Obama's Little Helper

Too cute not to share.



Do you think this video is a function of people's love for Obama specifically? Or, does every President get cute song/animation mash-ups made of them?

(HT: Nancy Scola at techPresident )

Obama, McCain and Third-Party Campaign Sites

The 2008 Presidential election was historic in many ways. The most obvious being the election of the first African-American to be leader of the free world (Barack Obama in case you hadn't heard). This election will also be remembered by history because of the revolutionary way Barack Obama used the internet as a tool for organization and communication.

In my Digital Influence class we recently looked at some of the effective strategies that the Obama campaign employed on their web site. My research shows that the Obama campaign's work on third party sites was monumental as well. Let's look at YouTube as an example:

Barack Obama's YouTube channel, had a huge presence receiving a lot of attention and notable milestones:

32nd most viewed YouTube channel of all time.
34th most subscribed YouTube channel of all time.

By comparison John McCain's YouTube channel, didn't even crack the top 100 in either of these categories.

There is also a clear difference in the degree to which each campaign used YouTube.

The McCain campaign posted 330 videos. Of those only three were viewed more than 1,000,000 times. His most popular video "Celeb" pulled in 2,200,000+ views.

On the other hand, Obama published 1,823 videos (clearly very active) and as of this writing has 12 videos with 1,000,000 views or more. His most watched video "Obama Speech: 'A More Perfect Union'" was viewed nearly five and a half million times (5,440,000).

The Obama campaign was clearly in tune with how to use the internet, whereas the McCain campaign was not. The numbers show that McCain didn't get as much attention on YouTube as Obama did. This may be due to the fact that McCain didn't have the same amount of public excitement around his campaign. However, this doesn't seem to be the case. Another glaring example of third party site use was the difference in each campaign's use of Twitter on election day.

On election day I visited Twitter's Election 2008 page. The Twitter Election 2008 page shows the feeds from each campaign at the top of the page and allows users to post their own personal campaign related "tweet". Here is a screen shot of the top of the page from election day:

In his tweet Obama asked supporters to vote for him and provided information on how to find one's polling place. McCain on the other hand provided a link to an article on his web site that attacked a pundit. A check of McCain's direct Twitter feed shows the tweet in question was posted on October 24th, a week and a half before election day.

McCain's Twitter feed didn't lose the election for him but his cash strapped, unenthusiastic campaign missed opportunities to reach potential voters and motivate existing supporters with free third party sites. According to David Burch of TubeMogul Obama earned 14,548,809.05 hours of free video time on YouTube (length of each video x views). In the same article Joe Trippi estimated that if the Obama campaign had tried to purchase that much TV advertising it would have cost about $46,893,000.

The internet is changing the way elections are being run. Had McCain made better use of the free online resources available to him he may have had a fighting chance.

Joe "the Internet Meme" Wurzelbacher

Presidential candidates consistently try to connect with voters by telling stories about "ordinary Americans." In our current election the McCain campaign has found a way to connect with voters by doing the opposite. They've asked "ordinary Americans" to tell stories about themselves so they will connect with the presidential candidate.

This all began in the third presidential debate, which took place two weeks ago on Wednesday, October 15th 2008 where Joe "the Plumber" Wurzelbacher was turned into a household name. Presidential candidate John McCain attacked Barack Obama's tax plan by highlighting a conversation Obama had with "Joe the Plumber." Joe became something of a touchstone during the debate and by the time it was over "Joe" had been mentioned about a dozen times.

Joe the Plumber's story resonated with some voters. Seeing this interest the McCain campaign made it an integral part of their strategy. They began using Joe the Plumber in the stump speeches of Senator McCain and Governor Palin. The idea was expanded into a theme and they began telling the stories of every "[FIRST NAME] the [OCCUPATION]" you could think of.

In a flash of genius the campaign turned Joe's story into an internet meme by asking supporters to make a video in which they explain how they too are "Joe the Plumber." The McCain campaign encouraged participation by announcing that they would produce a television commercial featuring the "I am Joe" videos. Participants were asked to send the link to their video at the John McCain web site.

Here is the resulting commercial:

YouTube: I Am Joe


Additionally the campaign featured some of their favorite videos on the John McCain web site. My personal favorite is "Joe the Magician".

Joe The Magician


In his book Designing for the Social Web Joshua Porter discusses using "authentic conversation" as a way to engage with customers. He writes "Conversation - at least the act of initiating it - only amplifies the existing sentiment." In an election where John McCain was (and is) down in the polls, and where he needed to amplify an existing sentiment (regarding Obama's tax plan) he hit upon an effective digital strategy to get his word out.

The Simpsons and WORDLESS Word of Mouth Marketing

I was fascinated by the book Word of Mouth Manual II by David Balter. When word of mouth (WOM) marketing works it's as if the advertising campaign comes alive. Exciting stuff. The book cited the iPhone and Tickle Me Elmo as examples of successful WOM campaigns. These cases got me thinking about a WOM campaign which successfully engaged me and my friends without anyone uttering a word. The campaign was the SimpsonizeMe campaign which promoted The Simpsons Movie in the summer of 2007.

My first exposure to the campaign was a TV commercial. The commercial featured animated aliens from The Simpsons_TM working in a Burger King® who were turning live-action actors into popular animated Simpsons characters. It was a cool gag. You can watch the commercial below:




As you can see the commercial only spends the last couple seconds on direct messaging. Three of those seconds are devoted to a URL simpsonizeme.com and only the last two seconds are spent on the "Burger King" and "The Simpsons Movie" logos.

After watching the commercial I didn't go to the link. I thought it was a fun yet strange ad but I didn't think any more about it. A few days later something interesting started to happening. I noticed that many of my friends had changed their Facebook, gMail, and AIM profile pictures to Simpson-like versions of themselves. One of my simpsonized friends posted a link to simpsonizeme.com on his profile page and explained that at the site I too could easily generate a Simpsonized version of myself.

This Simpsons/Burger King strategy is a great example of Balter's "Collective Shared Experience" form of WOM as discussed in chapter I.3. (pg. 18). The personalized images got people talking with each other about their personal Simpsons portrait and whether or not it actually bears any resemblance to the real life person. The site even garnered a fair share of websites complaining that it doesn't work very well. (Of course, each critical article included a Simpsonized version of the author). It turns out the only real problem the site had was keeping up with the overwhelming web traffic.

What's so smart about the campaign is that it takes advantage of social media. The site was successful because people shared their Simpsonized images. Without the web 2.0 infrastructure (social networks, buddy lists, blogs) this campaign couldn't have existed.

The final product (to the right) looks nothing like me. (At least I don't think it does). But to anyone familiar with The Simpsons the style is unmistakable. The SimpsonizeMe campaign was a unique WOM campaign because it was able to get people to communicate to their friends "I like The Simpsons" simply by changing their profile picture. While the images would inevitably lead to a real discussion this WOM campaign is unique because of its ability to silently get those conversations started.