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More on Obama and Social Media

In a recent post, speculated that President-elect Obama will not abandon the social network he built during the campaign but use it to mobilize supporters to push the change he envisions. Here's an article with the full scoop....

... in the September/October issue of Technology Review. Note: the article is free but registration is required (it is really worth it.)

My favorite line in the article describes the McCain campaign "blogette" (what is that anyway?) written by Sen. McCain's daughter, with this description:

  • "The bloggette site features a silhouette of a fetching woman in red high-heeled shoes. "It gives a hipper, younger perspective on the campaign and makes both of her parents seem hipper and younger," says Julie Germany, director of the nonpartisan Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet at George Washington University."

If the McCain campaign thought like this think-tank person, no wonder they fumbled the social media opportunity. Trying to present the "image" of being hip and young with some clever graphic design while the McCain social network site is described elsewhere in the article this way: "It was very insular, a walled garden. You don't want to keep people inside your walled garden; you want them to spread the message to new people."

But few of us in marketing can afford to laugh at hapless politicians out of touch with young voters. How many of us are trying to create walled gardens for our brand communities? Or trying to put a hip, young image on a one-way mass marketing communication model? How many of us are really ready to entrust spreading the message about our brands to our consumers, the way Sen. Obama let his supporters spread the word about his candidacy?

I think we will all learn a lot from the Obama administration's social media strategies.

Posted by Jim Nail on December 2, 2008 at 03:26 PM | Email this post Permalink
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