FreshNetworks Blog

The Wall Street Journal blog had a post last week about The Secret Behind Obama’s Nomination (it was social networks). Even though I’m not totally convinced by how much of a secret it was, I did enjoy the article and agree that Obama more than Clinton (and more than McCain) has made great use of social media.

The WSJ post discusses a lot Obama’s tactics and use of both his own site (www.my.barackobama.com) and on sites such as Facebook and MySpace. However, I want to dwell on a simple but incredibly effective aspect of Obama’s own site: it is very easy to get started. In fact it’s hard not to get started. Obama’s site is a model of how to engage people and why calls to action really work in online communities.

One issue we spend a lot of time working on when building online  communities at FreshNetworks is how to ensure and encourage participation. How do you design and build a community site which will make your target audience want to take part and then take the step to actually take part, contributing something or adding to the community in some way. The best and simplest solution is just to make it really easy for the community members to do things and to make it very clear to them what the benefits are. Obama’s site is a textbook example of how to do this and, I believe, this good online strategy and design has led to the impressive online community and support that is being spoken of.

When you first visit Obama’s website, there are two features on the landing page that power this community:

1. Calls to action: A list of very clear but very direct ways in which you can get involved in the campaign by registering to vote, hosting an event, volunteering, taking action. Whatever I might want to do, big or small, I can do from the homepage. They make no pretence that the purpose of the page is to point you in the direction of all the ways in which you can help the Obama campaign. But this makes absolute sense. If you visit the site, the chances are that you want to know more and may want to contribute in some way. By placing these very direct calls to action in such a prominent position on the homepage, they are actually making it very easy for the visitor to do exactly what they want to do on the site, without having to hunt around. It’s easy, it’s simple and best of all it’s effective.
2. Replaying my own activities: Once signed in the homepage changes. Rather than just a set of calls to action, the site lists all the activities that I could be involved in (attending a rally, hosting an event, knocking on doors, raising money) and then tells me how much of each I’ve done in the last week and the last month. This information is also available to the other members of the community. Different communities have different purposes and work for different reasons. Obama’s is a community of purpose, one where people have a common goal (to get him elected) and are working together to achieve this. In such a community, information on what individuals and the community collectively are doing to achieve this purpose is critical. And by playing it back to me on my homepage it will remind me first of what I can do to support this purpose and secondly of how I am performing.

So Obama’s site is effective because it makes it very clear how I can take part and add to the campaign. Once I’m signed up it tracks what I do and reminds me how I can help. It’s simple and it works. Calls to action are perhaps the single most important element to make sure you get right in your community. You need to sign-post how people can take part. Let them know what they can do and the kind of activities that you expect the community members to want to do. Links and headings should be powerful, telling you what to do and the benefits. Sites who have a strong strategy of engagement usually get this right. Those without such a strategy don’t.

Some more reading

• On the Convention: New Media Stream Into an Old Tradition
• The politics of social media
• Online Social Networks in Politics: Promise, Frustration and…
• Close Encounters Of The Republican Kind: McCainSpace Relaunches
• Survey: Record number of Americans following election via Web
• McCain Lags Behind Obama in Online Fundraising, Social Networking Popularity
• Online Community Numbers that Don’t Add Up

Today’s Libération, in Paris, reports on the rise of “le Twitter” (or gazouillis as it could be in French) and in particular its use in politics. Citing a French researcher the article says that:

Politicians, already under pressures, like to think that with these new means of communication they will escape the yoke of journalism and instead establish a direct link with the public

Twitter is still in it’s infancy in France. It has only 6,000 users, as opposed to the two million French people on Facebook. But even though the take-up is small (although growing rapidly) it’s development is being accelarated by learning from how it is being used in the US.

The French researcher quoted in the article no doubt has Barack Obama and his more than 50,000 followers in his mind. But what is interesting is to compare how he is using Twitter and how it is being used by French politicians.

Obama has a large following and is using Twitter as a means of pushing out messages and feeds. Contrast this with Benoît Hamon, a French Member of the European Parliament. He is using Twitter to give updates on what he is doing, such as

I don’t understand why riot police has cordoned off the European Parliament for Sarkozy’s arrival. The strikers have always been peaceful until now.

This contrast is interesting and shows, again, how the same social media site can be used by different people for different things. Obama is using it to issue notices and updates, Hamon to give his followers a real insight into his life and observations.

Perhaps most interesting, however, is that even though Twitter is in its infancy in France it is being used in a very mature way by its politicians. This shows that being a first mover can often mean a slower adoption curve. The US took to Twitter a lot quicker but the growth of corporate, political and organisational use of the medium to engage the public has developed quite slowly. France can start higher up this curve. It can start much sooner to use social media to have a direct link with the public.

Some more reading

• Can Barack Obama Fix Twitter?
• Twitter, la nouvelle arme des politiques
• McCain Lags Behind Obama in Online Fundraising, Social Networking Popularity

A lot has been written about the online strategies of Barack Obama’s campaign team, in particular in their ability to drive grassroots support and donations from thousands of supporters. (See our  own posts here and here).

One of the latest outputs from the team is an open briefing to supporters by David Plouffe, Campaign Manager. He’s recorded a short video of himself and some powerpoint slides that detail the upcoming campaign strategy and what’s required if they are to beat John McCain.

I think the video is worthy of a mention as it’s a great example of an organisation moving from polished advertising messages to raw, uncut conversations aimed at driving community engagement.

For fifty years presidential candidates have carefully crafted their messages and tried to give a sense of Teflon-coated invulnerability. Yet here is the campaign manager having a quick chat into the camera. He’s filmed in poor light, from his office chair, in casual clothes.

Now I am not saying this message hasn’t been carefully crafted, I am sure it has. In fact they probably tested different versions with a private online research community to get feedback before sending it out to everyone. But it’s the fact they have chosen to go with an unpolished, real-world feel that I find most interesting and that makes the video engaging.

Also worthy of note is that despite this being a two-horse race, despite the fact that McCain’s people will be keen to pour over the strategies mentioned here, they have still published it for all to see. They know the impact on their own advocates will outweigh the benefit to McCain’s troops. That’s a pretty bold move, but it’s what his campaign has been about all along.

This video is a great example of someone who has embraced the open, straight talking nature of the web to create real engagement and dialogue.

So if the ‘major event’ template employed by the BBC News website week is to be believed, November’s US election will be an Obama vs McCain affair. As something of a political junkie in the UK it’s great that we get so much coverage of events from the Primaries, but what I like even more is that so much conversation is going on online, that I can start to look at events as they are presented to and talked about by Americans.

The use of social media by the campaigns is impressive – Obama in particular has a website that makes it extremely easy for you to engage (if you want to) or just to find the information you want. If I want to register to vote, pledge money, agree to volunteer or to make calls I can do that from the homepage. I can also see his speeches (and take them with me by embedding them in my own sites) and read his policies. It’s a great example of building real engagement online and probably something that deserves a longer post than this about.

What I’m particularly enjoying is following the discussions in blog posts from the US. You can get a real feeling for what people think about and discuss, in a way that previously hasn’t been possible from abroad. Rather than following any one blog in particular, I’m enjoying dipping in and out of various people’s ramblings. And this week I was introduced to a great tool for finding these posts.

Trendpedia is a beta tool that searches blog posts and also lets you compare different search terms (and so it’s perfect for the Obama vs McCain debate). It may not be perfect and, in my experience, is better at picking up bigger brands and terms than more niche ones but it’s a useful little tool. Not least being able to compare discussions online over time…see the screenshot below.

To some, the US primaries, if not the presidential election itself, look like a done deal. The numbers speak for themselves: Clinton trails Obama 101,758 supporters to 428,899; McCain on the other hand has just 50,480 supporters and Huckabee doesn’t have a single one.

I’m not talking about delegates, votes last Super Tuesday or even predictions for this weekend’s ballots. Instead I’m talking about Facebook – the number of people who have said that they are ‘supporters’ of each candidate’s page on the social networking site. It’s not that these are particularly large numbers for Facebook (over 143,000 have joined a group about panic-buying carrots in May for instance) but that these ‘supporter pages’ are particularly active with high participation rates, moreover thay are a way to tap into a particulaly important demographic for candidates. A report by the Pew Research Center in January showed that 24% of the US public learns about the presidential campaign from the Internet; for those aged between 18 and 29, this figure rises to 42%. In a campaign where every vote really will count, the Internet is as much a battlground as the townhalls of New Hampshire have been and the cable channels and national TV debates will be.

That the Internet is a campaigning tool and source of information for voters is not new and not particularly surprising. What is interesting is to look at how the candidates are using their presence online and where they are going. Rather than just using their own websites to broadcast information in the hope that people will visit, the campaigns are being taken to places where voters hang out online – most notably Facebook and YouTube. Candidates are identifying supporters or potential supporters in these places and then harnessing them in groups or networks. This is a great example of the oft-cited shift in marketing theory from an age of ‘interruption’ (think traditional TV advertising) to onw of ‘engagement’ (think tailored ads online or word of mouth campaigns). The candidates are proving to be very good at using new tools; better in some cases than large brands are.

So what is the benefit of using Facebook or YouTube in the way that Clinton and Obama, McCain and Huckabee are? Well natural preexisting communities of people are easier to tap into and easier to seed with information and ideas than are communities of people you have to build yourself. You can use these communities as a place to share all your information – no need to have seen a particular campaign ad when it aired as you can watch it in your own time on YouTube. But what is more exciting is the opportunity to use groups such as those on Facebook to test new ideas – get feedback on campaign slogans and positioning with a sample of a few thousand people before you release it on the whole country. This is more people than you could reach with traditional methods such as Focus Groups, and because you are tapping into a community with social bonds and networks you are able to watch how a community (rather than set of individuals) respond. You can see how the influencers in the group react, and how they pass your message onto others. If you use it properly, you have created a microcosm; a test lab for your ideas and messages. And all for relative little outlay.

The candidates in the US primaries appear to be ahead of the game in terms of marketing and using online communities for innovation. They could teach brands a lot, but have a significant advantage in being able to easily identify where their target audience hangs out and are happy to engage them publicly for all to see. Brands often need some help with this.