The Web Uncovered

Web 2.o developments have significantly changed the way political campaigns are executed.  The Obama campaign championed some of these technologies with a team of over 90 people working on just their internet presence.  While virility is much easier to attain with a presidential candidate, it did plow a path for for more local political campaigns to follow in how social media can make a difference on election day.

First of all, not only did Obama have a Facebook, Myspace, Youtube, and every other social network page, he also created his whole own social network Mybarackobama.com, which had millions of registered users.  While this is a good start, it was only the beginning.  Obama kept a blog, a text message list, email list with 13 million names, and more.  What this signifies is not just a move of campaigning to the internet, but utilizing the less formal aspects of online marketing.  Getting a text message from Obama is much more humanizing than seeing him on CNN addressing a crowd.  

This feeds into consumer psychology.  If politics is a business, representation is the product.  People want to believe they have access to their politicians, and that their voice is truly heard.  Utilizing these technologies, Obama was able to address many more nuanced concerns of his constituacy.   Following in suite, many other politicians began using Twitter to Having new ways to both reach out to your audience and have them feel as if they are reaching you, this has greatly changed the way campaigns will be done.

For those of you who already use Gmail, you can stop reading immediately.  For everyone else, Gmail is revolutionizing email with some very basic technologies.

Archiving:  With over seven gigs of storage, you never have to delete emails, furthermore it works perfecting with Labels.

Labels:   These color-coded tags works the same way as folders, only you can have more than one label on an email.  This allows you to create sub-categories, or criss-cross organize anyway you see fit.

Conversations:  Emails are listed as conversations.  This means that if three people respond to the same email with you cc-ed, it shows up as one tab, with three parts.  For those of you in large organizations, this means instead of finding 45 new emails from lunch break, they are seperated by topic into the six conversations.

Filters:  Whether you want to automatically archive all emails from your mother, or have all your golfing buddies’s emails go into a special label (which then looks like an inbox on the sidebar), filters can save you time.  It takes only a few seconds to set up, and can filter by email address, topic, keyword, or other methods.

Spam:   Google has the best spam guard in the business.  Furthormore, it holds spam emails in a special folder for 30 days, just in case your important contract in an email from an unknown friend’s address ended up there by mistake, you’ll have time to save it.

Apps:   Google has some of the best integrated applications, including calendar, documents, and many more, which can save you lots of time, and are extremely easy to learn and implement.

The Takeaway:

While moving your email could seem like an intense process, it’s easy to sign-up for google, and takes less than a minute to set-up your email so that you can send and receive email from your old address.  Furthermore, you can set it up so that you can send emails from countless addresses and domains.  Test it out, you have little to lose, but it can save you enough time to make it worth the short time it takes to figure it out.

In a world where emails have replaced business meetings and communications, often times we can find ourselves buried under electronic mail.  Take a week’s vacation without checking your email and you’ll know what I am talking about.  Whether you use email filters, check your email on your wireless device, or just plain don’t respond to your co-workers, you may need to explore decentralizing your communications network.

One cheap and easy way to do it is to install Wiki software in your domain.  This is the software that runs Wikipedia, but can be used for your own needs.  It’s free, takes only a few minutes to set up, and runs on software most anyone either knows how to use or could figure out in about 5 minutes.   You can organize your files based on department, project, or however you want to organize it, as well as upload forms and templates.  Furthermore, by clicking “recent changes” you can view content changes, and who did it.

One potential issue is if your co-workers don’t implement the new method, being too lazy to figure it out.  I had to deal with this once and this is what I did:  Whenever anyone emailed me a question or comment regarding a project on the Wiki, I responded with, “Look on the Wiki” and the linked to the relevant article.

The Takeaway:  Time spent sending responding to emails is time not working on your project.  Communication decentralization with directly add to your efficiency, and ultimately your value added.  The cost of adapting this system is very low, and could make a big difference to your bottom line.

Thomas Freidman’s flattened world may be appear a bit fictious in certain regards, but one technology that has overshadowed the others mentioned in his book, The World is Flat, is that of mobile technologies.  Since the book has been written, the proliferation of Iphones and Blackberries are rudimentarily changing the fashion by which business is conducted.  As an example of how this effects marketing, I’d like to talk about John Mayer.

Sound a bit out there?  John Mayer has learnt about the capability of marketing to mass ammounts of people several times a day.  How does it do it?  He tweets.  John Mayer’s twitter page has over 685 THOUSAND followers, and I am one of them.  With his Blackberry, he uploads around ten updates a day to over half a million people.  It isn’t the mobile technology that makes this so effective, it is how the technology has allowed his fans to feel as if they are personally connecting with him several times a day.

The Takeaway:

While you may see mobile technology as a tool to execute your marketing plan more efficiently, think bigger.  How can your campaign be adapted in a mobile world?  Neil Postman, an American media theorist from my alma mater, taught that the same message changes on different media, often to the negative effect.  Taking the inverse, to be truly on the cutting edge, we all must explore how new technologies in media create new opportunities to adapt our message.

This week we spoke with Rick Rovegno, a former Technical Analyst for PC Magazine. He has been successfully using LinkedIn to develop his online network. Rick shared with us some of the features of Linked In that have helped improve his odds of finding a job using social media. Also joining the conversation, Ryan Goodin of Diligent Brands, Inc., a full-service marketing agency and Mildred Tassone, a digital and social media consultant.

For those of you who didn’t catch it, check out this article about Facebook in New York Magazine:  Do You Own Facebook or Does Facebook Own You?

  Basically, it is exploring how the Facebook business model effects relationships with both users and implicitly marketers.  This is centered around the change in the terms of service, but ultimately its about determining how to deal with ownership of personal information.  This is very interesting in that there is the contradiction that it is in fact an advertising-ran system, yet they are dependent on user trust in order to remain relevant.  This is a game that many have lost, including Myspace, Friendster, and others.  Read the article here.