For those hiding under a rock, the American elections kick off in less than a week with Obama currently leading. While the politics is irrelevant to me (I’m not sure I like either of them and both have major faults) but what does fascinate me is the marketing behind the Obama campaign. Specifically how he has used technology to evangelise the apathetic masses towards his cause. What’s amazing is the use of social media to target the youth who are usually more interested in drinking than voting at all.
Firstly, Obama has used Facebook in an incredibly power manner. Search for Obama on Facebook and he has close on two and a half million fans. Add to the fact that there is another group that has close on a million people supporting Obama you can see the impact. Bearing in mind that these users are all actually talking about Obama and creating debate around him, the impact is even stronger. These massive numbers exclude the groups that are promoting Joe Biden, Obama’s Vice President.
Secondly is the Obama Twitter account. Over one hundred thousand people finding out where Obama is going to be speaking is pretty powerful, especially if those people tell their friends and so on.
While Facebook and Twitter are smart tools, the Obama campaign has an absolute fortune of money and clearly a marketing genius behind their online campaign.
First came the iPhone application, a clever move to link Obama with such a cool, hip device. This allowed you to call your friends to promote Obama as well as volunteer ones time for the Obama campaign. What this application has done is remove two very time consuming campaign procedures (phone calls and finding volunteers) and given it to voters to perform. This is one of the tenets of social media in that you involve your users to the point where they do the work for you.
If the iPhone application wasn’t enough, Obama then went and put adverts in Xbox Live games. Now in America Xbox is essentially the defacto console for college students who spend hours online via Xbox Live. This target market usually cares more about girls and beer than politics so gathering traction around these students is critical.
While it’s obviously impossible to isolate marketing as the winning factor in this years elections it will be fascinating to see how these efforts have affected the race for the White House.
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The US presidential elections are without a doubt one of the biggest PR events in any year that they are held…
Lots of fun and games and I’ll admit that my first instinct when I heard about the Obama ‘assasination plot’ was CHEESY PR…
But then I’m just a conspiracy theorist so what do I know…
Well we must also consider what are the factors in Obama’s marketing campaign on Presidential inauguration.
http://controversial-affairs.blogspot.com/2009/01/obama-presidential-inauguration-2009_19.html