2012: Can we again?

It’s not a secret that when Barack Obama entered the white House in 2008 he broke many barriers. He was the first African-American US president and he also was the first leader who understood the power of communicating through social media.

Now that Obama has announced that he is going to run for president one again, everybody is wondering how the (social media) political landscape is going to look like for 2012 now that all candidates will be optimizing the use of social media.

In 2008, Obama’s campaign team has used social media to its fullest. Not only was he able to get his message out there, he was also able to garner the votes of those who don’t vote (the youth) and to energize Americans into action.

Let’s have a quick look to Obama’s social media strategy:
There was the website, the blog, the Flickr account, the YouTube channel, the Linked In account, the Twitter account, the Facebook page , the MySpace page etc. And all this work paid off.

On the eve of the election, a web strategist thought about taking a snapshot of the Presidential Candidates Social Networking Stats and numbers don’t lie!
Obama was able to raise $656million for his campaign; over $500 million were raised online.
Let’s hope that for 2012 the republican candidate will also hop on the social media bandwagon.

A nice side to marketing!

I always thought that marketing was selling a product to make money out of it. I recently discovered that there was also “another side” to marketing, a nice one this time: Social marketing. Social marketing was born as a discipline in the 1970s; it uses the same marketing principles that were being used to sell products to consumers could be used to "sell" ideas, attitudes and behaviors.

Social marketing seeks to influence social behaviors not to benefit the marketer, but to benefit the target audience and the general society. It is generally used in health care programs.

As in “regular” marketing, social marketing focuses on the consumer’s wants and needs instead of trying to persuade him/her.

Social Marketing uses the 4 Ps used in consumer marketing and adds 4 more Ps, which gives us the 8 Ps of social marketing:

1. Product: in social marketing the product can be but is not necessarily a physical one. (Physical product: condoms, service: medical exams, practice: breastfeeding etc.)

2. Price: it refers to what a consumer has to do to get the product. The price can be money (to buy the product) but also time (to get a medical exam).

3. Place: it describes the location where the consumer can get the product. It can be a store, a clinic, a moving bus etc.

4. Promotion: it refers to do ways by which a demand for the product is created (advertising, PR, media advocacy…)

The following Ps are specific to social marketing:

5. Publics: all the people that are involved in the program. It includes the target audience as well as any audience that can reach them or have an influence in their involvement in the program.

6. Partnership: since a social or a health issue cannot be dealt with by only one institution. Partnerships are created between all or some of the actors that play a role in the fulfillment of the program.

7. Policy: the implementation and the success of a program can only happen if there is a policy change accompanying it. An adequate policy can help make a program sustainable.

8. Purse Strings: most organizations that develop a social marketing program need funds to do so.

Here are some examples of social marketing videos that were made for The Partnership for Drug Free America:

The Cost of Free

The digital revolution brought by internet and mobile phones has greatly changed communication, commerce and relations between people. Internet has become one of the most important tools in Public Relations As part of this digital revolution, social media has greatly facilitated the task of PR professional to target effectively their intended audience. In fact, social media has allowed the creation of communities; people with the same interests use the same platforms to communicate their thoughts and ideas. The creation of these communities has enabled corporations to create tailored advertising that will reach only individuals that might be interested on a specific good or service therefore increasing the chances of selling products.

The Virtual Revolution, a television documentary series that aired on BBC 2, looked at the impact internet has had on society over the past two decades. One of the episodes, the cost of free, examined how the web is transforming our notions of privacy and culture and the trades made online by users of the web as their share their thoughts, their preferences, their curiosities with the many search engines, services and media which appear to be delivering information online for free.

Here is the first part of the Cost of free: