Media09 Wrap up p3 - Context & Widgets

Obama: Grassroots Campaign at its Best

From here onwards, Tweets were flying left right and centre for #media09. Ben Self from Blue State Digital led Obama’s grassroots campaign which reached the scales of 15m views for the 1,800 videos created and achieved $US770m worth of funding, 65% of which was raised online by 3.2 donors.

Secret to success? Lower your barrier to entry by:

• Getting the community involved (participation and engagement). The campaign effectively recruited the audience to target the voter. Supporters also had the tools, a ‘MyCampaign’ like site that helped them manage activities and funding, including a prospect list containing which should be targeted by geography and demograghy
• Mobilisation of grassroots, making it personal by allowing people to blog about Obama on a regular basis (100K individuals involved)

The essence of the campaign focused on creating passion first before applying any technologies to the mix – raise interest before you think about making the experience an awesome one.

Content is so 80’s: context is now King

Meg Pickard, the head of Communities and User Experience then took stage with her gems on social media. Great succinct statements and useful engagement models made up this talk:
Social media doesn’t need to be sociable
Embrace things that already exist – recreation is not always necessary, drawing on Guardian’s recent compilation of ‘Message for Obama’ pics across the globe using Flickr & Blurb.com).
Generating goodwill comes about from collaboration

The content flowchart: consume --> react --> curate (eg. Delicious) --> create

‘Do what you do best and link with the rest’ and ‘find things people are interested in and get them to talk about it in your media’ are great mantras to go by.


Widgetbox – connecting users to their ‘third place’

The last speaker I heard was Will Price – started off a bit dry with definitions around the existence of a third place, an informal gathering venue outside of work and home – for Will, social media was asserted as this new neighbourhood pub that fosters human relationships, with Twitter being a great example of this.

The turning point though was when he localized his widget demo to suck in feeds from SMH, You Tube, RSS and Twitter’s #media09 feed that the true value of his widgets came to being.

The Erratic Blogger

Yes I’ve fallen in love with microblogging. I’m time poor, I have a kid, I’m a casual fitness instructor, I have a full time day job in media, so my work and play is a balancing act and I don’t really have much time to write long, meandering blogs (so expect succinct thoughts here!). I’m sure it’s a quick process for those veteran bloggers, but like most things, thoughts come on the fly and there’s no better way to capture these thoughts than through the likes of Twitter, Friendster and Yammer.

I’m lucky that part of my job involves being ‘in tune’ with the online community. Whilst some folks at work would find the notion of Twitter-ing a chore and rather monotonous, the notion of escaping to a third place, made up of people who have common interests and the same desire to share their sometimes wacky, sometimes serious thoughts on their view of the world is hard to come by.

And we’ve talked about it for a long time but its benefits remain alive and kicking – being online via these communities brings folks from all over the world into your local laptop, and that’s pretty cool.

I am relatively new to the whole thing (does this still make me early adopter) but it doesn’t take long to get hooked – mainstream folks who read this, give it a go! Find me here.