Obama Presidential Campaign
Camapign:
Obama Presidential Campaign
Campaign Summary:
This was without a doubt a showcase example of online social media in action. The Obama preseidential campaign leveraged the Internet, and in particular, the ‘social web’ more than any other event that had come before it. The campaign was multi-facited, starting with Obama’s Democrat nomination, and the head-to-head battle with Hillary Clinton, through to the election itself, the inauguation, and then the subsequent initiatives sinc Obama took office such as the the new whitehouse.gov website, and live blogging of speeches. The Obama campaign had an official presence on over 15 social networking sites, including Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter. Each of these spawned numerous supporting groups, and fan pages. More importantly, they stimulated discussion and debate, not only online, but in the real world.
Campaign Results
- 3 million online donors during the election
- 2 million people created profiles on my.barackobama.com
- Video: 1,800 videos created since January 2009. They were viewed 15,000,000 times for 14,000,000 hours.
- Search: For every $1 spent on search, $9 was received in donations. That’s a 900% return on investment.
- Email: After someone registed, email was the main method of communications to stay in touch and ensure the supporters rallied around Obama. It was used constantly throughout the campaign with every emails call to action (CTA) being ‘DONATE NOW’.
- Website: The campaign website was developed in 10 days. It evolved over time, but was the focal point/platform for the campaign.
- Technology: Throughout the campaign, technology was used to amplify excitement with the main purpose to try and encourage a moment (or behaviour change).
- Testing: The databases were used to test consumer feedback of campaign content/videos. A control group of 1,000 was used and learnings applied to the content/video prior to mass sends.
- Database: As soon as supporters signed up to the website or campaign, they were segmented based on the several fields captured about them. They were then divided up amongst the campaigners (video trained supporters) based on their profile and communicated with via phone or door knock.
- Smear: The US elections are won and lost on the truth factor (or smearcomponent). Obama’s campaigners ensured that search was a huge part of the fight against smear. Whenever a new rumour surfaced, a search campaign was created to direct people back to the ‘Fight the Smear’ website.
- Community: MyBarack membership site had a focus on being local and developing a community of supporters. It was supporters connection to local and community (offline) Obama events.
- Training: Supporters were able to be educated on Obama’s policies via an online video. The video was used to educate supporters so they could take to the streets and rally more supporters around them.
- Twitter: more followers than anyone else (168,000)
References
Thanks to the following sources for the information contained in this case study. Please visit their sites for more info -
Day One
Hello World,
I have decided to start this blog of Social Media Campaigns as I have had trouble finding a single resource online that showcases the best of the best in the Social web world. I will attempt to post all campaigns that are successful, unique, or doing something cool. Hopefully it will be come a resource for marketers and anyone else interested in online social campaigns to reference. Feel free to contact me with any breaking campaigns that you know of or are involved in and I will try to post them as soon as possible on to this blog for all to see.
Cheers
Carl
