TRAACKR

Authors: Laurent Liscia & Pierre-Loic Assayag

Marketing nirvana is a special place that violates the first law of thermodynamics: if you’ve found it, you can generate maximum buzz with very little energy and expenditure. You’d think, then, that campaign managers, hostage as they are to enormous stakes and insufficient donations, would tirelessly seek out that nirvana by adopting bold, innovative communication strategies – and yet, tried and true, or even “stale” appears to be the motto on the publicity trail.

Nearly four years ago, George’s Bush’s campaign was led to success by a direct marketing wonk: Karl Rove, who made his fortune using techniques developed decades ago. Granted, Dubya was an incumbent, and given the opposition, might’ve won with no message at all.

This year, all presidential hopefuls look like they’ve understood the value of the Internet: they have websites, newsletters, email campaigns, even blogs, MySpace accounts and YouTube videos. However, when you take a closer look, you realize that very few of their teams know how to leverage the viral nature of social media, and operating from recipes that stopped working years ago.

What we did at Traackr.com, which measures the popularity, reach and buzz of any given digital asset or campaign, was to create Traackr accounts for every candidate and track assets (such as videos) posted to a variety of sites.

One of the things we discovered, beyond the fact that there are huge differences in social media proficiency from one campaign to the next, and not always where you expect them to be, was no presidential contender whatsoever knows how to tag their assets.

Let’s step back and think about tagging for a second. Tagging is the well-known process by which you can associate relevant keywords to any document: a photo, a video, a song, or a PDF for instance. Librarians invented this methodology more than a century ago to make sure visitors would find books that were pertinent to their research topics. That’s what “relevant” means, right?

Except relevance has taken on new dimensions in the search space. If you have an asset online and you have your ear to the Web pulse, you might decide to tag your assets with keywords that resonate with the current buzz. This is not like tagging everything you post with the keyword “sex”; tagging is not about false advertising. It’s about presenting your assets in ways that visitors can relate to. For instance, if your video is about jobs being outsourced to India, you shouldn’t tag it “Mitt Romney” and leave it at that.

Guess what: that’s exactly what campaigners for McCain, Romney and everyone else are doing. If they tag their candidates’ assets at all, they usually use their name and their direct rival’s. Not unlike Motel 6 bidding on the Super 8 keywords on Google.

The problem with that Karl Rovian strategy is that users aren’t looking for the cheapest possible presidential candidate – they’re looking for content. “What did Hillary say about jobs outsourcing? Maybe there’s a video or podcast that will tell me that. “
The current, crude approach to tagging drastically limits the number and type of viewers who see the content painstakingly posted by campaign staffers.

A savvier tagging strategy based on true relevance and buzz could help candidates:
- Reach the users they need to talk to the most, such as independents and undecided voters
- Help these users browse their way to a richer message and get answers to their most burning questions
- Respond to smear campaigns in a constructive way

Presidential hopefuls are in dire need of expertise in developing a tagging strategy. Time’s running out and we’re not seeing anyone rise to the challenge.

[PS: Here's the kicker: we realized after a few weeks that we had not tagged this article properly! We need a dose of our own medicine, clearly.]

To learn more about what Traackr can do for you and your campaigns, visit us at www.traackr.com

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By Pierre-Loic Assayag and Laurent Liscia (Traackr.com)

Summary

The concept of electronic town hall has been kicking around since Ross Perot coined the term. The data we’ve been collecting on Traackr (a social media campaign tracking site) suggests that social media such as YouTube and MySpace are turning it into a reality. While successful campaigns online, like their “real-world” counterparts, still hinge on crafting the right message, they also require that the candidate address the audience without artifice: in the current primaries, for instance, citizens online have a preference for grassroots campaigns that convey authenticity and a theme of change.

1. Not all campaigns know how to use social media

One of the key measure of influence in Traackr is “buzz”, defined as the ability to initiate a topic and make others discuss it. Obama and Ron Paul both show a much higher buzz score than their opponents. How do they do that?

Most candidates operate on a fundamental misconception of participatory media: they think of them as an extension of their TV ads – only free. Not so. Users on YouTube, for instance, tend to perceive a candidate’s views through the lens of other YouTube users’ comments. They rely on the community to qualify the candidate’s statements, and form their own opinion only after they’ve read several comments. (To our knowledge, there is no reliable study at this point of how users read the comments page).

In that sense, using YouTube as a broadcasting platform prompts viewers to ignore you at best and despise you more often than not. Instead, encouraging viewers to relay your message by making it their own generates tremendous buzz: this is where Barack Obama and Ron Paul have done so well and where others have failed to date.

2. Social media can stimulate new voter participation

The unexpected good results for Barack Obama and Ron Paul in Iowa and NH can largely be chalked up to their success in bringing new voters to the ballot.

We would argue that participatory media have played a pivotal role in this process. They have given a voice to many citizens who have traditionally felt isolated, powerless or disenfranchised. There are two immediate consequences to this: first, it should come as no surprise that this audience is particularly sensitive to the theme of change, since their “political apathy” stems from their feeling that they have no power to change the way things work; second, this audience expects authenticity openness, and availability from their candidates.

If you can’t deliver – stay out! That said, with new media increasingly focusing on the campaign process, presidential hopefuls have no choice anyway.

3. Social media add speed and authenticity to the marketing mix

Why is it so hard for candidates to engage voters on new social media? For the same reason that metrics tools like Traackr have emerged: traditional “one to many” marketing, which made the fortune of the likes of Karl Rove, is on its way out.

In case you’re skeptical, think about the rate of change on the Internet: the last presidential election was in 2004. In four years, E-commerce has become a significant chunk of the economy, and Google has risen to prominence as the engine of E-commerce. Now, buyers seek out products – they don’t wait for fliers and catalogs to come into their physical mailbox.

No need for a crystal ball to predict that this trend will continue. Let’s apply this knowledge to the primaries: most campaign managers work hard to create a candidate’s image based on a consistent set of values and corresponding sound bites that can be repeated at every opportunity.

On social media the traditional rules of marketing are modified – while image still matters, speed of communication matters even more, as well as a willingness to engage users in debate, even if they disagree with a candidate’s ideas. That’s the “town hall” piece in “electronic town hall”. As uncomfortable as virtual debates might be, candidates should jump on this opportunity and strengthen the perception of their character; or better yet, strengthen their actual combativeness.

4. Success in social media may predict overall success

While there is still no front runner among the Republicans, Barack Obama is clearly erasing Hillary Clinton’s lead. We would posit that Obama’s online buzz, as measured by Traackr, might serve as a good predictor of future progress throughout the campaign.
To learn more about what Traackr can do for you and your campaigns, visit us at www.traackr.com

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