ireckon blog

Dom's 3 Stage Budget Campaign

Posted by: Dominique on 15 Aug 2008 @ 8:32 am Category: The Wondrous Wide Web

What do Clinton, Obama, Rudd and Howard have in common (apart from the obvious – They are political figures)? They all chose to use the internet as a campaign marketing scheme and had great success in doing so.

Why did they have great success? Well that's simple... some bright-minded crony decided to put them on the trendy track of social networking. Well actually, how Obama came about finding MySpace was pretty interesting – A diehard fan decided to make an Obama tribute profile and uploaded a whole bunch of campaign information. The profile became so popular that the poor guy who made it had to quit his job just to manage the content of this profile which was later discovered by Obama's people (at which point they took over) but I digress.

The fact is that although their online campaigns have done so well using the likes of Facebook profiles, MySpace profiles and independent web fronts there is a much higher potential in viral marketing that has been overseen due to the fact that they are already receiving adequate reception from their existing strategies.

If I was to set up a budget political campaign this is what I would do:

1. Firstly I would replicate the conventional strategies by setting up MySpace and Facebook Profiles. I would then take this one step further by finding activist groups on Facebook such as “If you join this group I will name my son batman” or a more related one which targets some of the policies I am pushing...say for example “Say no to abortion” and then interact with this community. For starters you know that the people within this niche agree with your notion and you may get a following from this. I would even create my own support groups on other policies to get my name out there.

2. I would find forums which relate to the geographic location that I am campaigning for. Running a campaign for Brisbane? Target the “I love fluoride in water” threads on forums with a large community from that region. Tell them what they want to hear and make sure they tell their friends.

3. If you haven't heard of social bookmarking, have a look into it. This is virtually untouched in the political arena. I have seen social bookmarking do wonderful things for research foundations and donation organisations. I might as well give you a crash course on it using a diagram (I love diagrams):

It basically works on the same basis of bookmarking a site for yourself to look at later, only when you bookmark it for a community website, you bookmark it for everyone so they can view it. The more people that view it, the higher the chance of repeated bookmarks of the site and this will increase the rank of the site; pushing it higher on the list of most popular sites to look at. This will then get others curious as to why it’s so popular and will get more bookmarks and so on and so forth.

I would be hoping at this point I would have a lot of friends (minions) and here is where you test their loyalty. I may not be as popular as MC Hammer, but I bet I could find enough of people to click a link for me thousands of times. It may be sneaky, but it will definitely get the job done on a popular social bookmarking community with millions of users.

What does high traffic mean for my site? Well apart from the exposure it also means that Google is probably going to help me out a little bit and push my site ranking up.

So, at the end of my campaign set up, I really haven't spent too much money and in theory my ideas should get me far in the political arena (Kevin Rudd should be worried). Of course there are maintenance costs and other factors to consider but let's not spoil my hopes and dreams.

There are various other untapped online solutions for campaigns, if you have any ideas explain them to me and I’ll draw you a diagram.

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