Like most workplaces, the world of social media was slightly subdued throughout August. We assume most people were busy sunning themselves, or desperately trying to avoid yet more Trump-related controversy.
Anyway, let’s journey back and take a look at the best of the rest, shall we?
The 2016 Presidential primaries are well under way, and not surprisingly, all of the candidates are actively using social media to rally support.
Here’s how the two candidates for the Democratic party, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, are using social media.
In the run up to the 2016 US presidential election, how successfully are candidates using social media and online content to engage with voters?
What are the best social media marketing campaigns of all time?
First of all, let me justify the use of the phrase ‘of all time’ by looking at Facebook specifically.
Facebook was available at Harvard in winter 2004 and then over time was extended to some other schools and institutions. In September 2006, anybody could join.
I was considered a late adopter at my university in the UK when I finally joined in early 2007. In late 2007, Facebook had 100,000 business pages.
Ten years on from The Facebook’s foundation (and remember MySpace launched earlier, in August 2003), we’re looking at a form of media that is truly mature.
In the last ten years Facebook has gone from this…
In case you’re a few years behind the times, you will be aware that Obama’s re-election campaign was a success.
But what is less well known is the detail of the testing process behind the email strategy that helped to raise more than $500m in online donations.
At Searchlove this morning Obama’s director of digital analytics Amelia Showalter gave an insight into the A/B tests that optimised the campaign’s fundraising emails and the lessons that the digital team learned as a result.
Showalter said that in a tightly fought election Obama’s campaign team knew they would have to top the $750m raised in 2008.
As businesses look at their plans for 2013 its time for them to seriously consider adopting a maturity model for social media. For many marketers social media is looked upon as an immature media, but when Nielsen titles its 2012 report “Social Media is Coming of Age” perhaps its time to stop treating social media as a wild child and instead approach it as the rapidly maturing media that it is.
Adopting a maturity model for social media will require businesses to evolve their thinking and approaches, as well as their use of resources, in order to take advantage of social media as a mature media form. One way might be to adopt some of the strategies that Obama For America campaign used in the 2012 presidential campaign.
On May 7, 2012, François Hollande took over from Nicolas Sarkozy as President of France. If, for many, the final vote was read as an indictment against Sarkozy, more than a vote for Hollande, both candidates outdid themselves equally in one area: they were both equally inept at handling the social media opportunity.
As we reflect on the Obama-Romney duel, one can observe that social media and politics are inextricably linked. While social media has had a well-noted impact in the Arab Spring and, increasingly, in deeply controlled countries such as Saudi Arabia and China, the relationship has even more impact in a democratic forum, where openness and liberty of expression are enabled, along with the potential for anonymity.
It’s hard to put in perspective how much money goes into a presidential campaign. Obama and Romney have poured their hearts and souls and their supporters’ pocketbooks into a race to take office in 2012.
A recent infographic by Retargeter shows the difference in online spend during the two candidates’ campaigns. Obama’s is much higher with a spend of 52 million, about 12 million more than it cost to build the Lincoln Memorial.
In less than 36 hours we’ll know the outcome of the one of the most talked about events of the year: the US elections. 2008 was marked as the first election that used social media with Obama far outpacing Senator McCain.
Now the mudslinging has hit every social platform and not only are we hearing the candidates point of view but news outlets, bloggers and anyone with a Twitter, Facebook or YouTube account are taking to the internet to say who should be the next president.
Global social advertising platform, Ebuzzing, is one of the many companies analyzing social media to predict the outcome of the election. They have pulled together over 925,000 tweets, 159,000 forum posts, 75,000 articles and 6,600 blog posts. According to the team at Ebuzzing, this amount of conversation equates to a media value of over $16 million.
Today at Digital Cream in San Jose, Chris Tolles of Topix started the day of round tables and discussions by looking at how marketers can model their campaigns on political campaigns.
As we gear up for the next US election this fall, the topic is not only timely but as the presidential campaigns move rapidly to their end in the upcoming months, there are continual lessons to be learned.
The last UK election was touted by many as the first ‘truly social’ vote. There’s some truth to this, given the huge growth in uptake of social networks from 2005 to 2010, improvements to internet access and consumer awareness of these channels.
Plus, there was influence from the party leaders themselves as most of them tried to emulate the success of Obama’s 2008 campaign.
Now in the US, just a day ahead of the Iowa caucuses (widely accepted as the first major electoral event in the run-up to the presidential election) the same prediction is being wheeled out again. Where Obama blazed a trail, others now seek to follow.