Obamanomics A Study in Social Velocity

Transcription

1 Obamanomics A Study in Social Velocity Jalali Hartman Edited by Mike Nolan and Emily Paterson

2 Thank you to the visionaries who are helping to shape Social Velocity Michelle Amos, Kelly Dyer, Tameesha Desangles, Mike Nolan, Tiffany Hartman, Israel Swanson, Emily Paterson, Polly Draper, John McCain, Michael Wolff, Daniele Campbell, Flint McLaughlin, Scott Adams, Mike Palmer, Loose Kannon, Tom Desmond, Bill Baird, Mike Massey, Blaine Graboyes, Seth Godin, Eric Maas, HD Publishing, Aaron Rosenthal, Lora Schaeffer, Stephen Colbert, Ron Paul, Todd Lebo, Jimmy Ellis, Gaelan Brown, Albie Hecht, The Dream Team, Barack Obama, Allisa Brodsky, Craig Calder, Scott Webb, Eric Stockton, Chief Chicken, Lyn Benjamin, LaDell Fuqua, Alex Beskin, Brad Hoppmann, Dave George those I forgot & You 2

3 How did the 2008 Presidential Race impact how we use social media? 37 Months of research revealed. Stephen Colbert for President? Barack Obama was not the first presidential candidate to tap into the Facebook phenomena. That honor belongs to Stephen Colbert, host of the satiric news hour, The Colbert Report. Of course it was a joke, but it was fun. The group grew like online wildfire for several days, at more than 10 supporters per second, with little to no outside prodding. Even Colbert was surprised by the power of his fan base and the speed of the movement s growth. There was a point where he joked about what would happen if he actually got on the ticket. continued to fuel the fire. Later in the campaign Colbert (who claimed he didn t want to BE president, he just wanted to RUN for president ) began promoting the cause on his TV show, which What started as a joke on Facebook became a movement that almost put a comedian onto a presidential ticket. The Obama campaign took note More than a year later, the serious political campaigns of John McCain and Barack Obama began taking shape. Both campaigns were historic in their use of the Internet and community organizers. The Obama campaign, however, like the Colbert-for-President movement started to take on a life of its own, particularly in the final weeks. The Obama campaign gathered steam and became a worldwide phenomenon, culminating in a landslide victory against war-hero and experienced statesman John McCain. 3

4 According to Google, by election time Obama dominated the web with 250% more awareness among Internet users than McCain: Total Google searches for McCain and Obama as compared to all searches worldwide. What caused the Obama campaign to flourish so well online? Was it superior planning or simply more advertising dollars? Surprisingly, neither candidate spent very many comparative dollars online in the 2008 election. The Obama campaign spent less than 2% of their overall budget online. In fact, Obama spent even less than McCain in online advertising and search engine advertising. According to one social marketing analysis, McCain actually outspent Obama in online Paid Search by 22 to 1! 1 How was Obama able to simultaneously rule the web and spend very few dollars? McCain misses the boat 1 obama john mccain 2008 presidential election search social marketing analysis/ 4

5 McCain s mistake was viewing the Internet from a very limited perspective he saw the web as just another form of media to cover with advertisements, as he did with radio, television, and print media. While McCain was spending precious money on online advertising, Obama focused on utilizing the viral and democratic nature of the web a system that proved both powerful and inexpensive. Obama focused on cheap yet effective resources mobilizing a huge base of fans that would generate buzz in their spare time, for free. For this reason, the vast majority of Obama s Internet traffic was organic the result of powerful word-of-mouth campaigning. Digging into the Playing Field: Why did Obama experience massive online growth? Our own online political network picked Barack Obama over John McCain, beating him by a margin of 25%. We started the 2008 Presidential poll in early 2006, watching our numbers carefully as the primaries weeded the field down to the 2 major candidates. We then saw Obama quickly pull ahead of McCain in our polls. favored Obama over McCain. Out of 23,894 Internet voters on our online survey, 13,320 voted for Obama, while 10,574 voted for McCain. This sampling is representative of the Internet population as a whole, and it suggests that the overall population greatly In comparison, polls predicting the popular vote predicted Obama winning by a much lower margin of 13%. This discrepancy can be explained by only two possible scenarios: Either the popular vote polls were wrong and McCain was going to get slaughtered on election day, or McCain s followers were not Internet users, meaning that McCain s campaign could not mobilize them through this media. Either way, McCain was at a major disadvantage. 5

6 Obamanomics: Social Velocity To understand how Obama achieved such an enormous online movement, it is useful to employ a model we call Social Velocity. The 4 C s of Social Velocity 1. Content Content should come from the bottom up, not from the top down. The people, the consumers, the end-users whatever you want to call them form the group you are trying to inspire to action. For that reason, the best content is what the people create themselves. Obama proved that when people are empowered and trusted, they will create and disseminate their own content and their own message. A few months before the election we were asked to make a pro-obama music video for a famous rock band that we represent. The band members wanted to do what they could to support his campaign. We contacted the Obama campaign to get permission. Not only did the campaign provide pictures and photos for us to use, they also provided every speech and appearance that he had ever made, and gave us permission to do what we wanted. This anecdote is a good example of Obama s overall policy of providing information and access to his supporters, and trusting them to go out and use that information as they saw fit. This policy complements the viral nature of the Internet Obama supporters were literally able to make his campaign their own by building on existing information to create something entirely new and personal. This policy of openness and access proved to be effective and extremely viral. 6

7 Obama s no rules content-strategy encouraged supporters to create their own content around the campaign. There were no copyright battles, and his supporters made great use of free networking sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and MyBarackObama.com. A supporter on MyBarackObama.com could create a personal webpage in order to host events (that were then searchable), send invitations to other supporters, upload photos, keep a personal blog, and access data bases of phone numbers for doing phone banking from his or her own living room. Campaign signs, photographs, literature, and guidelines were available for free download from the campaign website, allowing supporters to spread the word in their own district, and in their own way. Providing these tools empowered people to do it themselves, and it was also very inexpensive. The creativity and excitement that exploded out of this campaign was a result of Obama s policy of openness and freedom of expression. A few examples include: Obama Girl and her overnight stardom with her funny music videos. The wildfire spread of hip-hop artist will.i.am s Yes We Can video. Artists creating and posting free online stencils for making homemade Barack t-shirts. A slideshow of Obama jack-o-lanterns from around the country. Thousands of video clips from people s personal cameras of Obama s speeches and rallies. These are only a few examples of the online content that took root in the Obama campaign but eventually blossomed into a life of its own. By enabling his supporters, Obama was able to create a breadth and depth of content around himself and his campaign that otherwise would not have been possible. In essence, his supporters became his creative department and his marketing channel. 2. Connections Barack Obama understood the power of connections on the Internet. In February of 2007, Obama met with Marc Andreessen, Netscape founder and Facebook board member, asking for tips on how to utilize social networking for his campaign. 2 Rather than invent a totally new product, Obama tapped 2 (David Carr s 11/10/08 article in the New York Times: 7

8 into existing systems. His organizers published thousands of videos on YouTube. Obama and his wife, Michelle, both had personal pages on Facebook which they updated daily, and his staffers created and formed Facebook groups. The campaign created a website for its supporters called which utilized familiar tools from other sites such as Linkedin, evite, Google Maps, and Facebook. Obama embraced existing communities and websites and used them to his advantage. BarakObama.com online traffic vs. McCain.com traffic. What caused Obama to command such a significant lead? Perhaps more importantly, Facebook was used extensively by non-affiliated supporters, who created groups with such titles as One Million Strong for Obama, I endorse Barack Obama and I m telling my friends!, One Click for Barack Obama, and anti-mccain/palin groups such as I have more Foreign Policy Experience than Sarah Palin. Almost every college and university had a student-initiated Facebook group for Obama, as well as many cities and states. It s hard to overstate the power that Facebook had in this election. A single supporter-initiated group, One Million Strong for Obama had 920,502 Facebook members. This group had over four times as many members as a similar official group started by the McCain campaign called One Million Strong for McCain/Palin 08 (216,711 members). Supporter-created groups against McCain/Palin such as I have more Foreign Policy Experience than Sarah Palin (251,410 members) and 1,000,000 Strong against Sarah Palin (209,673 members) were wildly popular and were passed from friend to friend. What all of this meant for Obama was that he had access to a broad support base for very little money. He could post messages on Facebook groups that

9 would instantly reach over a million supporters, fans who would then the news to other friends. The overlapping nature of MyBarackObama.com, YouTube, Facebook and other social media outlets created a single broad, allencompassing network that spread across the United States and, to a great extent, the entire world. Obama truly ruled the Internet with his powerful online connections. The Obama campaign mastered the social media network YouTube. The official Obama channel was consistently ranked one of the most viewed channels on YouTube, and thousands of supporters created millions of unaffiliated user-videos that still circulate today. 9

10 3. Community Obamanomics A community is influenced by the connectors in this case those Obama supporters who were motivated enough to create a Facebook group, set up a MyBarackObama page, or forward s to their more passive friends. But a community is only as strong as its members. Obama strengthened his community members by providing tools that would help them to be more successful; he empowered them by refusing to micro-manage and asking them to do it themselves. In this way, the campaign mantra grew from Yes we can! to Yes we did! The Obama campaign used its extensive online network to motivate real-life, geographic communities. MyBarackObama.com offered a database of guidelines and how-to s how to plan a voter registration drive, how to host a debate party, how to knock on doors, how to make phone calls for Obama, and more. Supporters were given access to databases of phone numbers and s of other supporters, and local Obama events were posted on maps and searchable by zip code. Volunteers who logged in to MyBarackObama.com felt that they were not alone they had the resources of the powerful campaign at their disposal. These tools enabled everyday people to become Community Organizers in their own neighborhoods. Ordinary Americans didn t need professional campaign organizers they could do it for themselves. Obama did not create a community, he enabled volunteers to create their own. This distinction gave his supporters the drive and resources to grow the community for him. 4. Conversion The Obama campaign did naturally what every good marketer should do in this new economy. Rather than focusing on acquisition as most marketers tend to do, the campaign had a 3-prong approach. 10

11 Acquisition > Activation > Advocacy Barack Obama s conversion goal was obvious: win the election by getting as many people as possible to vote for him. His landslide win 365 electoral votes to John McCain s 162 and 10 states that voted Republican in 2004 shows just how successful he was. But the campaign was not successful simply because it got a lot of people out to vote. It was successful because it got a lot of people out getting others to vote. There is a myth that social media and viral marketing can t be measured or tracked. As Obama made evident, that couldn t be further from the truth. In Content Obama McCain Total YouTube Videos 442, ,300 Connections Facebook Friends YouTube Channel Subscribers Community Monthly Visits to Candidate s Website Conversion Electoral Votes Popular Votes 3,150, , ,515 29, M 2.5M ,882, ,343,671 fact, the conversion stage, or the stage during which you not only gain a new customer, but also turn that customer into an advocate for you, actually becomes the central hub of the campaign. Like a snowball rolling downhill gathering mass, each new client added to your network should be able to pull in several more. We can gauge the success of Obama s conversion by many measures. Here are a few of the measures we use when creating a Social Velocity score. Of course, in any analysis there are almost infinite measures one could use to determine a score. However, the formula for Social Velocity requires only a sampling of those most important elements to get an accurate picture. A simplified sampling (above) illustrates that there was a strong correlation between actual votes, and the Connections, Content and Community focused around each campaign. 11

12 Conclusion: So what does this mean for me? The question is not does viral marketing work?, or should I use Social Media in my marketing plan?. The question is: am I willing to let my consumers and my customers become my channel? Is my brand, product or service good enough to survive and flourish in a democratic marketplace? The Obama campaign embraced this new, open society. Unlike most of the publishing, entertainment and music industries today, the campaign encouraged the rampant re-purposing of content and thus started a movement that took on a life of its own. Barack Obama s power came from encouraging people to make the story their own. The campaign was less about policy, and more about Hope and Change, terms that people could, and did, interpret in their own personal ways. Most importantly, the campaign became as much about the individual power to make change as it was about Barack Obama becoming President. The result: Millions of people celebrating on election night as Obama won a landslide victory, forever encouraged by the change they had created by themselves. About the Author I am founder and CEO of Social Media research firm Yovia ( After years in ecommerce, and online publishing, I wanted to start a company that enabled a new era of marketing, where customers became the channel, where hype no longer thrived, and where buzz matters most. Our mantra: Spread the word, which we do for a select group of partners, some of whom you ve probably heard of 12

13 Special Invitation How to Viral Market December 10, :00 3:30 pm EST Join a practical webinar with the net s top social media and viral marketing experts as we debunk common myths about viral marketing. Hands-on toolkit and workshop just $97 to the first 500 attendees. 13

14 What is your Social Velocity Score? Are you wondering how to apply Social Velocity to your business? Let our analysts calculate your Social Velocity Score Do you need more Content, or a different type perhaps? How should you use Facebook, LinkedIn and Digg to your advantage? How can your list be most useful in a connected society? What about widgets, blogs, forums and live chats, where do they fit? How can you multiply your ad budget via Social Media: Contact: Mike Nolan EVP Partnerships [email protected] 14