Exercise Your Vote, and Your Website
No matter the outcome, if we gain nothing else from the presidential primary this election year it will be that Senator Obama has changed the rules of campaigning for ever. This happened once before in my memory when a very 5:00 o’clock shadowed Richard Nixon made a very poor television presence during one important debate as compared to the young and dapper John Kennedy. From then on presidential campaigns were conducted on television. From this year on campaigns will be done online with the same fervor as chasing the evening news sound bite.
While I admire the Obama campaign for this reason as well as others, to me the more important lesson from this is that even stodgy old political campaigning can benefit from the new reality of the internet. More businesses need to learn from this, and hopefully will as a result from a successful end to the Obama campaign. Check out the March 19 issue of Fast Company for a nicely written article on the Obama campaign and the impact of web marketing.
It was no accident that the Obama campaign found success on the web. Fate was sealed better thanks to the recruiting of Chris Hughes of Facebook fame. And there alone is probably a lesson. If you are going to build a better web strategy you want to find someone who understands the segment that uses it most completely to help you build a useful strategy.
But there are some other lessons to be learned as well. Perhaps most importantly is the amazing success of social networking for the Senator from Illinois. Most of my clients have no aspect of social networking in their web strategy, not even a blog site. Heck, I am happy if I can get a web strategy built for many of the organizations I support. Don’t think that just because your customers are baby boomers that social networking does not matter to your business. Viral marketing does not only infect twentysomethings.
However, you don’t need to recruit a web wunderkind to build your internet strategy to develop some decent cyber reach. You don’t really need to be all that fancy to find success, but you are not going to experience the benefits of web marketing without taking a step beyond your obligatory web site with your product overview, pictures of your management team, and job postings. Start a customer community and allow for user generated content (whether you do or not there are people talking about your products on a blog site somewhere else). Be careful, one of your customers might actually have a good idea or even better, a good experience to share.
So, get out there. Leverage the power of the web. And, don’t let those voting muscles get flabby between now and November.