Social Media Lessons from ’08 Campaign Resonate Today
By Rob Bratskeir
At last week’s Critical Issues Forum, Former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs boldly declared, “2012 will be the Twitter election,” adding that in today’s Washington, rapid response comes by the tweet, not the press release.
Gibbs’s thought-provoking keynote address at the Council of Public Relations Firms’ annual meeting illustrated and interpreted social media’s immense power to mobilize communities. While the Arab Spring may have been the world’s wake-up call to the medium’s massive reach and influence, Gibbs said the 2008 Obama campaign already understood that a shift in communication was underway, and that social media was the “connective tissue [that could] make the election of a man named Barack Hussein Obama possible.”
The approach Gibbs’s team took starting in 2006 (decades ago in social media time) still serves as a social media strategy and deployment blueprint for not only political campaigns, but for consumer marketers today. First, make people feel like they have a stake in the outcome, Gibbs explained, rewarding those who have declared interest with access to information first. Next, be prepared to listen closely to the stories you get back – and not just the ones you want to hear. Gibbs said that in aggregate, those stories tell a bigger tale – one that either validates your approach, or tells you how to adapt. Finally (and perhaps foremost) be transparent at every step.
Gibbs said that meeting these mandates requires tremendous time, energy and resources. Looking around and seeing heads nod, I could see that point wasn’t lost on anyone representing the dozens of agencies represented in the room — many tweeting away as Gibbs spoke.
As in any industry rapidly transformed by technology, Gibbs identified legacy issues as the biggest barriers to effectiveness, and urged communications professionals to abandon the control freak mentality that served us so well until only very recently. “You have to acknowledge the reality that voters and consumers are now in control,” he said, stressing that engaging in a two-way dialogue, listening and responding are the new rules of the road.
Gibbs exposed an essential paradox of splintered media, a revolution rooted in cable TV’s rise in the 1980s that is today fueled by social media’s ascent. “There is more media, but it is harder to communicate,” Gibbs said, illustrating his point with a stunning metric. In 1980, 50 million Americans watched a national network newscast every night – essentially meaning that 50 million people got the same message, day in and day out. Today that number stands at 21 million, while the U.S. population has grown by nearly 80 million. In other words, it’s easier to get the word out, but infinitely tougher to get your point across.
While Gibbs generally stuck to his native politics for narrative, he landed a point about corporate behavior and image management in the social media age that we as consumer marketers and communicators can ignore at our own peril. “Products today are judged less on their products’ performance than on their parent companies’ reputations,” he said. One needn’t look further than BP last year, or Netflix today, to understand.
