By Molly Miller
I have always been a student of campaign politics. I love to consider the effectiveness of different tactics and strategies used by candidates. For example, I was intrigued by the Obama campaign’s decision to announce their vice-presidential pick via mobile phone texting. Tactically, it didn’t seem that effective to text a message out in the pre-dawn hours of a Saturday morning. I thought the campaign missed out on the full potential of a viral response—(how many folks actually forwarded the message to others in their drowsiness?)—and they probably bent to the deadlines of a very traditional media source, the daily newspaper. But strategically the campaign was able to garner a fairly precious resource—the mobile phone numbers of a lot of faithful followers. Now they have a group they can text regularly, poll for opinions, solicit for cash.
But what has really been impressive is the Obama campaign’s use of YouTube. As I write, more than 775,000 people have viewed a 13-minute video on McCain’s involvement in the Keating 5 scandal, just posted yesterday. Barackobamadotcom’s YouTube channel has today, a month before the election, more than 96,000 subscribers and has experienced more than 16,850,000 Channel Views. Those statistics do not include any SNL Tina Fey impersonations of Sarah Palin, each reaching into 7-figure views, or David Letterman’s ranting video when McCain canceled his appearance on the Late Show, which alone has generated close to 3 million views. Not to mention the many, many unsolicited videos and clips. The Obama campaign certainly sees the ROI in using viral video communicate with a healthy segment of the voting population.
John McCain also has a YouTube site that has close to 1.8 million views at this writing.
We still find that some clients need prodding to try new media techniques, even when we present direct evidence of new media successes we’ve had with other clients. Perhaps this year’s elections will provide broader evidence of the effectiveness of new media for engaging your customer audience.
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