I'm sure the Internet is filling up today with a myriad of opinions on Barack Obama's acceptance speech for the Democratic candidacy, and even as I write, the Republican pick of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. This is not an opinion on either. Rather, it was a good excuse to talk about how the government and politics is using social media.
Currently, I've moved from a large PR agency working to communicate messages for mostly Fortune 500 companies to a smaller social marketing firm focusing on government, non-profit, and healthcare communications. And, wow, do these new clients "get it." We've always known that politics has been an innovator in the use of communications methods, but sometimes that can get buried in the rhetoric of all that is negative with policy and public institutions. Though this will look skewed towards Democrats, they do seem to use technology more--from Howard Dean to the latest use of text messages to announce Barack Obama's VP candidate, etc.
More importantly is the the campaign speak of conversation, "you're campaign," straight talk and other ways of including the public into the dialogue. Though we may be cynical about these promises, the foundation of what is being said there is important. People want to be heard. People want a stake in something, and feel they had influence on the outcome. Now imagine if companies had to go door to door to ask you for your purchase instead of marketing to you. Imagine if they wanted to include you in the dialogue and give you a stake in the outcome. This is social media marketing.
We've seen plenty of examples of companies use the mash-up concept to allow their audiences to create User Generated Media that could be aired on TV (even the Super Bowl). But imagine if these same people had access to the development of the product? Take a look at Dell Ideastrom or My Starbucks Idea for how this can work.
But not all social media ideas can work in the same manner. One thing that always struck me as odd is how agencies feel that active communities and "robust" conversations are going to happen for every product their client of the week wants to push. How many people do you know that are going to set up a profile, pick an avatar and daily come to a site to talk about new and better ways to clean the bathroom? Now, given the amount of knitting blogs there are (~10,000), maybe a few will. But put a social network together for community leaders to share ideas on reducing youth violence in their communities and watch just how "robust" a conversation there can be. These tools were almost meant for this. More to come....
