To create a modern brand a marketer will need to have a “conversation” among “friends ” ;.Okay, now exactly how does a marketer create those “friendships” to own those “conversations” to produce those strong, effective, brands? An instance study in how to achieve this could be the presidential campaign of Barack Obama in 2008.
At the start of this article I wish to state this misnomer. President Obama is just a lightning rod. Some individuals love him and some people hate him, but even his biggest detractors need certainly to admit that his social networking strategy was a classic. Marketers should study this campaign since it is just a tutorial how modern products must be branded. I am hoping that the reader will concentrate on the marketing and not the politics.
Barack Obama is just a classic case in what sort of brand could be created in a New Media Age. To win the American presidency a candidate will need to have a great deal of money and a great deal of name recognition—a brand. If your candidate does not need a brand, if voters don’t know who you are, you are not going to be elected. If your marketer cannot distinguish their product available in the market place, that product won’t be bought. This is why modern marketers should study the Obama campaign. Ahead of the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama had no money and was unknown. By comparison, Hillary Clinton was a well-known senator from a sizable state. During 2006-2007, it had been a foregone conclusion that Hilary would win the Democratic nomination She and her husband had created a vast political network to draw from, and she lots of money—she had a strong brand. Barack had no brand; even yet in his own household. When Barack broached a possible candidacy to Michelle, her response was, “This is actually the craziest thing you ever believed to me. Nobody will beat Hilary this year…Get over it, kid” ;.Barack and his team did have familiarity with social networking and just how to use it in a campaign. This knowledge was his biggest asset.
The campaign of 2008 is analogous to the current market place. In times past, it had been quite difficult, and too costly to produce a new service and brand it. This is why social networking is this important element in modern marketing. A cultural media campaign allows a new service to be created and branded available in the market place quickly, at almost no cost. The present day market place is better explained by author Shiv Singh. There is a change available in the market place. No longer are consumers interested in engaging with large impersonal brands. Consumers don’t trust brands any longer—they trust their friends. In a recently available survey conducted by The Economist half the respondents stated that they don’t trust big business. They trust the recommendations of their friends. Leveraging the recommendations of friends is how you can create brands. This is the key reason why the utilization of social networking is indeed critical to branding. Through social networking, friends meet, conversations happen, and brands are created.
This means that if a product will be selected, the brand must develop into a “friend” to its consumer. This is what the Obama Campaign did and the way that he did this should be studied by marketers since it is just a case study in how to produce modern brands using social media. By combining social networking that produces micro-targeting, force multipliers are produced that are needed to produce world-class brands.
The data of the current market place allowed Barack and his team to quickly create a strong brand and overcome the Clinton campaign. Now, I want to clean up an error that I produced in a prior article. Recently, I wrote an article entitled, “The Perfect Storm: Why Companies Should Adopt Social Media Marketing whilst the Center of Their Marketing” ;.In this article, I identified David Plouffe, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager as an original person in the Facebook management team. This is an error. The Obama staff member that I was considering was Chris Hughes, who served whilst the Obama Campaign Director of Online Organizing. Mr. Hughes had a good influence on the campaign social networking strategy.
The Obama campaign was not the very first campaign to make use of social media. These were the first ever to co-ordinate social networking with an entire campaign. These were the first ever to organize the utilization of social media. For social networking to work, it has to be organized. John McCain and Howard Dean used the medium before Obama, but Obama and his staff was able to integrate and organize social networking into every section of the campaign in an easy way. Because of this Barak was able to create “conversations” that engaged. He created enthusiasm, however the enthusiasm his sight created was smart enthusiasm. He used social networking sights in a way that targeted supporters and voters. This targeting allowed him to understand the important metrics that he needed to understand to be able to win his campaign. He was able to target and concentrate on his true supporters.
The strength of Obama’s social networking branding approach is so it was constructed to produce and develop “friendships” ;.This is very important to marketers to realize. When you meet someone there’s a veil between you and that person. As you’re able to know each other better, the veil comes down. As your relationship develops, trust develops, and deeper conversations begin. These conversations bring about deeper relationships on an individual level. On a marketing level, these relationships become strong brands.
The Obama campaign knew so it had to interact people, but that engagement needed to be based on trust. The Obama engaged people in what it called “the ladder” ;.You engage one step at the same time, build the partnership deeper, and each step is just a higher level of commitment—a ladder. The steps of the ladder are on the basis of the comfort level of the in-patient in terms of the campaign. A marketer would call these steps creating touch points.
The first touch point could be Personal. This is actually the point of which a marketer and customer first come into contact and “friend” one another on a platform like Facebook. In the Obama case, it had been as of this stage when individuals are observing one another. A person signs ups for messages and emails. The following touch point is Social. It’s this touch point that people start making posts or comments to a friend’s profile about your product. At this touch point, a buddy explains for their friend why something is an excellent thing. In the Obama campaign, these profiles integrated with their web site. At the Website, an advocate may create an account. In the marketing area, an organization would integrate with a Facebook or Twitter. Now, a customer may feel comfortable enough with a brand to become listed on a “group” or create a “group” ;.
In the Obama campaign, another stage would be to become an Advocate. To operate a vehicle interest, pictures might be posted, blogs written, or a video might be created and posted to You Tube, instagram panel for instance. You will find analogies in the advocate stage for a marketer attempting to converse about the item with a “friend” (a customer) and vice versa. It’s in the advocate stage that the supporter could have now feel committed enough to Obama to host an event, ask friends to donate money, or to register to vote. In the Advocate stage, in a marketing situation, a person might communicate with a buddy and recommend something, developing a brand.
The following stage could be the Empowering stage. This stage is for serious supporters of Obama. Here an advocate gets heavily involved. The campaign tracked volunteers and could target its most reliable supporters.
These committed people could create social and fundraising groups on MyBO Web site. The Obama campaign could now organize their particular networks of supporters that gave supporters use of the Obama database, from which they might pull phone numbers for doing phone banking from their living rooms. In reading this article, a marketer has to produce an analogy using what the Obama campaign did as to the each marketer can do with their particular brand to boost engagement with their customers. Perhaps some organizations could offer discounts for their customers should they introduce their friends to the marketers and solidify the brand. Here a marketer could be flexible in their particular situation to extend their brand.
Exactly why social networking platforms are so popular is that friends will have the way to share video, blogs, pictures, and posts with their friends. This can be a god-send for marketers as they try to produce and expand their brand. Ford Motor Company just did this in a highly effective campaign to introduce their new car, the Fiesta. Ford called this the Fiesta Project. In exactly the same way that Ford extended brand awareness for the Fiesta, the Obama campaign provided source material for user-generated content. Here’s where scale makes play. Exactly why Ford’s and Obama’s campaign was so effective was since they both had the scale for “friends” to “converse” to produce the brand. This is why the planning stage is indeed important in developing a brand. As Napolean said, “Every army has an idea before the first shot is fired” ;.A marketing campaign is chaotic. Things happen. A marketer has to be flexible. The main reason Ford’s and Obama ‘s social networking campaign was so successful was because there was planning and enough scale was created to engage “friends” ;.