To create a modern brand a marketer will need to have a “conversation” among “friends ” ;.Okay, now just how does a marketer create those “friendships” to have those “conversations” to generate those strong, effective, brands? An instance study in how to get this done could be the presidential campaign of Barack Obama in 2008.
In the beginning of this short article I wish to state this misnomer. President Obama is 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 because it is a tutorial on how modern products must be branded. I really hope that the reader will concentrate on the marketing and not the politics.
Barack Obama is a classic case in how a brand could be created in a New Media Age. To win the American presidency a candidate will need to have a lot of money and a lot of name recognition—a brand. If a candidate does not have a brand, if voters don’t know who you’re, you’re not going to be elected. If a marketer cannot distinguish their product 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 big 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 powerful brand. Barack had no brand; even yet in their 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 knowledge of social networking and just how to utilize 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 very hard, and very expensive to make a new service and brand it. This is why social networking is such an important element in modern marketing. A cultural media campaign allows a new service to be created and branded in the market place quickly, at hardly any cost. The modern market place is better explained by author Shiv Singh. There has been a change in the market place. No further are consumers interested in engaging with large impersonal brands. Consumers don’t trust brands any longer—they trust their friends. In a current survey conducted by The Economist half the respondents stated they don’t trust big business. They trust the recommendations of their friends. Leveraging the recommendations of friends is how you can create brands. That is the key reason why the use of social networking is indeed critical to branding. Through social networking, friends meet, conversations happen, and brands are created.
Which means if a product will be selected, the brand must turn into a “friend” to its consumer. This is what the Obama Campaign did and the way in which that he did this would be studied by marketers because it is a case study in how to generate modern brands using social media. By combining social networking that produces micro-targeting, force multipliers are produced that are needed to generate world-class brands.
The knowledge of the current market place allowed Barack and his team to quickly develop a strong brand and overcome the Clinton campaign. At this point, I would like to get rid of one that I made in a previous article. Recently, I wrote an article entitled, “The Perfect Storm: Why Companies Should Adopt Social Media Marketing while the Center of Their Marketing” ;.In this short article, I identified David Plouffe, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager as a genuine member of the Facebook management team. This was an error. The Obama staff member that I was considering was Chris Hughes, who served while the Obama Campaign Director of Online Organizing. Mr. Hughes had a great influence on the campaign social networking strategy.
The Obama campaign was not the initial campaign to make use of social media. They were the first to ever co-ordinate social networking having an entire campaign. They were the first to ever organize the use of social media. For social networking to work, it must be organized. John McCain and Howard Dean used the medium before Obama, but Obama and his staff surely could integrate and organize social networking into every area of the campaign in a smooth way. As a result of this Barak surely could create “conversations” that engaged. He created enthusiasm, nevertheless 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 know the important metrics that he needed to understand to be able to win his campaign. He surely could target and concentrate on his true supporters.
The strength of Obama’s social networking branding approach is so it was constructed to create and develop “friendships” ;.That is important for marketers to realize. When you meet someone there is a veil between you and that person. As you get to know one another better, smm panel the veil comes down. As your relationship develops, trust develops, and deeper conversations begin. These conversations bring about deeper relationships on a human level. On an advertising level, these relationships become strong brands.
The Obama campaign knew so it had to engage people, but that engagement had to be centered on trust. The Obama engaged people in what it called “the ladder” ;.You engage one step at the same time, build the connection deeper, and each step is a higher degree of commitment—a ladder. The steps of the ladder are on the basis of the level of comfort of the individual in relation to the campaign. A marketer would call these steps creating touch points.
The first touch point will be Personal. This is actually the point of which a marketer and customer first come into contact and “friend” each other on a platform like Facebook. In the Obama case, it had been at this stage when individuals are learning one another. An individual signs ups for messages and emails. The following touch point is Social. It’s this touch point that individuals start making posts or comments to a friend’s profile about your product. As of this touch point, a buddy explains to their friend why a product is a great 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. At this point, a person may feel comfortable enough with a brand to participate a “group” or produce a “group” ;.
In the Obama campaign, the following stage would be to become an Advocate. To drive interest, pictures might be posted, blogs written, or perhaps a video might be created and posted to You Tube, for instance. You will find analogies in the advocate stage for a marketer wanting to converse about the product with a “friend” (a customer) and vice versa. It’s in the advocate stage that a supporter might 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 an advertising situation, a person might speak to a buddy and recommend a product, making 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 very own networks of supporters that gave supporters use of the Obama database, that they may pull phone numbers for doing phone banking from their living rooms. In reading this short article, a marketer has to create an example with what the Obama campaign did to what each marketer can perform with their very own brand to boost engagement with their customers. Perhaps some organizations could offer discounts to their customers when they introduce their friends to the marketers and solidify the brand. Here a marketer could be flexible in their very own situation to increase their brand.
The reason why social networking platforms are so popular is that friends will have the methods to share video, blogs, pictures, and posts with their friends. This is a god-send for marketers as they fight to generate and expand their brand. Ford Motor Company just did this in a successful 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. Listed here is where scale has play. The reason why Ford’s and Obama’s campaign was so effective was because they both had the scale for “friends” to “converse” to generate the brand. This is why the planning stage is indeed important in making a brand. As Napolean said, “Every army has an idea until the first shot is fired” ;.An advertising campaign is chaotic. Things happen. A marketer must be flexible. The reason Ford’s and Obama ‘s social networking campaign was so successful was because there clearly was planning and enough scale was designed to engage “friends” ;.