After Dave’s keynote at Training2010, Rahaf Harfoush, author of Yes We Did, spoke after barely getting off a delayed plane. And we are very glad she made it!
It was a great presentation that gave me a lot of wonderful ideas.
These, again, are my raw notes…
She wrote, “Yes We Did” on using social media for building the Obama brand.
Overarching Themes
- Power of strategy in an integrated media campaign – this is a win for strategy. They planned how and why they were going to be online and what they were going to do.
- Online organizing = offline action
- Consistent Branding & Design (Hope. Action. Change.) Everything that went out fit.
- Iterations –
Innovation
- Fifty State Strategy – go after ALL states, not the ones you know you can win.
- Targeted the disaffected center – go after EVERYONE
- Focused on small donations
My Page is the hub. Could donate, make change, etc.
Seven Lessons on building communities
1) Redefine engagement!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (mngrs, employees, execs, depts., activities, initiatives…) The most trusted source of content comes from friends or family. All of the other sites led back to MyBO – that was the center. Speak to the group directly without filter of a group.
- Be wary of arbitrary metrics
- Focus on Value add
- Target high engagement users instead of lowest common denominator users. Give that minority to do what they need to get the job done. (Community who want to bring social media to NASA. Give tools, share information, dates, etc)
2) Convert Low End Users
- Create very relevant content
- Done by emails (1 billion emails)
- Hyper-segmented. Your DB (profiles) Segmented by location (link to grassroot activity in the neighborhood), issues that they said was important to them (let them know of policies they were interested to them), financial contributions (how much have they contributed as a sign of respect) Any contribution, no matter how small, was recognized, appreciated and valued. (also do activity levels – take them to the next level)
- Over 13 million email addresses collected.
- The Ask vs. Nudge – ASK = demand, require, those who are highly engaged. Asked them for a lot of actions. Nudge = easy activity, quick to complete and easy to do and complete. Donate, watch a video
3) Facilitating Existing Behavior
- No matter where you were, you could be engaged (iphone app) Make it easy to support us.
4) Incenting the right actions.
- Activity index on profiles (!!!!!!!!!!!) with a score (number of blogs, doors knocked, amount raised, groups joined, events hosted – all based on time. If they didn’t do anything for a while, their score dropped. It was a game. (**** Do a ratio rather than a score.) All activities worth points.
5) Personalizing the Mission
- Showed the total amount raised. It asked WHY raising was important to you. They were giving $50 to support their neighbors. – link
6) Empowering Motivation
- Mashup of Google maps and community organizings.
7) Embracing the Unexpected
- When you know what is happening, you can react appropriately. If you are not engaged you cannot react.
Let people rip, make their own content and use it
