Barack Obama’s Social Media Toolkit

Barack Obama won the presidency in a landslide victory (by a margin of nearly 200 electoral votes and 8.5 million popular votes) by converting everyday people into engaged and empowered volunteers, donors and advocates through social networks, e-mail advocacy, text messaging and online video. The campaign’s proclivity to online advocacy is a major reason for his victory.

Since the election, the social media programs adopted by Obama’s transition team have foreshadowed significant changes in how Obama, as president, will communicate with – and more importantly – through the mass of supporters who were collected, cultivated and channeled during the campaign. Obama wants to be the first president to govern with BlackBerry in hand; he will certainly be the first with a legion of 13 million advocates at his fingertips.

Changing the Way Businesses Communicate

Obama has already succeeded in changing the way strategists think about engineering electoral victory. But, the lessons learned from his campaign won’t just be applied to future elections. Nor will they be limited to governing how the president relates to the American people. By combining social media and micro-targeting in the manner that it did, the campaign revealed force multipliers that are already being adopted by advocacy groups pushing their own issue agendas.

By examining the social media success of Obama’s campaign and understanding the ways that advocacy groups are incorporating these lessons into their own engagement programs, businesses can learn what is required to remain relevant in this new environment by retooling their communications efforts to successfully leverage social media.

Social media lessons from the Obama campaign

• Start Early
• Build to Scale
• Innovate Where Necessary; Do Everything Else Incrementally Better
• Make it Easy to Find, Forward and Act
• Pick Where You Want to Play
• Channel Online Enthusiasm into Specific, Targeted Activities that Further the Campaign’s Goals
• Integrate Online Advocacy into Every Element of the Campaign

The Obama campaign leveraged all the tools of social media to give ordinary Americans access to resources usually reserved for professional campaign operatives. Compared with both his Democratic primary challengers and the McCain campaign, his operation was cycles ahead.

The Obama transition team’s use of social media is an indicator of how his administration will operate. On November 6, the team launched Change.gov, a Web site designed to continue the conversation that began during the campaign. The site gave people an opportunity to share their thoughts on important issues and respond to the administration’s policy ideas. More than two million people visited the site in the first month of the launch.

Toward this end, on November 15, Obama issued his first President-elect weekly radio address on YouTube so that it could be embedded, shared and commented on easily. It worked: although relatively few people typically listen to the president’s weekly address on the radio, Obama’s YouTube address was viewed by more than a million people.

During the second week of December, thousands of Obama for America volunteers held house parties to discuss how the campaign’s grassroots connections could be channeled to support the president-elect’s legislative agenda. They understood – as Obama did – that social media could inspire people, give them a voice, connect them with like minds and help to channel their support, but you still needed boots on the ground to win an election. The interplay between online engagement and offline activity was integral to the campaign’s success and will be for the administration as well.

Further, Obama has said that he will institute a five-day public comment period before signing any non-emergency legislation. In doing so, he will leverage the mass of his supporters to invoke the moral authority to push his proposed agenda.

Lessons from Obama’s Social Media Campaign

The lessons of the Obama campaign’s social media program can be distilled into 10 key learnings that can be used by other organizations to better engage and activate supporters.

1. Laddering support through tiers of engagement – The Obama campaign understood that it needed to provide a variety of ways for people to be involved in the campaign based on their level of engagement. As TechPresident noted, the goal was to “provide opportunities for the most casual supporters to stay involved, while also providing more strenuous opportunities for the smaller core of activists.”

The Obama campaign gave prospective supporters a menu of options:

• Personal – You could start by friending Obama on a social network. Then, you might sign up for text messages and e-mails to stay informed about the campaign. As a supporter, you may make your first donation or register to vote.
• Social – Once invested, you may post a comment to a friend’s profile, telling them why Obama was the right candidate for them. Perhaps you would jump to the MyBarackObama.com (MyBO.com) Web site, where you would create an account. After getting positive feedback on the site, you might join or even create a group.
• Advocate – To drive interest in the group, you may post pictures, write blog posts or create a video declaring your support, which you could post to YouTube. With insights and materials from the campaign, you might host an offline event where you would ask supporters to donate money, register to vote, canvass or phone bank.

2. Empowering super users – In addition to providing tiers of engagement for the broader mass of supporters, the Obama campaign offered further support to its most committed advocates. The campaign tracked volunteers and took note of their most reliable activists. The campaign identified these connectors early and gave them the tools to activate others. These super users could create social and fundraising groups on the MyBO Web site. They also could organize their own networks of supporters that gave them access to the Obama database, from which they could pull phone numbers for doing phone banking from their living rooms.

3. Providing source materials for user-generated content – The MyBO Web site contained videos, speeches, photos and how-to guides that gave people the raw materials they needed to create their own compelling content in support of Obama. In return, supporters created more than 400,000 pro-Obama videos and posted them to YouTube. They also wrote more than 400,000 blog posts on the MyBO Web site.

4. Going where the people are – While 60 percent of adults in the United States belong to a social network, most do not belong to more than one. If you want to reach them, you have to know where they are and connect with them there. As Obama adviser Scott Goodstein said: “Some people only go to MySpace. It’s where they’re on all day. Some only go to LinkedIn. Our goal is to make sure that each supporter online, regardless of where they are, has a connection with Obama.”14 Obama had profiles on more than 15 social networks, including Facebook and MySpace. But he also was the first presidential candidate to have profiles on AsianAve.com, MiGente.com and BlackPlanet.com, influential social networks for the Asian, Hispanic and African American communities.

It is also important to note that Obama was not on every social network: he selected the most significant and important platforms in which to participate. While the unsuccessful Edwards campaign was on dozens of social networks, Obama limited his official presence to 15 and leveraged these platforms to direct people to the MyBO Web site, where the campaign had a greater ability to channel people to the specific activities and causes that were deemed the most important to fulfilling the campaign’s electoral strategy.

The MyBO Web site served as the hub for electoral activities, with spokes that reached to an array of platforms, all of which drove conversation back to the Web site in order to engage the people, empower the voices, raise the money and get the boots on the ground needed to win the election.

5. Using tools people are familiar with – These days, there is a social network for every distinct social niche. There also are umbrella networks that span all interests. Facebook has 150 million members; MySpace has 110 million; LinkedIn is approaching 50 million. These users have invested time, energy and social capital into developing their profiles and engaging other people on their network(s) of choice. The Obama campaign leveraged these existing platforms to maximize the social velocity of its outreach efforts.

6. Ensuring that people can find your content – If your content is posted but nobody can find it, does it exist? Can you convert anybody with it? No. According to Google, 90 percent of people who find a Web site through a search engine click on a result from page one of the search results. Therefore you have to be on page one or you will not be found. The Obama campaign understood this: it created simple Web sites with the URLs of popular search terms to increase the likelihood that they would appear at the top of the search results.Further, because the campaign knew that more than one-third of people do not distinguish between organic search results and paid search ads, it aggressively purchased search ads to increase the likelihood that users would be driven to friendly information.

7. Mobilizing supporters through mobile devices – Ninety percent of Americans are within three feet of their cell phones 24 hours a day. People still read more than 90 percent of their text messages, while pages of e-mails sit unopened in inboxes. Text messaging and the mobile Web offers an opportunity to reach supporters directly anywhere they are, any time of the day. It also is a much more cost effective way to mobilize voters. A 2006 study by the New Voters Project found that text-message reminders helped increase turnout by four percent at a cost of only $1.56 per vote, much cheaper than the cost of door-to-door canvassing or phone banking, at a cost of $20 to $30 per vote.

8. Harnessing analytics to constantly improve engagement activities – Management consultants call it kaizen – the concept of constant improvement. Obama’s campaign tracked the success of every e-mail, text message and Web site visit, capitalizing on the analytics that are inherent in digital communications. Each ad and e-mail was created in multiple versions (e.g., different headers, buttons vs. links, video vs. audio vs. plain text) to test what worked and what did not. The campaign developed more than 7,000 customized e-mails, tailored to individual prospects, and made real-time improvements to its outreach materials. Adjustments were made daily to improve performance and conversion. It worked. As the campaign progressed, the effectiveness of the e-mail campaign increased and conversion rates similarly improved.

9. Building the online operation to scale – In February 2007, Obama met with Netscape founder and Facebook board member Marc Andreessen to learn how social media could power the campaign.17 The campaign spent more than $2 million in 2007 on hardware and software that would serve as the foundation for the social media operation. 18 It built an enterprise-level system that was ready to scale to millions of supporters. As the primary season progressed and the general election campaign began, Obama’s team continued to look for ways to innovate. It used a “crawl, walk, run” approach, integrating new (and improved) social media elements into the campaign.

10. Choosing the right team – Long before the intensity of the 2008 campaign kicked in, Obama was already planning his online strategy. The Obama campaign had a core online team of 11 people with a total staff of 30, a number that climbed even higher toward the end of the cycle. While previous campaigns had treated online advocacy as an add-on, the Obama campaign integrated social media into all elements of the organization. Joe Rospars, the head of social media for Obama, reported directly to the campaign manager, David Plouffe. Internet and mobile was integrated into every aspect of the campaign.

(Source: www.edelman.com)

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