I just finished reading a great book, Yes We Did by Rahaf Harfoush about how social media built the Obama brand.Rahaf is a new media strategist from Toronto, who got an incredible opportunity to work on the New Media team for the Obama campaign. In her book, she takes you inside the entire online operation of the campaign and the strategy behind everything that significantly contributed to Obama's victory.
Rahaf shared some very helpful social media lessons that can be easily applied to your online community / presence. As I was reading the book, I shared some of them via Twitter. Click here if you would like to reply to any of them via Twitter, otherwise, I've listed them below:
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1. "How well do u know ur community? Offer the right incentives to increase engagement."
Obama's New Media Team offered great incentives to users such as dinners with Obama, front row seats at speeches and rallies, and 3-on-3 basketball challenges. These were the perfect incentives to drive the audience they wanted and needed. So, this begs the question, what drives your audience? I'm still in the process of figuring that out as it relates to ProspectLinker.
2. "Newly launched communities must establish routines & rituals to manage user expectations."
We all know that social media is about building that connection and long-term relationship between your organization and users / consumers. Establishing rituals and routines definitely helps. Back in September 2007, the focus of the campaign was to lay a solid groundwork for offline participation. And, through consistent regular social network profile updates, blog posts, and emails from the Director, David Plouffe, supporters of Obama were encouraged to get together and prepare for their primaries and caucuses in the beginning of 2008.
The same sort of consistency should be applied to your company in general. A friend of mine, Jun Loayza, wrote a great post a month ago about how important creating systems to stay consistent with marketing campaigns helped him survive the first few weeks of launching his startup. See his post here.
3. "Focus on what matters for your community and incite the right actions."
Like many websites, the myBarackObama website had a points system that kept track of users participation and rankings. The reason for this was to use online tools to organize offline action. That was their mandate. Their points system was refined to clearly reflect specific recent activities that user's were engaged in and then ranked them against other users in order to perpetuate participation. Very smart!
At ProspectLinker Beta (soon to be renamed), our mandate is to create tools that help people get insight from those who are outside of their network. As we've figured this out over time, going forward, every feature will emphasize and support this mandate. Our initial points system, which I believe we initially got wrong, (similar to how the new media team got it wrong with the myBO site) will change on our site soon. What matters is to learn from your mistakes and then figure out what works to help your mandate. The key is to know what is your mandate is.
4. "When asking something of ur community, make their experience more comfortable"
One aspect of the campaign that I loved was the myBO iPhone app that was built. Traditionally, volunteers would call strangers to encourage them to vote, right? Well, not with the Obama campaign, their app would tap into the users' personal contacts in their address book and identify people locally from their friends, who have not been called yet. How cool is that? How easy is it now to call someone you know, who's a friend and encourage them to vote? Brilliant!
They made an emphasis to make their users comfortable with the asks they called upon.
I have definitely been thinking about how to make our users of ProspectLinker (and potential users) more comfortable with how to use to pL.
5. "Ensure that you have strong analytics and consult them often in your email marketing strategy."
The Obama campaign had an entire team focused solely on analytics. Measuring the responses on emails, where users clicked, whether they respond to graphics, pictures, embedded videos, or not, etc. I noted this particular one because ProspectLinker will be heavily utilizing email and it's important to refine them and make them better each time.
If you are a ProspectLinker user and have received any of our emails, I would love to hear your thoughts on how we can make improvements on them. In addition to your feedback, we will be consulting the analytics to see what works best.
6. "Use stories of people interacting with ur brand and share them with ur community."
One of my favorite posts on the ProspectLinker blog was sharing an example of how a friend of mine needed advice from a media and entertainment professional and used ProspectLinker to get it. I wrote the blog post to help explain the value proposition of the company. As a result of the post, we received several new subscribers. It proved to be very helpful for our readers to relate and connect with a person who benefited from using our site.
7. "Measure engagement, not membership (i.e. quality, returning visitors, time spent, etc.)."
I remember a tweet from a friend of mine a while ago who said, "It's not about how many followers you have, but about how engaged they are with you." I agree. The question is how do you define your engagement? Through the quality of comments, number of returning visitors, length of time spent on a page, etc. These sorts of metrics provide a better sense of your engagement with members of your community.
8. "Smart org make their online presence more interesting by posting external content."
One of the ways to generate traffic to your blog is to write great content for someone else in your space with a guest blog post. However, as much as that benefits you, it also serves as a benefit for the person / community that shared your blog post. Why? Because having someone external to your organization post content can not only make your online presence more interesting, but can also integrate your site into the online community.
9. "Constantly research the effectiveness of ur emails, blogs, etc as perfection is a luxury."
As mentioned above in #5, consulting your analytics is very helpful in measuring whether your messages resonate with your community. It is very rare that a company can get it right from the jump. I've experienced this over the course of working on my startup. I completely agree with how Rahaf has worded it, "Today, perfection is a luxury that competes with the speed of changing technology." Iteration is so important. I've realized that the product my company releases may not be actually perfect when released, but rather, an ongoing work in progress. And, what we should strive to do is to improve those processes.
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Do you currently implement these social media tips? Do you have any additional thoughts pertaining to any of them in particular that could be helpful for everyone to know? Please share below in the comments.
Cheers,
Andre
http://abuddingentrepreneur.blogspot.com
Follow me on Twitter || http://twitter.com/acharoo
Blog || http://abuddingentrepreneur.blogspot.com
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