Joseph Lavoie

We’re enjoying a rare break in between sessions at a Starbucks on the corner of 36th/Madison. So far we’ve attended some great sessions and have used livestream to catch up on the one’s we couldn’t make due to conflicts. Lots to soak in.

By far, the highlight of the week (so far) has been Jonah Seiger‘s review of Michael Bloomberg’s successful social media campaign of 2009. Jonah, founder of Connections Media, was generous in his presentation, sharing loads of insights most folks in his shoes would keep close to their chest.

Interestingly, being in the dream position of not having to worry about fundraising (Bloomberg paid for his campaign in full), Jonah told the audience that this presented a unique challenge: typically, people tend to volunteer if they’ve donated to a campaign – they feel a certain sense of obligation due to the financial investment. The Bloomberg campaign had to activate people who might not otherwise feel compelled. Definitely not a problem most of us have to worry about when working on a political campaign!

Some takeaways from the presentation:

Rich media keeps your website engaging

The campaign had a smorgasbord of rich media content. Consistent with the findings of another panel discussion this week, people are far more engaged by video and images. If you feature these, you’re more likely to engage your users, and they’re more likely to share the content.

Additionally, in this case the campaign received 224,000 YouTube plays, or the equivalent of 448,000 30-second TV ads. The best part is that it’s relatively quick to turn around and relatively cheap to produce. Certainly worth the investment.

Social media drives traffic to your website

42% of the campaign website’s traffic came from social media sites. This is consistent with the Obama campaign’s hub-and-spoke approach to social media in 2008: meet people where they’re hanging out online, initiate dialogue and drive them to your website where you can convert their enthusiasm into offline action.

Of course, it’s not just a matter of setting up social media accounts for the sake of doing social media. Without engagement, people won’t bother paying your site a visit. This campaign was highly engaged, responding to people as much as humanly possible.

Politics is local

Obviously it doesn’t get more local than a mayoralty campaign, but Bloomberg’s social media campaign was highly targeted. They had a robust search ad strategy (1.1 billion impressions), going as far as to purchase the keyword “Twitter,” which if you lived in NYC, would give you an ad linking you to the campaign’s Twitter profile. Further analysis revealed that the website was visited by 46% of the electorate, an 11% increase from 2005. The campaign also found that Bloomberg’s 15,000 Twitter followers had 31 million followers, 3.5 million of which were in NYC. That’s damn good reach. However, I think a more relevant analysis would have looked at how many of these people were exposed to campaign-related tweets. Tough to measure post-mortem, I concede.

Social media efforts have one ultimate goal: getting out the vote

For the last 10 days of the campaign, Bloomberg’s team rolled out a “Tweet Out The Vote” campaign targeted to Twitter and Facebook. They created a targeted page for the campaign, which gave users the option to tweet out the vote by clicking on a Facebook Connect button or a Twitter button. The auto-generated link would bring users to that splash page, making it as easy as possible to participate in the campaign. Combined with a “thank you” strategy to make sure people were recognized for participating in the effort, the campaign was able to increase share of voice on Twitter and Facbook to 10% in the final 48 hours. Jonah calculates that the social media campaign brought out 36,000 unique voters. Nice work!

Photo Credit: Flickr, Rubenstein.