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Social media decided our next president and how we use it will decide Sprint’s future
By Justin Goldsborough | November 14th, 2008
Justin case you were wondering…I was not surprised in the least when I heard that Barack Obama will be appointing a Tech Czar to his staff. Seemed like just another logical step in the right direction for a president-elect who used the powers of social media to raise money, mobilize followers and put himself and his message out there.
The Obama campaign’s use of technology is something all corporate employees and execs can learn from. It DOES NOT MATTER who you voted for…the results show that Obama won because he knew how to use social media, or rather he hired people who knew how to.
At last week’s Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, New York Magazine’s John Heilemann said the Internet and social media played as disruptive a role in the 2008 election just like TV did in 1960 — remember a sweaty, nervous Richard Nixon debating a clean cut and confident JFK?
I’d say if the president-elect can use social media to win the highest office in the United States, it’s pretty obvious that companies like Sprint should be using it to communicate with customers and gain brand support. Here are three uses of social media we’d be wise to copy from Obama’s campaign:
1. Accessible messaging you can share. See any Obama videos this past year online? I did. I think I saw hundreds. And I’m not the only one. During the democratic primary, Obama’s YouTube videos were viewed 10:1 over Hillary Clinton’s videos. Obama’s tech team realized the power of YouTube from the start — get your candidate delivering his message on video and put it out on the Internet for people to share.
Obama’s “story” spread across the country in record time thanks to these videos. And Americans received unprecedented access to a presidential candidate. This ease of accessibility was Obama’s differentiating factor. It’s the same type of accessibility customers have come to expect from the brands they support. That’s why Southwest employees, Wal-Mart’s lawn and garden expert and Bob Evans CEO blog. They want to provide that type of accessibility.
2. Mobilization. The Obama campaign’s online fundraising was genius not only because it raised a ton of money, but because it made people feel like they had an impact on the campaign. People gave $10 and they were part of something. Obama also mobilized with his language. He always talked about what “you” did to make this happen or about yes “we” can.
Now, I’m not advocating we ask customers to donate money to Sprint :). But we need to come up with more ways for people to feel a connection to our brand. One way would be the aforementioned blogging and videos. Another would be continuing to offer opportunities for outside developers to create apps for our devices. And a third would be to give those folks out there who love Sprint a platform to tell their story and those folks who are Sprint device experts and opportunity to share that knowledge and be champions for our brand.
3. Be everywhere. Go to Obama’s site and you’ll see a list of all the places on the Internet where he had a presence. He was on every social network I’ve ever heard of. His team created mobile sites so you could access him on your phone. They even created an iPhone app that would look through your contacts and suggest who you might want to call to register to vote based on area code (swing states first, of course). And then there was the text messaging. If you signed up, you got several texts from Obama’s team — more asking you to register to vote if you lived in a swing state. Wherever you prefered to get your communication, Obama was there.
And one of the reasons Obama had a presence in these places goes back to the sharing. If you saw a cool Obama video, you could put it on your blog or MySpace page. If you wanted to share information about a fundraising effort you planned on barackobama.com with your Facebook friends and then you wanted to add some photos from Obama’s Flickr stream to your Facebook posting, Obama’s tech team made that easy to do.
Sharing content like this is where the Internet is going and it’s how people expect to communicate. And if you’re put off by my political example, then just take a look at how content sharing is working for Sprint. Recently, Goodby created a widget page that you may have seen. The widget page in itself is cool, but what’s cooler is that you can share it on your social networking sites or embed it in your Web/blog page. Check out the pic below from Facebook to see what I mean and check out all the conversation this site has generated on Twitter. People are using this site to get our “Now” message out there for us. We need more communication like this…and we need it now.
“The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent the positions, strategies or opinions of Sprint.”