Social Media Tips; The little things about the Obama Campaign

My take on the speech to the National Press Club by Ben Self, from the agency Blue State Digital, who managed Barack Obama’s campaign online.

Ben’s speech to the NPC highlighted several important items in using electronic communication, although some might say all forms of communication should follow the same methodologies.

There has been a lot of high level and deep writing about the campaign and how effective the online campaign was for Obama’s campaign.

Here are some key items I picked up from his presentation:

There is no secret sauce.

• There isn’t 1 magic thing or tool to use
• It is about simple, effective use of technology

The key items behind any successful online campaign is to build relationships:

• Regularity
• Be Relevant
• Authentic
• Transparency
• Lower the barrier to entry
• Measure everything

Regular doesn’t mean constant. But like an offline relationship it takes frequency to build a relationship.

Relevancy means don’t tell me about what you want to tell me, talk to me about what I want.

Be authentic. Be human to human in your correspondence. Create a personality to your organisation.

Transparency. Allow the outside world to see what is going on inside your organisation and how you are dealing with real world issues.

Lowering the barrier to entry means stop making it hard to use the tools. Keep it simple so all demographics can use the tools.

Measure everything. Technology is allowing much easier management than other mediums. You can get facts, test and adapt to successes.

There were no major catastrophes in what they did, and as a whole the overall combination of effort made the campaign successful. It was about information from their organisation being delivered by multiple methods. Technology won’t fix everyone’s problems, but there is a need for organisations to engage the grass roots of their communities and be much more real in their communication.

Important that just thinking you are ”getting technology more’, by having more friends or followers, is really just false metrics, and has nothing to do with real engagement. Technology is not engagement. Using technology can facilitate engagement. The organisation needs to want to engage by actions not just say they do.

This is just a short set of observations. It was all pretty common sense stuff. Hopefully the more that individuals like Ben talk to a broader audience in such plain language, and remove the technology element from it, will lead to helping people understand the processes and thinking behind online engagement which will end up with better results for more people.

Well that’s what ireckon!