I recently got a chance to meet up with Scott Goodstein, the Director for External Organizing for Obama for America. It was interesting to see how a man, who’s background was rooted in music bands and lifestyle, could direct his talents to helping one of the most phenomenal political campaigns in history. I took away quite a few interesting points from the discussion, and the post below summarizes the key points.

Social Media as a Service
Many of us believe that the social media campaign crafted out by the Obama team took a front seat role in ensuring that Obama won the election. While it did bring about a significant increase in votes, Scott viewed the social media efforts as a service to the rest of the campaign, as opposed to being the central core of it. Take the finance department for example. He looked at how social media could help raise more money. Rather than blatantly ask for money, he went about using social media to get merchandize made’. The end result for this service was clear. It was meant to provide 2 outcomes, organize people on the ground to get more votes and raise more money for the campaign. We all know the end result. Americans got out to vote in full force and America had their first African-American President.

The Art of Social Media
Email marketing has been out for quite a long time. Marketers have spent a considerable amount of time understanding the way consumers behave to email marketing campaigns. There are various methods (A/B testing) and data (when to send emails, open rates, click through rates etc.) to equip marketers with how to do an effective campaign. While email marketing still remains an art to an extent (we can’t deny how some email marketing campaigns are just so effective), it has more or less been nailed to a science with guides, best practices and metrics. Social media on the other hand is the exact opposite. It remains, very much, an art form with very little science to it. It is still very difficult to track open rates in social networks. It is hard to understand/quantify engagement levels in a social media campaign. Due to this, social media still remains an art form few have been able to master. This does not mean we should stay away from it. Rather, we should understand that every campaign/strategy/message is different and should be thought out differently. Scott was clear to point out that in Obama’s case, the message (change and hope) and the messenger (Obama) were critical to the success of the campaign. Had this exact campaign been done with another candidate, the differences could have been worlds apart.

It Ain’t a Cookie Cutter Game
Each social network has its own life, its own beat and its own feel. Doing one thing and replicating it across multiple networks may not be the perfect recipe for failure, but you can be well assured that your audience wont be engaged and your campaign wont be a huge success. Marketers have to engage users differently on different networks. This makes perfect sense considering the differences in dynamics, tools and demographics in the various networks. What marketers should be doing is hitting one network at a time, building awareness in a particular network and understanding what works and what doesn’t before reaching out to other networks in the field.

That being said, I believe there’s still lots of room for innovation and experimentation in the social media space. It will be interesting to see how the Singapore politicians use social media in the next election. Our Malaysian counterparts have been toying with this already with some interesting results.

Before I end this article, I would like to extend a special thanks to Anubha Pandey from Upstream Asia and the ad:tech team for organizing this great session.