Presidential Campaigns Show Businesses How to Tap Social Networking, New Media Tactics

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The 2008 presidential campaign serves as the harbinger of change in marketing strategies and the use of new media, as well as understanding how social networking can be adapted for building, marketing and in some cases, defending a brand, according to a new paper from Deloitte Consulting LLP. While businesses may sometimes be ahead of politicians in using new media, the velocity of the presidential campaigns forces politicians into much more aggressive experimentation and adoption.

“Businesses are well advised to keep a keen eye on effective and ineffective uses of new media by the campaigns, in particular as a response tool to attacks,” said Deloitte Consulting’s David Smith, a co-author of the paper, “New Media and the 2008 Campaign Season: Valuable Lessons for Business about being First, Fast and Nimble.”  “From John F. Kennedy's use of TV to Ronald Reagan's use of telemarketing to Howard Dean's use of the Internet, history offers an abundance of examples. This year’s presidential campaigns are no exception. Candidates are being marketed as new products and campaign managers are rapidly adopting and adapting the latest communications techniques to promote and protect their candidate’s personal brand advantage. The pace is furious.”

“What’s driving all this? We’re entering a new age—a time of collaborative, de-centralized brand management,” says Deloitte Consulting’s Rob Underwood, a co-author of the paper. “It used to be that campaigns could create a candidate with a set of position papers and carefully wrought advertisements. That model has changed.  Candidates and companies now appear to have entered a more radical phase where brand—their most guarded and valuable asset—has become part of the public domain. Average citizens with access to a blog or Facebook now view themselves as stakeholders in brands—whether that brand is Barak Obama or Apple. Resistance to this change may be futile.”

Underwood noted that this makes both candidates and companies vulnerable from many sides. Assessing threats, both on- and off-line, is crucial. Even those blogs and sites that are considered “friendly” may twist your message in unwanted ways and negatively affect your brand. Corporate business leaders should evaluate what techniques prove effective in keeping affiliates on-message. One set of relationships in particular to watch, especially as we move through the primary election to the general, is how candidates work with their respective influencer sites at more extreme ends of their political wings.”

“Defending your brand on your feet, establishing an emotional connection online and preparing for brand attacks show that Campaign 2008 offers businesses important live case study results that should be considered right now before the lessons and techniques become commonplace,” says Smith.