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THE active role played by the high-tech new media (think texting,
e-mail and blogging) in the resounding win of US President-elect
Barack Obama has got presidential contenders from all over the
world—including the Philippines—now making the Obama campaign
strategy an essential case study for their own chances by applying
the same IT elements that powered the first African-American as the
most powerful man on the planet.
With perfect timing, globally renowned public
relations, marketing and consulting firm, Weber Shandwick Worldwide,
has released its assessment of the Obama campaign in a paper
entitled, “The Other Digital Divide—Obama’s Digital Strategy
Changes the Communications Game.”
Interestingly, it is being presented
locally through Weber Shandwick’s Philippine office whose
President and Chief-Executive-Officer Atty. Michael Toledo was press
secretary during the tenure of President Joseph Estrada.
The company provides a strategic
assessment of the Obama campaign which notes that the 2008 Obama
digital campaign was built on organizing lessons from previous
presidential campaigns by taking principles of individual
empowerment and applied them in a disciplined and creative campaign,
employing new technologies and creative ideas to transform online
advocates into offline activists. The paper also comments that in
many ways, Obama was the first “inline brand”—the seamless
convergence of online and offline communications.
The paper states that “not all the tactics
will be relevant to all future campaigns, and certainly not every
campaign in the political or corporate world will have the resources
the Obama campaign had.”
It also presents lessons learned from the Obama
campaign, as follows: the Obama campaign was able to build a large
online community in part because its campaign theme was explicitly
about “you” and not “I”; while most brands in a campaign
instinctively want to control every instance or use of their name or
logo, the Obama campaign instead encouraged people to individualize
and stylize their brand. The most prominent example of this was
Artists for Obama, a collective of designers who put their stamp on
the Obama brand through original t-shirt and poster designs; the
main campaign Web site built a wide online presence that met their
audiences where they were already spending hours of time online.
By setting up a presence on both large social
networks—such as Facebook, MySpace and YouTube (something at least
two of the leading candidates for the 2012 presidential race in the
Philippines have already done) but also niche networks such as
LinkedIn, BlackPlanet, GLEE, Eons and MiGente—they were able to
expand their audience and reach communities across a wider social
landscape.
With over two million Facebook supporters alone,
there is no doubt that the Obama campaign built a strong social
media presence. The key was that they didn’t just use social media
to talk to supporters but to talk with them.
It deployed organizing tools throughout the
course of the campaign such as My.BarackObama.com, Neighbor to
Neighbor and an iPhone application with one goal in mind—to get
out the vote. This organizing infrastructure allowed them to contact
13.3 million individual voters through 20,000 neighborhood team
leaders, which according to the Obama campaign, resulted in 1.9
million new voters.
Obama campaign strategists also grasped that
misinformation must be responded to quickly and forcefully by using
separate micro-sites such as the www.fightthesmears.com fact
checking site to correct myths and untruths and sites such as
www.healthplanfacts.org to detail policy specifics.
The campaign also leveraged the power of video,
taking full advantage of the popularity of online video by streaming
footage of events live on its Web site, creating mini documentaries
and circulating campaign ads that never aired as paid commercials
but served as rapid response messaging ads for online and TV news
consumption.
The Blog TechPresident.com recently tallied up
14,548,809 hours of video that was watched about Obama on YouTube
and determined that to purchase that much TV exposure in a city the
size of Denver would have cost about $46 million.
Concludes Toledo: “Our assessment is that
these lessons from the Obama campaign helped form the foundation of
a new way of communicating with and activating key audiences. The
strategies will continue to evolve as the digital landscape changes,
and many of these tactics can easily be applied to individual or
corporate communications efforts.”
rjottings@yahoo.com
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