As a general marketer, I have the sense we will be learning a lot from political marketers this year about how to use social media to influence brands. Social media played a key role in several of the midterm election. (See Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics for an interesting description of the early use of newsfeeds and groups in campaigning). Social networks are expected to play an even bigger role in the 2008 Presidential campaign, especially given the importance of the Millennial vote to the election outcome. Will social media be just another channel like radio or TV? Or will its interactivity transform the dialogue into something never seen before?
As a first step to nabbing an invitation to the “netroots” marketing party, I set out to see what Barack Obama is doing with Facebook. I checked out his profile, joined a group and downloaded the Barack Obama Facebook app.
Obama’s profile shows 992,564 “supporters.” Reading the profile and seeing photos of his “supporters” isn’t that involving, as I am sure he doesn’t update it himself.
There are many Obama specialty groups, such as “Notre Dame Students for Barack Obama.” The biggest group, “Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Obama)”, has 564 million members. This seems like a lot of members, as the largest corporate sponsored group, “Apple Students” has just 432 million members, more than even the PINK Victoria’s Secret group’s 348 million members. However, it pales when compared to the group, “1,000,000 Strong for Stephen Colbert,” which really is one million strong with 1.2 million members.
The Obama group site at first glance is more like a portal than an interactive experience, displaying links to events, videos, T-shirts, the official donation site, sites explaining Obama’s stand on issues, etc. While useful to have aggregated in one place, they aren’t anything I couldn’t have found with a Google search. More interesting were the 32,322 discussion threads. Tonight’s rally in Detroit appears to have many posts, the excitement the difficulty of getting tickets, the prospects of actually posting a video. Before we leave the group, I should note that there seem to be nearly as many anti-Obama groups as there are pro-Obama groups. “Stop Barack Obama (One million strong and growing)”, has 65 million members.
Meanwhile, the Obama Facebook app makes content more accessible than the group — recent videos, news articles and speeches are rated in terms of number of member reader “thumbs ups.” There are also links to other users via the Facebook network and the ability to leave a comment, blogger style. The content can all be sorted by recency, popularity, and friend’s favorites. There are clear links for donating, volunteering and getting involved. This feels more user-friendly than the groups.
How these applications, groups and profiles influence the campaign remains to be seen. I plan to keep an eye on things.
