Marketing for Success - Mike Vilimek

Savvy Marketing by Obama

There is little doubt that the Obama campaign will be considered as one of the best examples of presidential marketing in US history. The campaign was dominant in online marketing with Obama having around 3 million supporters on Facebook, 4 times as many friends as his Republican rival, Sen. John McCain, on MySpace.com, and an email contact list of almost 10 million addresses.

What’s even more impressive is that within 24 hours of last week’s historic vote, Obama’s team launched a new web site, Change.gov to reach out and connect with the public. In addition to a countdown to the January 20 inauguration, the site has a newsroom and even a blog. The site is also very interactive allow visitors to share their vision of Obama’s presidency and even apply for jobs.  

 

Obama is the first president in a long time to have such a tremendous following among the youth of America, and he continues to do the right things in order to maintain that following. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center found almost half of Americans ages 18 to 29 turned to the Internet as their major source of election news in 2008.While I have no proof, I would image the majority of them voted for Obama.

Twitter Search

There is a new way for you and your company to monitor your online reputation. Twitter is a service that has recently caught fire as the latest great social networking tool. In their words, “Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?”

Twitter has recently launched Twitter Search which allows you to search for what’s being said about any particular topic. Enter your company’s name or products or even your CEO’s name and get a gauge on what people are saying about you. You can even setup an RSS feed to get real time updates on your search terms.

Information Overload

Recently, the PFF Blog reported that Google CEO Eric Schmidt made the following 2 points during a speech at the Milken Conference:

1.       Users of Google's YouTube are uploading 10 hours of video to the site every minute. That's 14,400 hours worth of new video uploads each day.

2.       By 2019, your average iPod (or other personal digital device) will have enough capacity for 85 years worth of video. Start watching when you're born. Maybe you'll see the final credits in old-age.

With more and more content vying for attention, how will your marketing message break through the clutter? The key will be messages that are short, memorable and contain a visual component. Also try to offer something of value to consumers in addition to your marketing message, such as amazing footage within a video or hilarious content. This could help your message go viral.

Advertising on Social Networks

The amount of traffic that social network sites draw makes many marketers drool. Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and others all have large loyal user bases that often logon daily. The opportunity to get that many eyeballs seeing your ad has made advertising on social networks a hot topic.

Traffic aside, they also allow marketers the ability to specifically target which users see their ads. Users on these sites create detailed profiles that give marketers precise information on who fits within their target market and therefore who will see their ads.

So what’s the problem? To date, advertising on these sites has produced mixed results. Sure, some have found success, but it’s not the sure thing many had hoped. The problem may be the very reason for their popularity. Users visit these sites to interact with their friends and share content. They are so highly engaged with their network of friends, it makes it hard for them to be distracted by ads, resulting in very low click through rates.