Being Buff: Marketing the social economy

With a Canadian election looming I wasn’t surprised to hear from a credible source that all the major parties have had representatives of the Obama administration come talk to them about Obama’s winning digital strategy. I interviewed an NDP representative about a year ago and they were already talking about learning from Obama, as everyone was. They continued that learning by having Betsy Myers, chief operating officer and senior advisor to the Obama for America campaign, speak at their recent national convention. In her presentation, Delivering the Winning Message, Myers described the strategy that took Obama from ten per cent name recognition to the White House in two years and left millions of Americans feeling Obama, “understands my problems, speaks to me at my level, and makes it about the human element.”

The NDP’s recent, ground breaking election win in Nova Scotia got me wondering whether they were using their new Obama strategies successfully.

So, how is the NDP doing at applying what they learn? Here’s a couple of things I’ve noticed they’re doing right and a few things they could improve.

What they’ve got right:

1) Social network links – Their home page has links to the major social networks, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Friendfeed and an RRS link. So, they clearly understand the need to be linked in to these networks.

2) Video – They’re using video right on the front page, in big windows with big titles, to highlight key addresses by leader Jack Layton.

3) Encouraging people to encourage others – Jalali Hartman, CEO and founder of the social network marketing firm, Yovia.com. said the Obama campaign “was not successful simply because it got a lot of people out to vote. It was successful because it got a lot of people out getting others to vote." During the lead up to the recent convention, the NDP provided a way for people to encourage others to come out by including the message “spread the word by sending a personalized e-card to your friends.” in the emails they sent out.

What they could do better:

1)  Personalize the emails: The emails I got from the NDP said “Dear Friend”. The one’s I got from Obama said “Dear Robin”.

2) Keep the message about the people not the man – the NDP should focus, at least on their site, more on the message and less on leader Jack Layton. Keep the videos of Layton but without all the campaign style photos.

3) Encourage and enable face to face meetings – much of the focus on the Obama campaign’s successful use of social media missed a key point: Obama used social media to encourage and enable people to hold their own face-to-face meetings with their neighbors to discuss the issues. The NDP should go beyond encouraging people to forward emails to enabling people to organize face-to-face meetings.

That’s what I see for now. Let’s see what all the parties do over the next few months.

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