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Driving Innovation

10 Social Media lessons from the Obama campaignDelivered by Mark McNally mark.mcnally@mindcloud.eu

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Driving Innovation

The numbers

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Driving Innovation

1.0 Have clear objectives for your campaign• Mission - To become president

• Key Objective - To raise funds for the campaign

• Key Objective - To engage the wider community to raise money and get other people to vote

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Driving Innovation

2.0 Drive action• Email is still king and

stimulates most action

• Ensure low barriers to action

• Focus on making things happen

• Action delivers objectives

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Driving Innovation

3.0 Allow people to engage at all levels• Different levels of

engagement

• Opportunities for most casual supports to stay involved

• Drive up commitment by offering more value

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Driving Innovation

4.0 Identifying and empowering superusers - manage the community• Identify connectors early

• Empower committed advocates

• Give super users tools to activate others - Social and fundraising groups, event organising on MyBo community site.

• Connections not just left to chance

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Driving Innovation

5.0 Fish where the fish are• Go where the people are

• Objective to make sure that each supporter online regardless of where they are, has a connection with Obama.

• Used other social spaces to drive conversation back to MyBO community site.

• MyBO focused on more specific activities - raising finance, campaigning

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Driving Innovation

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Driving Innovation

6.0 Be relevant• Listen to what is being said

• Identify touchpoints (where are people already talking about you and what are they saying)

• Be ready to react

• Engage and add value to existing conversations

Sarah Palin - Obama campaign most successful fundraiser - $11 million raised in one day following Sarah Palin speech - Campaign reacted community via email. Giving the cynical speech as a reason the to donate money to ensure Palin could not succeed

No.1 Obama Fundraiser

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Driving Innovation

7.0 Combine online and offline• Get people to act offline - using

online to facilitate offline line activities

• Maximise offline activity by sharing the experiences in the online space

• Both totally compliment each other

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Driving Innovation

8.0 Ensure people can find your content• 90% of people find content through a search engine

click (Source Google)

• You have to be on the first page of search results of you won’t be found.

• Create simple websites with the URLs of popular search terms.

• People use You Tube related videos so mimic original critique tags in the Obama response (don’t do a habitat!)

• 1/3 of people don’t distinguish between organic search results and paid results so they aggressively purchased search ads and adwords.

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Driving Innovation

• Track the success of every email

• Very cheap to track effectiveness

• Use the users to test

• Subject of email has probably biggest impact on whether it is opened or not.

• Campaign found open rate could be doubled from 15% to 30% by just changing the subject line - why not test before you send

• Campaign developed more than 7000 customised emails tailored to individual prospects making real time improvements

• Conversion rates improved through the campaign

9.0 Measure everything

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Driving Innovation

10.0 Choosing the right team• Online was not an add on - online team

were pulled together early

• Team of 11 with the time and skills to deliver. Team had worked on the Dean campaign.

• Team/advisors of experts - Chris Hughes - co founder of Facebook and Eric Schmidt to name a few.

• Head of social media reported directly to the campaign manager - integrated social media across the whole organisation

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Driving Innovation

10+ Culture • Social media central to the

campaign - not a sideline

• Agile approach to responding

• Accepting some chaos

• No room for command and control

• Open and transparent

• Set ground rules