Mon, July 20, 2009 1:16 PM EST

Social Media and How it Defined the Presidential Campaign

by Oliver McIntyre

Many of my presentations start off with the question, “What was the largest and most successful Social Media campaign in the USA and what did it achieve?” In my book, the Barack Obama campaign was and, as we all know, he became the President of the United States.

Main Street now accepts the fact that social media is one of the most powerful and persuasive of marketing tools. Many of the ad agencies here in NYC advertise senior digital positions requiring that candidates have a minimum of two years of Internet experience. So, it’s easy to understand why many clients are frustrated at the level of understanding and expertise coming from the agency team when it comes to Social Media strategy and planning.

The social media-marketing umbrella includes sites that are both Web 2.0 and 1.0 – and basically we need to ensure that our clients are somewhere that enables discussions, sharing, or user-generated content (UGC), such as: blogs, forums, discussion boards, consumer reviews, social networks, online communities, social bookmarking sites, social news, social music, video and photo sharing, and of course Wikis. But before exposing our clients to the vast unknown it’s really important to create the social media road map. By that I mean a map of the social web as it pertains to each and every client’s business.

Our clients also need to understand what Social media can and will do. It engages an audience, encourages online conversations that are user-generated, it increases our client’s web presence and expands brand awareness. It generates publicity (both good & bad I’m the first one to point that out) and it provides huge SEO benefits. It’s great for brand building, relationship management, product development, reputation management, customer interaction, customer feedback, customer support, community building and, of course, SEO.

Last week, Nielsen released the 2009 Global Online Consumer Survey of over 25,000 Internet consumers from different 50 countries. The focus of the survey: to define the degree of trust consumers have related to online advertisers and brands. No surprise, 70% trusted opinions from other consumers posted online and 70% trusted branded websites. Due to the explosion of user generated content over the past two or more years, consumers have a new way of defining and assessing brands, products, and services. The report quotes: “The explosion in consumer-generated media (CGM) over the last couple of years (we are now tracking over 100 million CGM sources) means consumers’ reliance on word of mouth in the decision-making process, either from people they know or online consumers they don’t, has increased significantly.” The CGM (consumer generated media) revolution is forcing brand owners to use more realistic forms of messaging that are grounded in the experience of consumers rather than the BIG IDEA. No longer do we need traditional advertising to obtain information about a brand or product as the Web puts us all in direct, real-time contact with each other, wherever we are in the world.

The web is now channelized and as marketers we must help our clients to use social media to find out who tomorrow’s customers really are. In our everyday life, our conversation and personality differs dramatically when we speak to different types of people and we must apply the same thinking to web as we now have very defined user demographics.

Many web entrepreneurs will tell you how easy it is to get thousands of people to glance at a site, but how tortuous it is to get people to stick around or even come back again the following day. Creating an expectation for the very first time is easy but fulfilling a desire that people didn't even realize they had is something else.

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