Obama Continues Great Online Campaign Strategies

It's no secret that in the 2008 presidential election broke some records. One of them was the amount of grass roots fund raising and social media campaigning that Obama's campaign pioneered. Its success was, no doubt, a huge factor in his successful run for president.

Since 2008, politicians from the local to the national level have embraced social media and online marketing with the same fervor. You would now be a fool to run for even local office without an active and relevant Twitter account and Facebook page. Which brings us the 2012 presidential election and an interesting question:

How is Obama going to top that?

More specifically, now that every Republican nominee will use similar tactics, how is Obama's campaign going to stand out as different? His unique, cutting edge way of campaigning was such a large part of how he got into office and raised millions of dollars in $5 increments, one wonders how he'll top that. How he'll continue to get that kind of attention and support now that the idealist 'Hope' fervor and marketing differentiation that helped carry his first campaign is gone.

I was surprised and interested to see one of his new tactics emerge already:

Donate for a chance to dine with the president.

How cool is that? For any amount of donation, you can put your name in the hat to dine with the President. Its a standard sweepstakes, but twisted such that it fits campaign goals.

I find this to be a great tactic for a few reasons. First, if you're a liberal and an Obama fan it's your chance to schmooze with the President, get your ideas heard first hand like the top end campaign donors do—but at a much more affordable price. Even if you're an independent, someone not sure if they're going to vote for Obama let alone donate, it still seems to be a tempting offer. For $5 I can see a few otherwise non-donors dropping a few bucks for the chance to be heard first hand by the President. And finally, it's just pretty cool to meet the President, even if you don't agree with his politics. Tack the shear fact that, love him or hate him, Obama will go down in history books for being the first black President of the U.S. and it's quite an offer.

What do you think? Is a tactic like this going to up the amount of donations to the campaign? Or is it just a cheesy ploy?

Check In To Space

I had heard, in the infancy of Foursquare, that you could check in to outer space. I looked for it on my Foursquare app, thinking it might be one of those global check ins—because, you know, Earth is in space, right?—but I couldn't find it. Apparently I needed to be in a space ship—or a 7-Eleven.

Yep, you heard me. 7-Eleven is offering you the opportunity to check in to space at a 7-Eleven store. And they're giving you the opportunity to win a space experience! Okay, well a Zero-gravity flight at any rate. You're more apt to win free tickets to the movie Super 8, for which they are offering this cross promotion.

Yes, it's a bit hokey, but fun nonetheless. I'd stop by a 7-Eleven just to have that on my Foursquare history, would you?

Don't Be A Clingy Brand

This cartoon came to my attention a couple weeks ago, but I didn't get around to posting it. Having just been asked, yet again, to 'like' another brand on Facebook I remembered I wanted to share.

Noise to Signal Cartoon

Facebook pages and Twitter have been around awhile, but the past six months have seen and exponential growth in the number of brands now officially on both social networking sites and trying to use them. Granted, there is some cool stuff going on in this realm, and often following a brand you really like can be beneficial, but the constant requests to 'Like' or 'Follow' your brand are starting to sound like that classmate from high school, whom you barely remember, that keeps trying to 'Friend' you on Facebook. It starts to look a little pathetic.

The Anti Social Super Bowl?

Did the Super Bowl commercial lack social media components this year? According to this article from Ad Age, yes, they did. With the number of people with smart phones these days and the power of social media marketing it is surprising there weren't ANY integrated campaigns.

Granted, I learned from the Super Bowl of Social Media voting site that the Doritos and Pepsi Max spots were consumer generated concepts that the brands then produced for the Super Bowl. I had no idea. There was no press that I knew of and no indication prior to the spots airing that they were user generated. It does explain the fragmentation and appearance of a lack of a unified campaign. Honestly, they were some of my least favorite since they seemed contrived with too much cheap humor. Some of them actually offended my parents and I found them rather yawn-worthy. Haven't we seen that same crap in the last five years of Super Bowls? I'm actually more sad to find out those were user generated—there's got to be some better ideas out there.




Ian Schafer's Ad Age article cites some great examples of what could have been done with the campaigns that ran to make them more social. He chides Chrysler, Motorola and Coke for not reaping clear tie-ins that would have worked centrally with their Super Bowl campaigns. I loved the 'Imported from Detroit' ad from Chrysler, but why didn't Chrysler tie that in to some charitable cause for Detroit? It would have to be the right charity, but it would have been brilliant. You have millions watching, enraptured by the commercial, feeling the American Pride for Detroit—the right charitable tie in would have given Chrysler the image of a car company that cares as much about its city as it does about selling cars.


Schafer argues that incorporating social media would have given these campaigns legs beyond the Bowl. As it is, many of the commercials will continue airing for months, but I think he has a point. The social aspect would give you legs and interaction beyond the television. And isn't that what all brands are trying to do these days?

I wasn't watching the game, poised with my iPhone, but it was just across the room. I think I would have engaged if I'd been asked. Would you? Did you think the Super Bowl was lacking in social media aspects?

The (Twitter) Empowered Consumer

I just got the upgrade to Adobe CS5 yesterday. Yep, it was a pretty sweet day—until Photoshop CS5 started crashing my computer regularly. I couldn't do anything. I had to constantly restart my entire computer and with a few deadlines looming, my patience with the program got really short, really fast.

After talking with IT, it looked like all I needed was some upgrades, so I managed to work around it yesterday afternoon to hit my end of day deadlines and planned to update first thing this morning. IT graciously updated my computer early this morning before I even got in. Unfortunately, it didn't do a thing.

By crash number four of the morning, I was royally ticked.

What did I do? Well I tweeted my frustration of course. My computer was restarting—again—so I pulled out my iPhone and let Adobe have it—hash tagging everything I could. I wanted anyone considering the upgrade to know this was a very bad potential issue. That and I knew Adobe would here it—if they were social media smart.

Well darned if a guy from Adobe hadn't responded by the time my Firefox was up and running again. Good job Adobe. He also managed to steer me, and IT, to some links that eventually fixed the problem. It still took some sweat and some cursing before it managed to work quite right, but throughout I was able to communicate with someone from Adobe. He even offered to get someone in touch to work through the problem when things were not looking good.

The customer service component of Twitter is quite the phenomenon. Seriously, if you aren't on Twitter, you really should be—just for this aspect if nothing else. And if you're a brand that's not monitoring tweets like mine, you really should be—it can quickly escalate. Just ask Motrin.

The best part about Twitter-style customer service is the timing, the lightening speed that you get in contact with someone—no phone menus involved. The first time I experienced it was at a local restaurant that had built its business with Twitter—they sponsor local Tweet Ups, etc. I'll admit, I originally went there since I'd heard so much about it on Twitter. Well, it was my first time there and my dessert really sucked—it was a giant cookie and it was completely overcooked and dry. I'm not the type to outright tell my waitress that the dessert sucked, but I did tweet about it. The response was immediate—like within a few minutes. Unfortunately I didn't check my phone until I was on the way home, but I was able to express my annoyance and clearly have it heard and got an apology and a sincere effort to keep me as a customer. It made me much more likely to return.

What's the moral? Twitter is fast becoming the best way for customers to interact with their brands. It brings the brands to a somewhat personal level—even if you're just tweeting back and forth with the brand name. They have a personality and if it's done right, it really can make you feel like a valued customer, no matter how ticked you are.

The Gap's Brand Boomerang

Original Logo

New Logo

A little over a week ago the Gap suddenly announced a new logo. A very generic logo that boiled down their iconic brand to typeset Helvetica and a blue box. I wasn't a particular fan—my immediate reaction was why? Why do this to your simple, yet effective blue box? A simple Helvetica typeset only improves a logo if it was hideous or too busy to begin with—and that was simply not the case here. All it does is make it extremely generic.

I intended to post about it immediately, though a busy schedule both in and out of work prevented me from really having time to collect my thoughts about it. As luck would have it consumers on Twitter and Facebook ranted plenty for me and shockingly, the Gap did an about face last Tuesday, announcing that they were ditching their new logo in favor of the old one. Thank goodness.

Of course, that was after they ran a crowd sourcing campaign to design their new logo. Crowd sourcing is a cool idea, but maybe not the right approach for your core brand identity—you get a lot of crappy logos. Check out Brand New's post on it, they highlight some of the pieces. And if you scroll down, they'll give you a taste of exactly how generic that new Gap logo really was—by applying the same treatment to a number of other iconic brands. It made me laugh.

Kudos to Gap for swallowing their pride and relenting that what was probably months of hard work was misguided and hated by their target audience (assuming the whole thing was not a big publicity stunt as some have suggested). It really is an interesting study on the power of social media in today's consumer market. Everywhere from brands to politics, one false move can create an enormous wave of bad publicity and anger from the people you're trying to please.

Pepsi's Successful CSR Program

Earlier this year, Pepsi announced a $20 million corporate social responsibility (CSR) campaign, in lieu of its traditional Super Bowl sponsorship, called the Pepsi Refresh Project.

The program essentially gives monthly grants to different organizations or ideas that are chosen via online voting by the general public. It's like a social responsibility idea generation site funded by a major soft drink company. Anyone can submit an idea and anyone can vote. Pretty cool. There are a four different monetary categories that an idea can compete in from $5,000 to $250,000 and Pepsi awards the top winners in each category—how many top ideas depends on the monetary amount (i.e. many more $5,000 idea projects are funded than $250,000 projects).

So far the level of engagement is huge! It's a challenge just to get your idea in the running (they only accept so many ideas per month for voting) and then the voting competition is fierce. It's great to see so much engagement between a company, it's consumers and a wide variety of charities and community projects.

Okay, I'm gushing a little, but I'm a fan of CSR programs. Some people write them off as merely green washing large corporations to make them feel friendlier, and sure, most companies aren't going to participate in such a program unless they see some sort of ROI, but even so, don't you like seeing corporate money going to good causes? I do.


Shameless Plug

So I've never done this on the blog before, but I am going to give a shameless plug for a cause competing in the Pepsi Refresh Project this month. I know some of the people involved with the Global Genes Project, which is working with the Children's Rare Disease Network for their Pepsi Refresh idea. Essentially, the Global Genes Project aspires to serve as an awareness and funding platform for rare diseases. Rare diseases suffer in these areas simply because they're each so rare, but if you add up all of the rare diseases and the number of people affected by them, you start to get more significant numbers. Therefore the Global Genes Project is a way for many smaller rare disease charities to work together toward mutual goals. Pretty cool idea honestly and it's up for the $250,000 Pepsi Refresh Grant to help jump start it (the Global Genes initiative is only about a year old). If you're so inclined, please check out vote4hope.org where they'll show you three different ways you can vote in the Pepsi Refresh Project for the idea. It's currently around #23 and only the top two ideas get the grant. You get up to 10 votes per day, so you can vote for other ideas too. Check it out!

Old Spice, W+K and the Invention of Real Time Advertising

If you haven't heard about the Old Spice campaign from the brilliant minds at Wieden + Kennedy, you must have unplugged yourself from the internet or boycotted all social media outlets. The hilarious, real time social media campaign has taken the internet by storm, confounding industry creatives with the speed and quantity of responses.

If you're unfamiliar with the campaign, here's the gist. Old Spice has a character called Isaiah Mustafa (from their TV spots) who has nice abs (and knows it), sits around in a towel all day charming ladies (and gents) in that cheesy, suave ladies man kind of way. What W+K did was make this character instantly accessible by having 30 to 60 second videos of him posted to YouTube that actually answered questions and comments from consumers that were posted on Twitter and Facebook (and even Yahoo! Questions)—in real time.

It's a campaign that's taken social media advertising to an entirely new level. Instead of using Twitter and Facebook to mostly respond to crises or user comments and complaints, or even to sometimes run a contest or game, it's actually letting users interact with a brand's character via video. Everyone in the industry marveled at the mere ability to turn around cleverly written videos so quickly. W+K isn't revealing all their secrets behind the productions, but W+K's global interactive creative director, Iain Tait, sheds a little light on their process in this Fast Company post. They were able to produce nearly 100 custom spots in a day based on their plan and strategy for a quick turn around. There's been much speculation as to how they wrote so quickly. I'm guessing some of the situations he acts out were already pre-written with props that went with them and just tweaked to be customized, but some of the responses and definitely written on the fly—like the response to taming wild whales. At any rate it feels like customized, real time responses like the Burger King Subservient Chicken campaign did years ago. It's just revamped and on a new level and actually responding in real time, to some extent anyway, where the Subservient Chicken was more or less very cleverly written code and video. Like the Subservient Chicken campaign did years ago, it's also blown the current standards of internet interaction with your customers out of the water and given agency creatives everywhere a brilliant social media campaign to aspire to. Bravo!

Sadly, the responses have ended after two days of custom replies—Mr. Mustafa has to sleep sometime you know—but is this the new social media advertising of the future? Would a stunt like this ever work quite as well again?

The spots range from responses to the likes of Demi Moore and Alyssa Milano and @biz (the founder of Twitter) to a marriage proposal (she said yes). If you haven't seen the videos check out the YouTube channel or some of the ones I've selected below. They'll give you a good laugh.

Volkswagen's Fun Theory Competition

Volkswagen has a fantastic new initiative in Sweden called the Fun Theory Awards. Their blog hosts a few hidden camera type commercials that aim at getting people to do things that are better for themselves or the environment by making the activities fun. The theory itself rests on the idea that making things fun is the easiest way to change behavior for the better.

The Fun Theory Competition wants your ideas on new ways to change behavior through fun and Volkswagen is offering €2,500 for the winning idea. As far as I can tell, the contest is open in anyone, you don't have to be Swedish, so get thinking! The contest ends December 15th.

Check out the videos below, which are also on the Fun Theory Blog, to see what Volkswagen has already done to get the fun started!







(Thanks to the Truth Against the World blog for the heads up on this awesome initiative.)

Magical Tweets

I'll admit it, I'm a Harry Potter fan. I read the books, saw the movies, bought the movies and then reread some of the books again. I love the stories and even as over-commercialized as the franchise has become, I still love it all.

Even if you're not as enamored with all things Harry Potter as I am, you have to give them credit for their recent Twitter application to promote the latest movie. Marketers everywhere are trying to figure out the best way to use social media to promote, but since Twitter and social media are driven by the consumer, it's a tricky beast. This current Harry Potter Twitter application, however, is a great blend of entertaining and promotional.

Essentially, you visit HarryPotterTweet.com and select one of four spells featured in Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince to direct message (DM) to your twitter friends. If they click on the link in the DM, they'll see a fake version of their Twitter homepage followed by an animation of the spell being cast and a message from you. Unfortunately the messages are pre-written, but they have a variety of amusing and appropriate messages. Check out the thumbnails on the left to see the spell cast on me last week.

The only glitches with this clever application, are the inability to customize your DM and making the default "Check this out, it's simply magical. [URL]" so vague it's a little too close to spam. The application's been a bit slow to load at times too, causing spell victims to leave the page before the spell's animation has occured. Beyond those issues though, the idea and execution of this Twitter application is fantastic—the marketer's ideal blend of promotional and fun.

Sharpie Art

Sharpie has a new social media campaign site, Sharpie Uncapped, encouraging people to use their Sharpies to create art all over the place, from shoes to soccer balls to Barbies. It seems to be a permanent extension of Sharpie's Write Out Loud campaign from earlier this year. The big idea is great, but I don't think it's really working yet.

For one thing the home page is a little confusing. It seems to be mostly an aggregator for everything referencing Sharpie on YouTube or Flickr. If you venture over to the Uncapped Gallery area of the site, it invites you to submit your Sharpie art and promises the possibility of being featured in the gallery. It took me much longer than it should have to figure out that would be in the gallery's Sharpie Showcase, mostly because 80% of the gallery page is more aggregators like we saw on the home page, just organized slightly differently. If you click on these you get a Flickr page key word searching 'Sharpie' or their YouTube channel.

The Sharpie Communities page really just reiterates what the Sharpie Gallery showed, but tagged a Facebook fan page and Twitter account in there for good measure. This page makes sense. What doesn't is why it's confusingly repeated in the gallery section.

The Sharpie How To section is abysmal. If you're going to even have a how to section and I'm going to take time to watch one of those how to videos, I do expect them to have some information that goes beyond a fourth grade art class. I realize we're dealing with markers here, but come on, Sharpies must do something slightly cooler than just draw on book covers and t-shirts, which I could probably figure out how to do without a video.

The site does have a few merits though. The look and feel of the site is great. It's clean with bold color accents, hand lettered headings and fun Sharpie doodles throughout and it works well. The banner ad inviting you to play around with the Sharpie twin tip marker—which really just translates to a fun little drawing widget—is fun and engaging. On another site, this banner ad would have me hooked—on this site, I really thought it needed it's own page to play and have fun with. And why don't you give me the option to draw on some shoes or other objects while we're at it?

Overall, the idea has some merit. Uploading your Sharpie Art will get Sharpie lovers involved, but for a simple four page website, the organization and user experience is not very good. Sharpie is a great, well-known brand and is such a widely used product it will naturally have a presence on social media sites like YouTube and Flickr, but this site isn't yet working to bring them together. What do you think? Did you get as lost as I did trying to navigate through the site?