IM Strat­egy (2) - How Barack Obama Used In­ter­net Mar­ket­ing To Win Presidency

In­ter­net Mar­ket­ing Strat­egy, Part 2 of 7

Does in­ter­net mar­ket­ing work? The short an­swer to this ques­tion is yes, but there are plenty of fan­tas­tic ex­am­ples of how it works.

A good one is to con­sider the elec­tion of Mr. Obama.

Re­gard­less of whether you are from the U.S. or not, and no mat­ter what side of the ticket you were root­ing for, one thing has to be said. Mr. Oba­ma’s abil­ity to use In­ter­net mar­ket­ing, in­clud­ing in­ter­net mar­ket­ing meth­ods, helped him win this elec­tion, ac­cord­ing to many professionals.

Mr. Oba­ma’s cam­paign is the most suc­cess­ful in­ter­net mar­ket­ing cam­paign ever conducted.

The e-strat­egy blog called his cam­paign „The Per­fect Po­lit­i­cal Storm”.

They wrote:

His bril­liant use of the In­ter­net and his get-out-the-vote ef­forts will be stud­ied as a text­book ex­am­ple not so much of a mul­ti­chan­nel mar­ket­ing cam­paign as an every chan­nel cam­paign. The cam­paign will be stud­ied within the po­lit­i­cal world for buck­ing his­tory and ac­tu­ally get­ting young vot­ers to cast their vote.

Obama used the many, many tools in In­ter­net mar­ket­ing to help him to win his elec­tion be­cause he and his cam­paign more­over knew the im­por­tance and suc­cess it could bring.

The world goes to the web to learn what it needs to, in to­day’s cul­ture. More so, the In­ter­net pro­vides an easy, af­ford­able way to reach mil­lions of peo­ple every sin­gle day. No other medium of­fers this.

How did Obama use in­ter­net mar­ket­ing to win the Pres­i­den­tial Elec­tion of the United States?

Us­ing in­ter­net mar­ket­ing tools, web­sites, and even things like Goog­leAds helped him to make it happen.

First of all he had his own website.

https://www.barackobama.com

Be­sides giv­ing in­for­ma­tion about his cam­paign the very pur­pose of this site was (and still is) to get peo­ple to sub­scribe to his email newslet­ter.

Once you do this you’ll get reg­u­lar pro­mo­tional emails. And most of­ten you will be asked to sup­port him with donations.

Be­fore you en­ter his web site you are forced to see the name squeeze page. (If the pres­i­dent elect can do it, then you can do it too to build a list of prospects.) The de­sign and con­tent of the squeeze page changes of­ten, but the pur­pose is to get vis­i­tors to part with their email address.

So­cial Net­work­ing For The Campaing

Next he (or rather his cam­paign) cre­ated a Barack Obama pro­file on ALL ma­jor net­work­ing web sites. That in­cludes the 2 most used web 2.0 sites that we peo­ple from the so called ‘In­ter­net Mar­ket­ing Niche’ are us­ing and pro­mot­ing: Twit­ter and Facebook.

Barack Obama on Twitter

In fact, https://twitter.com, a use­ful tool that al­lows in­di­vid­u­als to put out a 140 char­ac­ter mes­sage about what they are do­ing right now was used by Mr. Obama as one of the many meth­ods of in­ter­net marketing.

By gain­ing a huge fol­low­ing and com­mu­ni­cat­ing through them in short clips, he could con­verse with every­day peo­ple, put his mes­sage out and do it all with­out spend­ing a penny for it.

https://twitter.com/barackobama

At the time of writ­ing this, Jan­u­ary 5 2009, Barack Obama has a fol­low­ing of 154,537 peo­ple on Twitter.

I’m work­ing on it too, hehe. I ‘col­lected’ my first fol­lower on Dec 27 2008 and to­day, 9 days later, I’m at 946 followers.
https://twitter.com/ralfskirr

Barack Obama on Facebook

An­other ex­am­ple of this is Face­book. Every­one on the web knows that Facebook.com is a haven for younger gen­er­a­tion in­di­vid­u­als who like to find each other and chat. The trend has grown. In fact, busi­nesses, politi­cians, and even em­ploy­ers are us­ing it as a tool to con­nect with oth­ers. Mr. Oba­ma’s Face­book page was yet an­other form of in­ter­net mar­ket­ing that helped him to get his mes­sage out.

https://presby.facebook.com/barackobama?q=barackobama&ref=ts

You would­n’t be­lieve it, he’s al­ready set his eye on the sig­nif­i­cant year 2012.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/BarackObama2012/40275089374

And here’s me again. https://www.facebook.com/people/Ralf-Skirr/1019486454?

There’s A Mar­ket­ing Les­son To Be Learned…

I’m not throw­ing my own ac­counts in for pro­mo­tional pur­pose only. I’m throw­ing it in to bring your at­ten­tion to a very im­por­tant fact:

You and I are nowhere near the multi mil­lion dol­lar bud­gets Barack Oba­ma’s cam­paign had, right? 

Yet the very cool thing is – we can use the very same web sites that pow­ered his cam­paign and it does­n’t cost a dime.

I have my own Twit­ter and Face­book ac­count just like the Pres­i­dent elect has, and you can do it too. It’s on a smaller scale, but that’s a good thing be­cause your per­sonal or busi­ness goals are on a smaller scale too.

We’ll come back to that in the next part of the IM Strat­egy series.

Barack Oba­ma’s Per­sonal Blog

Just like many small busi­ness in­ter­net mar­keters he’s keep­ing a blog too:

https://www.barackobama-2012.blogspot.com/

As you can see, there are ex­cel­lent ways that in­ter­net mar­ket­ing works. For most of the gen­eral pub­lic, you aren’t try­ing to win the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. Nev­er­the­less, these tools can still be used to help vir­tu­ally any­one to gain suc­cess in get­ting traf­fic to their website.

Here’s just a few of the pro­files Oba­mas in­ter­net cam­paign has cre­ated. You could - as part of your own in­ter­net mar­ket­ing strat­egy - make use of the same networks.

Barack Obama on Facebook
https://presby.facebook.com/barackobama?q=barackobama&ref=ts

Barack Obama on MySpace
https://www.myspace.com/barackobama

Barack Obama on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/barackobama

Barack Obama on Flickr
https://www.flickr.com/photos/barackobamadotcom

Barack Obama on Digg
https://digg.com/users/ObamaforAmerica

Barack Obama on Twitter
https://twitter.com/barackobama

Barack Obama on Eventful
https://eventful.com/performers/barack-obama-/P0-001-000000162-8

Barack Obama on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/barackobama

Barack Obama on Eons
https://www.eons.com/members/profile/barackobama

Here’s an ex­cel­lent vi­sual rep­re­sen­ta­tion that il­lus­trates Oba­ma’s campaign.

It’s worth check­ing out, you could eas­ily cre­ate a sim­i­lar map for your own cam­paigns. Pay spe­cial at­ten­tion to the so­cial net­work­ing il­lus­tra­tion on the right.

See it in full size as PDF.

That’s it for to­day, to­mor­row we’ll fi­nally re­veal the 3-step-in­ter­net-mar­ket­ing-strat­egy. We’ll ex­plore these three parts and find out how you can put them to use no mat­ter what type of In­ter­net mar­ket­ing busi­ness you have.

As usual: Your Com­ments Are Welcome…