In his 2008 election campaign, President Obama showed what can be achieved with Social Media. As if commanded by Joe Jaffe, he joined the conversation from initiating to responding, from simple status updates to slick videos. The influence on Social Media Marketing has been so profound that the Obama Campaign might be a leading cause of Wind Tunnel Marketing in Social Media Marketing – - strikingly similar tactics used across to boost conversation and “fan count”, the new metric to stand alongside the “website hits” of yesterweb.

Looking a little closer at 2008, there were signs this wasn’t only about Social Media, but Social Production. In particular, within the race for the Democratic nomination in Texas, Obama hinted at what happens when you get beyond conversation and build a new type of “Outside Organization”.

Yes, Obama was using Facebook, Twitter and e-mail to build awareness and recruit volunteers, but he was using tools like his MyBO website to co-ordinate volunteers and enable them to co-operate.  As Technology Review described “In Texas, MyBO also gave the Obama team the instant capacity to wage fully networked campaign warfare.” As the head of the Clinton campaign conceded when they understood what was being organized on MyBO:

“I remember saying, ‘Game, match–it’s over.”

Social Production lessons for the 2012 Election
On June 1 2011, Techcrunch reported that the CTO of Threadless would be joining the 2012 Obama campaign. We believe this represents a shift to Social Production – building the tools and organization necessary to enable large groups of people to work with and on behalf of the Obama campaign, in the same way that Threadless has learned to work with their community to create, market and sell happiness-making t-shirts.

Threadless is no Social Media slouch with over 1.6 million Twitter followers or 300,000 Facebook fans. However much of the value creation is being done by a only a few thousand people (based on our estimates from the 6% of “addicts” according to Quantcast) using a custom platform, not Facebook or Twitter.

How do you build an organization that can depend on people that are not fulltime employees to generate a big chunk of the value that your organization creates? Threadless knows and they are joined by a small number of organizations who have figured this out.

From getting fans to creating value with fans
In a recent report, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) described the shifting focus from conversation to generating value across the organization – Re-envisioning customer value – Opening the floodgates of new potential. They highlight a number of successes across different functional business areas:

+ New Products: Today P&G get 50% of innovation from outside the organization

+ Product Development: Intuit works with 25,000 to get ongoing feedback

+ Service and Support: British mobile phone company, GiffGaff has its customers responding to 50% 99% of the support questions – more on that below.

At Mutopo we’ve been calling this the “lumpy donut” – the changing roles of people outside the organization through the product lifecycle. Paid employees remain at the core, but increasingly people outside the organization expend effort to create value and change the economics of value creation.
 

Building new organizations using Social Production
GiffGaff provides an important example of what happens as organizations shift focus from Social Media to Social Production. The Giffgaff tag line:

“the mobile network run by you”.

“The company’s customer support community has over 200,000 100,000 users and delivers three million 5.5 million page views per month as of June 2011. At least 50 99% of queries are answered by other customers and 95% are answered in less than one hour.  The average response time on the companies Help boards is less than a minute and a half. “

There are certain online sites which tend to evoke in people a feeling of the true nature – or the DNA – of the internet.  Chatroulette was one of these and 4chan is another. Usually what people mean by  ‘the DNA of the internet’ is unbridled raw expression which is often tainted by porn or other social vulgarity. Using this criteria the public bathroom wall has functioned in much the same way as the internet.

One of the big keynotes at sxsw was from 4chan founder – Christopher ‘m00t’ Poole -  who went for Facebook’s jugular by deriding their identity-driven model as contributing to the web’s “loss of innocence.”  Almost in the same breath m00t used the event to push 4chan’s newest product called Canvas.

Two ingredients which have kept 4chan’s message boards legendary are anonymity and images.  These are the same levers which have fostered liberated communication for thousands of years – whether it’s WikiLeaks whistleblowers or the increasing slope of visual culture provided for anyone with a cameraphone or the tendency to deface ads when people get within striking distance. Canv.as reaches the lowest common denominator of conversation – - and what’s novel about it, they provide the rudimentary tools to keep things creative (think MS Paint).

Want to play a fun game? Ask a child to draw an object. After he or she is done, it’s your turn. Add a line – curved, straight, spiraling, jagged. Then it’s their turn, so on and so forth. It gets wild quick – the whole process is a great way to let go of preconceptions.  Canvas is the same (except the group is larger and not innocent kids). For all that’s contrived about today’s packaged and over-produced culture, having your preconceptions challenged is a noble pursuit – even if it’s done from a bathroom stall.

When Obama announced his intention to run for President in February 2007, there was little belief that he could actually win even the Democratic nomination.  He first had to beat Hillary Clinton for the Democratic ticket, which at the time was viewed as a nearly impossible task.  It was akin to Apple taking on the music industry a few years back – everyone knows how that turned out.  Obama quickly established a consistent campaign slogan – “Change We Can Believe In” (later slightly altered to “Change We Need”) – and surrounded himself with a loyal team who recited this mantra at every possible moment.  This consistent brand message throughout the entire campaign provided both a rallying point for his consumers and an effective counter to his entrenched opponents who argued that he did not have enough experience.   It also provided the campaign with a brand “mission ⁽¹⁾” that appealed to their consumers, in sharp contrast to other candidates who changed their mantra with every speech. 

In addition, Obama and his team realized more than any prior political campaign in recent history that a grassroots community of consumers could be built through the use of technology.  Obama met early on with Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, to discuss ways to mobilize his campaign.   Four years earlier, Howard Dean’s campaign established the Internet as an effective way to fundraise and communicate.  By 2007, political consumers had caught up with technology, and indeed, the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 46 percent of Americans used the Internet, e-mail or text messaging to get information about the 2008 campaign or to mobilize others – more than the 34 percent who read newspapers daily, the 39 percent who watch cable news or the 29 percent who viewed network TV news.  The Obama campaign first built a database of brand supporters (essentially an Internet-enabled direct mail list) that the campaign then mobilized for fundraising; voter registration drives, phone banks, videos on YouTube, and posts on every social networking site.  Obama and his team effectively created and empowered a core of brand consumers online to then spread the product message throughout a broader community.      

Finally, a key component of building any brand is responding quickly and effectively to criticism (negative “reviews”).  Once again, the Obama campaign effectively tackled bad reviews the moment they surfaced.  During the course of the campaign, the minister at a church Obama attended in Chicago, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, made a number of speeches that contained harsh racial rhetoric.  Obama himself admitted to having been a member of Reverend Wright’s congregation, but immediately distanced himself from Reverend Wright.  His campaign realized it was not simply enough to distance one’s self, but that any negative publicity must be addressed head-on, and that the Obama brand must prove that it can maintain its message and rise above the negative press.  Obama effectively did both by tackling the difficult issue of race in his famous speech on March 18^th – the video of this speech has been viewed more than four million times on YouTube ⁽²⁾.   

To conclude, there are a number of key takeaways from the 2008 Presidential Campaign marketing and PR professionals:

Be consistent – Companies that provide a consistent brand message that conveys the core of their product maintain a loyal base of consumers.  The message does not change with trends (it may modify slightly, as when the Obama campaign changed from “Change We Can Believe In” to “Change We Need”), but is flexible enough to be widely embraced over time.  Think of Nike’s iconic “Just Do It” or Microsoft’s recent “I’m a PC.”

Build local, and then go global – Obama’s campaign was effective in part because it started at a grassroots level, and built from the ground up.  A number of passionate, early adopters act as a tipping point and an effective testing ground for brands.  Obama was able to put his product and his brand message out there, and receive instant feedback from a small, core group.

Empower and engage your consumers – The best consumers feel actively engaged with a brand (their feedback is valued, they contribute to spreading the brand message and they assume some level of brand ownership as in the case of the campaign’s MyBO website), and develop a passion for their product.  These consumers provide feedback, reviews and spread brand awareness.  The Obama campaign also leveraged new technologies and social media to make it easy for their consumers to feel empowered.  People these days are happy to engage but they need to be able to do it in less than five minutes.   

Actively respond to negative reviews/bad press – Negative reviews are often underestimated by companies.  An extreme example of a company not responding to negative reviews and bad press is The Sharper Image, which is now going through a messy bankruptcy partially related to poor product reviews.  In a desperate move to boost sales in 2004, the company became an early retailer of air purifiers, in particular the Ionic Breeze purifier.  By 2005, air purifiers accounted for 28% of the Sharper Image’s sales.  A Consumer Reports article that year, however, stated that the Ionic Breeze purifier could be a health hazard for consumers as it released small amounts of ozone while in use.   Sales of air purifiers for the Sharper Image tanked, and the company did little to respond to consumers about this particular product – there were few alternative options offered, no “bring your purifier back” campaigns, and indeed, not even an open apology to loyal consumers.  Instead, the Sharper Image funneled efforts into suing the manufacturers of the Ionic Breeze.  Clearly, the Sharper Image bankruptcy is more complicated, but there is no doubt that a failure to respond to poor product reviews added to the company’s demise.  Of recent note, companies like Dell are now actively responding to product criticism on outlets like Twitter.  New technology can be an effective tool for marketing professional to instantly respond to any bad “press” regarding a product.

Brand relationships do not end with a “purchase” – Brands need to move beyond the point of sale as the ultimate goal.  Brands that extend their consumer relationship beyond the purchase and into daily life guarantee future success.  Now that Obama has secured the Presidency, his campaign did not end – consumers receive emails asking for input, details of current Cabinet appointments, information about upcoming events, and opportunities for community engagement.  One can only imagine that with time, the Obama brand’s database of consumers will be a powerful tool for change in Washington. – Leah

(1)    Grove, Lloyd. The World According to David Plouffe. Portfolio Magazine. December 11, 2008. http://www.portfolio.com/views/columns/the-world-according-to/2008/12/11/David-Plouffe-Interview#page6

(2)    Talbot, David.  How Obama Really Did It.  Technology Review.  September/October 2008.  http://www.technologyreview.com/web/21222

One tool to rule them all, one tool to find them, one tool to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.

Apologies to JRR Tolkien. 

Twitter is doing for realtime, curated information, what Google has done for all the rest.  I played with Twitter at first and then didnt use it for a while. And then I found some funny, useful, people to follow such as @saneel, @37signals, @jeffjarvis, etc. And suddenly it was part of my online routine. 

Google Trends illustrates this nicely (I helped the dip) – it didnt catch fire initially, but…

There are more charts, showing similar trends. But perhaps the Twipping point, was Mumbai (sadly). 

I first noticed news on Mumbai as I clicked through my various news sources. And then the Huffington Post (thanks) directed me to Twitter’s Mumbai feed. Since then, the Twitter feed has been my starting point for updates.  Multiple sources chronicled Twitter’s role alongside local TV coverage, in providing up to the second updates. On a more personal note and for a good specific example, just take a look at @vineetgupta’s Mumbai related Tweets. 

Before Mumbai, I had a similar experience during the US elections earlier this year. Twitter featured a link to the election feed and the commentary, links to news, etc were more colorful than the mainstream coverage (granted we were following online, since we chucked regular TV sometime back). 

Now there are a growing number of useful applications that help you get more from Twitter (although its still not clear what Twitter’s business model is). From analytics to easier Tweeting on your iPhone. And there is no shortage of practical advice , guides and even comandments on how to use Twitter for fun and profit. 

So why is Twitter so great? Tim O’Reilly has a good list of reasons to love Twitter. He gets to the heart of what makes it useful and likely to be successful.

I think of Twitter this way - V.S.R.S.S. - Very Smart Real Simple Syndication. 

The smarts come from the fact that in a Mechanical-Turk-like fashion, everything depends on people (yes, there are some bots, but nobody is making you follow them). As folks who are in the business of news can tell you, its really hard to know whats important without an editor (Techmeme, a staple of automation, recently added an editor). Twitter is the ultimate wire-feed – all you need to do is pick your sources.

So how do you know who is worth following? Increasingly, like the barrage of social-booking buttons, I expect you will see more “follow” or “tweet this” buttons. Also, there are already some tools which do various types of parsing of the feed – if people with lots of followers, are leaders, then these are they, according to Twitter Grader. Twitterbuzz is Digg-like, pulling the most referenced URLs from the ether.

And then there is Retweeting for which I couldnt find a good tool, but some interesting insights on the subject. This might just be the piece that emerges as something akin to hyperlinking – more retweets for a tweet increases its value and similarly, more retweets for a  user will likely do something equivalent to improving their “Pagerank” if such a formal metric ever emerges for Twitter. 

It seems like Twitter may be doing for social media what Google did for search – yes – much useful goodness for fun and profit. Specifically, aside from being fun, its delivering things like leads (dare I say revenue?) according to folks like Hubspot(notice post to Twitter link on slideshare). I’m curious to see where it goes and hopeful that we can work with our clients and portfolio companies to benefit from it. 

Oh yes, lest I forget, you can follow me at http://twitter.com/shaunabrahamson.

Update: John Battelle weighs in on how Twitter changes how we search, resulting in realtime conversations. Interestingly, I just tried to understand an exchange regarding Blackberry Bold between @jowyang and others.  (I’m for the Bold). Realtime reviews? Its happening – the brand reps just need to get into the fray now.