Digital Marketing Lessons from the Obama Campaign
While political pundits and marketing strategists alike will be dissecting the many strength’s of Obama’s strategy for years, there are several fundamental themes that are important for any digital marketer to understand…

Under the Hood - Martin Sexton Gets Social
Like all great musicians, Martin Sexton has a passionately devoted group of fans around the country. But being an independent musician means going it alone in today’s already fractured music scene without any major label support to reach new fans. So to to help promote his new album, Solo, we worked with Martin to create a social media marketing strategy that helped Martin tell his story of life on the road and reach a new audience…

And finally, Google posted an awesome Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. And while I agree with Micah’s perspective on SEO, this guide covers the best practice principles everyone should employ when it comes to optimizing their web site for search.

From the Google Webmaster Blog:

Our Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide covers around a dozen common areas that webmasters might consider optimizing. We felt that these areas (like improving title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, and more) would apply to webmasters of all experience levels and sites of all sizes and types. Throughout the guide, we also worked in many illustrations, pitfalls to avoid, and links to other resources that help expand our explanation of the topics. We plan on updating the guide at regular intervals with new optimization suggestions and to keep the technical advice current.

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Each episode so far is under five minutes - perfect for lunch-time enjoyment at the office - and features a sardonic Mayne more or less going behind the scenes at SportsCenter. AdAge reports:

Between “SportsCenter” clips, web-only shows devoted to mixed martial arts and more, ESPN.com averages between 120 million and 130 million video views per month. It streams a handful of original series — “The Rookie,” which chronicles Michael Beasley’s inaugural NBA season, and the weekly college-football travelogue “Road Trip” — as well as unaired content from news programming such as “E:60″ and “Outside the Lines.” Yet when it comes to original scripted web fare, the venerable ESPN.com has been beaten to the punch by any number of media upstarts.

The ESPN Video web site is fairly well-done, allowing viewers to comment and rate each web episode, as well as embed online. Although, the site could use a redesign. I’d rather see a cleaner user interface more similar to Hulu.com or even MTVMusic.com (essentially a Hulu-knockoff).

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Ordering Pizza Hut From Your Facebook Page? It’s on the Way
A number of fast-food chains are reaching across the digital divide to get young consumers to order via Facebook or their iPhones. And they’re building valuable databases of their customers in the process.

What Next for Database of 3 Million Barack Fans?
The numbers border on unbelievable: Nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars in donations and some 3 million people who opted in to become agents of change. During his two-year election campaign, Barack Obama and his marketing machine achieved unprecedented success in their use of direct/database marketing for a politician. Steve Cone, chief marketing officer of Epsilon, said Mr. Obama’s is the biggest non-evangelical database of active donors he has ever seen.

Abandoned Blogs
According to the Technorati 2008 State of the Blogosphere, of the 133 million blogs the site tracks only 7.4 million have been updated in the last 120 days. (For those that don’t feel like doing the math, that’s 125.6 million abandoned or at least unloved blogs.)

MGM’s Full Length Movies Coming to YouTube
So much for the idea that YouTube and Hulu aren’t direct competitors. NYTimes reports that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios will start posting full length movies from its catalog on the popular video sharing service. The partnership will be announced today, and viewers will immediately be able to watch shows such as “American Gladiators,” full-length movies like “Bulletproof Monk” and “The Magnificent Seven,” as well as clips from popular movies like “Legally Blonde.” MGM’s movies and shows will be free to watch with the only hassle being some ads which will be running alongside the videos. While these movies and shows are hardly the latest blockbusters, it’s an important step forward for YouTube, which obviously wants to shrug the reputation of the place to find short, odd, and poorly filmed user generated videos (although there’s nothing wrong with that), and start offering full length features.

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Some 37,000 people regularly follow the first-person, often-poetic MarsPhoenix Twitter feed. From 35 million miles away, they ask MarsPhoenix questions about life on the red planet. They celebrate its intrepid mission. And now, they mourn the robot’s slow demise due to the onset of an unforgiving Martian winter. (Twitter user laura47 recently lamented: “MarsPhoenix *cry* I don’t want to lose you!! so far away, and yet so close.”)

Of course, the robot itself is not Tweeting across the universe. In fact, its Veronica McGregor from the news office of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

It’s a testament to the power of social media technologies that an organization as habitually detached as NASA can make significant inroads with a public it’s kept at arm’s length. Give McGregor’s astute understanding of the power of empathy and narrative a lot of the credit; it makes following MarsPhoenix compelling in a way that no standard-issue press releases and dry updates from the NASA website ever could be…

Hopefully, the success of this experiment will lead to a sea change in the way people interact with the research community (and vice versa). By reaching out to the public, scientists can keep people apprised of their groundbreaking work—and even offer some interesting lessons, as well. Take for example McGregor’s MarsPhoenix dispatch that informed her readers that the star that looked like it was directly above the moon wasn’t a star at all–it was Mars. “I got a lot of responses from people saying they actually went out and looked; they got very sentimental about it because they never knew that was Mars,” she says. “It’s great to think that people are learning.”

Perhaps like Obama’s powerful online narrative bringing in new voters, the MarsPhoenix social media strategy is an excellent case study for the power of story to breathe new life into a once overlooked agency.

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Image by comicbase via Flickr

It’s a new day in America, and despite the still-looming economic crisis around the world, there is at least for today, a sense of hope and optimism. Across Twitter, blogs and Facebook pages, I’m seeing that hope be vocalized by thousands and thousands of people who over the last year, passionately rallied around Obama and used their personal online platforms to campaign for change.

And it worked.

In just a few months, a new president will take office in large part because of the millions who actively participated online to make such an election possible.

But now the question - among so many other questions - what is to become of these online communities? Does Obama pull a John Edwards and simply stop posting updates on Twitter? Do the countless groups on Facebook or the niche fundraising services on Obama’s site simply go away?

Hopefully not.

If I were on Obama’s team, I would seriously figuring out how to keep these communities alive by continuing to communicate with them straight from the Oval Office. The problems this country faces have not yet been solved simply by the election, and it is going to take continued cooperation by everyone to work on these issues. Use these communities as the new “base” for the party - asking for their volunteer support, sharing ideas and discussing policy options. The House has done a decent job communicating with constituents -might now the Executive Branch finally have a direct line of communication with the American people?

In an interview with Rachel Maddow, Obama indicated he wants to take the ideas about how to use technology on the campaign trail to the government. This is an amazing opportunity to help restore the American people’s faith in government by providing better transparency and more direct access to our leaders.

If you were in charge of Obama’s online strategy, what would you do?

Watch more YouTube videos on AOL Video

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• Twitter can be useful for keeping up with friends, but businesses are also finding ways to employ it. Daniel Rothamel, a real-estate agent from Palmyra, Va., follows feeds from more than 1,000 people, including neighbors and fellow real-estate professionals. The 27-year-old searches the site for people who indicate that they are seeking real-estate help in his area; once he used the service to exchange messages with a potential customer, who later changed his plans.
• Mr. Rothamel doesn’t just seek out professional advice, though. He once used the service to help identity some flowers growing in his front yard. He snapped a photo of them, uploaded the image to a Web site, posted a link to the site through Twitter and asked for help. Someone quickly responded, warning him not to pull the flowers up — they were daylilies and would bloom soon enough.
• Other users are flocking to Twitter as an easy self-publishing and promotional tool. People are using it to build up their professional reputation by sharing updates about their work in a less time-intensive way than starting a blog. Andrew Flusche, an attorney in Fredericksburg, Va., recently used Twitter to promote a webinar he was holding on trademark registration. The session got 15 attendees, compared with seven for a subsequent seminar he didn’t promote on the service.
• Twitter is already spreading quickly at several companies, however. Online shoe retailer Zappos.com Inc., of Henderson, Nev., has more than 450 employees using the service to communicate with one another on topics ranging from politics to marketing plans. Zappos Chief Executive Tony Hsieh kicked off the trend by launching his own personal Twitter account, and continues to blast out updates about his activities to his more than 14,000 followers.
• Some companies are using the service as a way to reach out to customers. Frank Eliason, director of digital care for Comcast Corp., often resolves dozens of customer-service issues a day over Twitter. Several months ago, employees of the cable operator started mining public Twitter accounts to detect issues people were having with their service, from faulty DVRs to troubled Internet connections.

As Twitter continues to find it’s way into the mainstream (no doubt aided by the trend of celebrities like Britney Spears joining Twitter), it will be interesting to see how other business make Twitter useful.

For more inspired thinking on how to successfully start using Twitter for business, you won’t want to miss these posts from Chris Brogan and Jeremiah Owyang.

And of course you can follow me at Twitter.com/rmoede.

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While Dichter’s manifesto is inteded for those leading nonprofits, quite frankly, it’s an inspiring message that anyone who wants to sell an idea should read:

There’s this unspoken idea floating around that “fundraisers” can go about their work in a vacuum, having quiet, unimportant conversations with nameless, faceless rich people, while all the while the people who do the real work (the program folks) can go about their business, separate from and unconnected to this conversation.

What a waste.

Don’t you think that creating a tribe5 of connected, engaged, passionate evangelists for your cause will create a positive feedback loop that will amplify the change you hope to see in the world?  It doesn’t matter if that tribe is 300 powerful, smart, wealthy people or 3 million regular folks who believe in you and the change you hope to make.  If they are passionate and engaged and you give them a way to help, you will amplify your impact.

If nothing else, then, we need a new word.  Fundraising is about a transaction – I raise funds from you, you get nothing in return.

I’d rather be an evangelist, a storyteller, an educator, a translator, a table-pounder, a guy on his soap box, a woman with a megaphone, a candidate for change.  I want to talk to as many people as I can about my ideas – whether in person or in newsletters or on Facebook or Twitter or in the Economist or at the TED conference or at Davos – and capture their imagination about the change I hope to see in the world.

Don’t you?

Read the complete post on Dichter’s blog.

Via Seth Godin.

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Small Brands Teach Big Lessons
“…They found the more they listened and engaged with their customers — each spends hours each week personally responding to e-mail messages and even don bacon costumes on the road to hand out samples — the more sales they made, the more buzz they generated.”

10 Pieces of Content That Define Today’s Marketing Reality
From Seth Godin to Brian Solis and the Cluetrain Manifesto, Nick Fell catalogs 10 definite ideas for today’s marketing reality.

What Went Into the Updated Pepsi Logo
As much as $1 million or more?

As the Lines Blur, Digital Agencies are Taking the Lead
“Late last year, Forrester completed a study of several interactive agencies. The report’s author, Brian Haven, argued that interactive shops are closer to the consumer, in a better place to mine the rich insights and data available via the web, and in the right place at the right time to capture consumer behavior changes. Because of those things, interactive shops are poised to be the “foundation for all marketing efforts within the next five to 10 years,” he wrote.”

Welcome to the Social World - Shiv SinghWelcome to the Social World

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As Jiyan wrote over at the DC City Blog, the event was hosted by a collection of DC bloggers, including KStreetKate.Net, ProjectBeltway.com, TheGlamazonDiaries.com, DCCityBlog.com, ANotSoCapitolIdea.com, BrightestYoungThings.com, StoreAdore.com, SIN PR.

I had a chance to record a quick conversation with with Jiyan, and he’s also posted more video interviews at DC City Blog.

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In the article, titled “The Contribution Revolution: Letting Volunteers Build Your Business,” he puts real backbone — sans Web 2.0 buzzwords or social-media hype — on the argument that customer participation drives tangible enterprise value.

“My job is simply to lay down the pipes and to enable the flow of meaningful contribution by passionate users,” he said. One of his biggest “aha” moments came when he realized that the vast majority of questions asked by consumers are answered by members of the forums. Wilder underscored the unique “nuggets of insights” he finds in these user forums.

Social-media exuberance is at an all-time high, and I worry we may be chasing the wrong prize. Events and campaigns and buzz tricks with unrealistic payout hurdles dominate the social-media landscape, often distracting us from bigger, more sustaining opportunities like the ones Cook outlines. Moreover, we risk cheapening the macro user-contribution ecosystem with short-term success criteria and our sometimes irrepressible desire to bend the message or “influence the influencers.”

Be sure to check out Scott Cook’s article in HBR when it’s available online.

Up next - I’m loving the new spot from Nike, “Fate.”

And finally, this short film from Carlos Lascano is simply gorgeous:

A SHORT LOVE STORY IN STOP MOTION from Carlos Lascano on Vimeo.

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