Online Marketing Lessons From the Obama Campaign's Technology Guru

If you're a small business owner or a marketing professional trying to learn inbound marketing, there's one shining example that stands above the rest: Barack Obama's presidential campaign.

Using the web to organizing supporters and raise tens of millions of dollars, the campaign was able to overcome two of the country's most powerful political machines.

So what are the lessons? What, specifically, can marketers and small business owners learn from the Obama campaign?

Earlier this month I asked Jascha Franklin Hodge that question. Jascha is co-founder and CTO of Blue State Digital, the firm that built the Obama campaign's website. His answers are in the videos below. (The first three are shorter summaries, the last is the full interview.)

 

Key Lessons

From the video above, Jascha's four lessons from the campaign:

• Drive action 
• Authenticity is critical
• Branding is important
  
• Measure everything constantly

Social Networking Is Not an End

From the video above: "Unlike Facebook, whose model is to get you to spend as much time as possible online tending the garden of your social network, we really looked at it from the standpoint that social networking is not an end in and of itself."

 

 

A Two-Way Conversation

From the video above: "What we really tried to do with this campaign is to make a big jump forward in terms of how -- how we actually engaged."

 

Full Conversation

 

Posted by Rick Burnes on Tue, Apr 21, 2009 @ 07:20 AM