A Historical Breakthrough in Social Media: The Obama Internet Campaign (Part 1)

A while back I had the opportunity to hear Scott Thomas ( @simplescott ) at an event held by MIMA (The Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association.) Scott was the media design director for the Obama campaign and he worked with a talented team of innovators who made it work. The campaign was groundbreaking because it was the first time in history that a campaign was approached as a brand that tied in the the marketing communications component as well.

The Obama website, was designed to be a consistent face of the campaign. They engaged people in registration and participation, sent out regular team emails for those who registered on the site. They made the user experience and bringing groups together easy. In the end there were more than 150,000 planned events by the public. The site had 1.5Million+ visitors and raised more than $6Million U.S. dollars

Their approach shifted away from the traditional “about us, how can we make you love us“ campaign model and focused on “how does what we are doing going to influence lives?“ That is how the new face of advertising is supposed to work.  

 They learned how to listen to internet chatter and leveraged search engine optimization (SEO), bought pay per click advertising with sponsors. They participated in other platforms like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and more.

One perfect example that fascinated me, was being on Twitter during the debates. Live time, the Obama campaign was twittering fact checks for each item that McCain misquoted a fact or figure. I was amazed at how they were able respond so quickly. I was in awe. 

Scott Thomas described managing the changes in the campaign like “building an airplane while in flight.”

What did I learn? It seems they weren’t afraid to make changes when something didn’t work right. They learned from their mistakes and were given the freedom to be innovative. They were trusted for their business judgement. When it comes to social media, I think this is a message that the corporate world will eventually embrace. I believe they are starting to catch on, slowly and we are moving in the right direction. What do you think?

By Kakie Fitzsimmons