The following is an excerpt of Barack 2.0: Barack Obama’s Social Media Lessons for Business
This book and its accompanying interactive online companion addendum make up the definitive reference on the use of social media as it applies to small business. Brent Leary and David Bullock developed these collections of lessons over the course of 12 months. There are currently no restrictions on the use of procedures or principles, public or private.
What is Barack 2.0?
We hope the lessons contained in this workbook will help you understand the impact a social media strategy can have on businesses of any size. This is not about politics. This workbook is about viewing Barack Obama’s campaign use of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other sites from a business perspective. Democrats, Republicans and/or Independents can use these lessons alike. It’s about understanding how we can use technology to meaningfully connect with people to build long-lasting relationships, turning clicks into customers, and using content to convert strangers into collaborators. These are the true lessons that we can take away from Barack Obama’s improbable rise from obscurity to the presidency.
How to Use Barack 2.0
The tools and principles included in this workbook will serve to work for your business to win friends and influence millions. Social media is a blanket term used to describe any of several online platforms that utilize the technology of the internet to facilitate social interaction through written, visual, or audible communication.
Examples of social media methods include blogging, podcasts, forums, online press releases, and social networking platform sites like Facebook and Twitter. The use of social media as a marketing tool has quickly become prominent in the modern business world, and it can be an extremely effective way to promote products and services to a targeted audience. Websites function as a static billboard to promote your products, services, or ideas, but social media has created an opportunity for dynamic dialogue with your audience. The dialogue allows for interaction and personal connection. There is simply no other presentation of these principles with as much power and flexibility as Barack 2.0.
Social media marketing has several advantages over traditional marketing strategies.
Efficient – Unlike many traditional marketing methods, social medi
a marketing provides an instant connection between you and your target audience. As soon as you create content and place the information up on the internet, it immediately becomes easily available to a large number of people.Affordable – Social media marketing is extremely cost-effective when compared to other marketing methods. Many social networking platforms charge little or no fee to register, allowing you to utilize their services to locate and interact with your target audience without having to spend large amounts to do so.
Effective – Social media allows your information to become available to millions of people through the internet. It can be used to reach very specific niches, ensuring that your marketing is attracting the attention of people who will be interested in what you have to say.
Interactive – Unlike most traditional marketing strategies, social media allows you to begin a conversation with your audience, creating a dialogue. Encouraging your audience to provide feedback and express their ideas and suggestions about your business.
The key elements in achieving success through social media marketing are an open mind and a considerable amount of patience. It often takes several months for these tools to really provide tangible results. Traditional measurements of Return on Investment (ROI) do not always apply to the world of web marketing. However, internet marketing continues to be one of the least expensive and most effective ways to promote your business.
Unfortunately, many companies and organizations leap into social media marketing without the knowledge or experience of how to use it properly. The most common mistakes include using blogs solely to promote products or services, providing inaccurate or uninteresting content, scraping content from other sites, and failing to engage in honest dialogue with their audiences. Getting started on the right foot is essential in executing a successful social media marketing campaign. Some of the beginning strategies will include setting up blogs, web pages and social networking profiles. Your current site(s) will need to be optimized for social media interaction.
Congratulations on taking the first step in your journey to success. Barack 2.0: Barack Obama’s Social Media Lessons for Business will be essential in educating yourself on how to successfully utilize these platforms to ensure the best possible results for your business or organization.
There are a few tools and principles that everyone will use, several others that most will use, and many more that only few will use. The most advanced users may even combine programs and tools to create new functionality specific to their needs, and we will offer some guidance for them as well.
These tools will be presented in the same order as they were identified in the Barack Obama 2008 campaign. This book is a written representation of the interaction on the www.Barack20.com Website. Therefore, as you might guess, there are several online references. These references are easily identified with the icons below and can be accessed via the interactive online companion.