, her response was, “This is the craziest thing you ever thought to me. Nobody is going to beat Hilary this year… Get over it, kid”. Barack and his team did have knowledge of social media and how to use it in a campaign. This knowledge was his biggest asset.
The campaign of ’08 is analogous to the modern marketplace. Previously, it was very hard, and extremely costly to make a new product and brand it. This is why social media is this kind of important take into account modern marketing. A social media campaign allows a new product to be created and branded in the market place quickly, at very little cost. The modern marketplace is best explained by author Shiv Singh. We have seen a new experience in the market place. No longer are consumers interested in engaging with large impersonal brands. Consumers do not trust brands any longer—they trust their friends. In a recent survey conducted by the Economist half the answerers stated that they don’t trust big business. They trust the recommendations of their friends. Using the recommendations of friends is the way to create brands. This is why why the use of social media is so critical to branding. Through social media, friends meet, interactions happen, and brands are created.
This means that if a product is going to be selected, the brand must turn into a “friend” to its consumer. Available on the market the Obama Campaign did and the way which he did this should be studied by marketers because it is a research study in how to create modern brands using social media. By combining social media that creates micro-targeting, force multipliers are created that are needed to create world-class brands.
The information of the modern marketplace allowed Barack and his team to quickly establish a strong brand and overcome the Clinton campaign. At this point, I would like to disappear an error that we manufactured in a previous article. Recently, I wrote an article entitled, “The Perfect Storm: Why Companies Should Adopt Social media marketing as the center of Their Marketing”. In this article, I identified David Plouffe, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager as an original member of the Facebook management team. It was an error. The Obama staff member that we was thinking of was Joe Hughes, who served as the Obama Campaign Director of Online Organizing. Mr. Hughes had a great influence on the campaign social media strategy.
The Obama campaign was not the first campaign to use social media. These folks the first to co-ordinate social media with an entire campaign. These folks the first to organize the use of social media. For social media to work, it has to be organized. John McCain and Howard Dean used the medium before Obama, but Obama and his staff surely could integrate and organize social media into every section of the campaign in a seamless way. Because of this Barak surely could create “conversations” that engaged. He created enthusiasm, but the enthusiasm his experience created was smart enthusiasm. He used social media sights in a fashion that targeted proponents and voters. This targeting allowed him to understand delivering metrics which he needed to know in order to win his campaign. He surely could target and focus on his true proponents.
The potency of Obama’s social media branding approach is that it was constructed to make and develop “friendships”. This is important for marketers to realize. When you meet someone there is a veil between you and that person. As you get to know each other better, the veil precipitates. As your relationship develops, trust develops, and deeper interactions begin. These interactions bring about deeper relationships on a human level. On a marketing level, these relationships become strong brands.
The Obama campaign knew that it had to engage people, but that wedding must be based on trust. The Obama engaged people in what it called “the ladder”. You engage one step at a time, build the partnership deeper, and each step is a more impressive range of commitment—a step ladder. The steps of the step ladder derive from the comfort and ease of the individual in relation to the campaign. A marketer would call these steps creating touch points.
The first touch point would be Personal. This is the point at which a marketer and customer first come into contact and “friend” one another on a platform like Facebook. In the Obama case, it was during this period when people are learning one another. A person signs ups for messages and emails. The next touch point is Social. It is this touch point that people start making posts or comments to a buddy’s profile about your product. As of this touch point, a friend explains to their friend why a product is a good thing. In the Obama campaign, these profiles integrated with their web site. At the Website, a advocate may create business relationship. In the marketing area, a business would integrate with a Facebook or twitter. At this point, a person may feel safe enough with a brand to join a “group” or create a “group”.
In the Obama campaign, the next stage would be to become an Advocate. To drive interest, pictures may be posted, blogs written, or a video may be created and posted to you Tube, for instance. There are analogies in the advocate stage for a marketer trying to communicate about the product with a “friend” (a customer) and vice versa. It is in the advocate stage that a advocate might have now feel committed enough to Obama to host an event, ask friends to contribute money, or even register to political election. In the Advocate stage, in a marketing situation, a person might talk to a friend and recommend a product, creating a brand.
These committed people could create social and fundraising groups on MyBO Web site. The Obama campaign could now organize their own networks of proponents that gave proponents access to the Obama database, where they could pull phone numbers for doing phone banking from their living rooms. In here article, a marketer has to make an analogy with what the Obama campaign did as to what each marketer can do with their own brand to increase wedding with their customers. Perhaps some organizations could offer discounts to their customers if they introduce their friends to the marketers and firm up the brand. Here a marketer can be flexible in their own situation to extend their brand.
The reason why social media platforms are so popular is that friends depend on the methods for share video, blogs, pictures, and posts with their friends. This is a god-send for marketers as they try to create and expand their brand. Honda Motor Company just did this in an effective campaign to introduce their new car, the Fiesta. Honda called this the Fiesta Project. Like that too that Honda extended brand awareness for the Fiesta, the Obama campaign provided source material for user-generated content. Here is where scale is needed. The reason why Ford’s and Obama’s campaign was so effective was because they both had the scale for “friends” to “converse” to create the brand. This is why the planning stage is so important in creating a brand. As Napolean said, “Every affiliate marketing online has a plan before first shot is fired”. A strategy is topsy-turvy. Things happen. A marketer has to be flexible. The reason Ford’s and Obama is the reason social media campaign was so successful was because there was planning and enough scale is fashioned to engage “friends”.
In the case of the Obama campaign, its web site, MyBO contained videos, speeches and toasts, photos and how-to guides that gave people the garbage they needed to create their own compelling content to get Obama. In return, proponents created more than 400, 000 pro-Obama videos and posted them to Youtube. They also wrote more than 400, 000 content on the MyBO Web site. Today’s marketer has to engage their customers to create compelling content for the company that creates brand awareness. This is why social media is important in creating modern brands. A company is going to have a hard time by doing this, left to their own devices and more significantly, finances. In the case of Honda, Honda did not spend hardly any money on their Fiesta launch. Fiesta had a great presence on social media sights, but the presence is fashioned by private individuals. When the Fiesta was launched, 38% of the target market was aware of your car.
The next step in the later that created brand for the Obama campaign was the integration that developed between MyBO and the social media platforms. In the case of the Obama campaign, its website served as the center for electoral activities, with spokes that reached to an array of platforms, all of which owned conversation back to the web site in order to engage the people, encourage the voices, improve the money and get the boots on the surface needed to win the political election. This again is a scale issue that involves planning. A marketer must have a common source to integrate with social media because there are so many social media sites. If a brand is to build relationships friends, the conversation must be fun, easy, and simple. This takes scale.