What can we learn from Obama?

I don’t mean here and now because at the moment he’s fouling things up. I mean when he undertook his campaign? Ben Kepes is at the Enterprise 2.0 jamboree. His piece that talks about my.barackobama.com: The Secrets of Obama’s New Media Juggernaut is one of the best matchings I’ve seen that illustrates the relationship between the value of tools like online media and the lessons learned along the way. I have to say though that having seen that presentation content several times already it can sound a bit overwhelming.

While the attention is always on the funds raised the cost side of the equation is rarely talked about. Think about the services Obama was using. Per Ben:

Over 1 billion emails sent to over 13 million email addresses
Over 1 million SMS subscribers
Over 200000 offline events planned via the web
Organised 35000 volunteer groups
14.5 million hours of YouTube content viewed
Raised $770 million

We now know that Google has had a good hand in the Obama campaign. Probably got free software out of it. SMS – there would have been a heavily discounted deal there and YouTube? Free because it’s good for both parties. In other words, Obama was able to achieve mass attention courtesy of Google and Yahoo plus one fat Internet pipe from – Verizon? These tools are becoming the future of marketing. As I said in another post, I am doing more video – that requires investment at my end. But if I get it right? All sorts of possibilities emerge. One of the learnings Ben mentions:

Create Ownership – turn users into advocates, crucial to turn people into active rather than passive participants, connect people with each other, solicit ideas from the community

This is what I find lacking in so many places. I believe this is in part why so many people are active on Twitter. It’s about the ambient interaction and feedback loops. This site is getting more attention from Twitter than it is from Google. That’s how powerful this tool can be. If you check my Twitter account, you’ll see there are over 4,000 people allegedly following me. I’ve met a lot of people in my time but I’m guessing it would take at least 10 years to have met that number in the real world. It’s almost certain I will never meet a large number of those who follow. But does that really matter?

Of course there is always the other side. Earlier today, Thomas Wailgum at CIO.com wrote something that made me giggle:

When a CIO says, “We think iPhones for our workforce—even though they are more expensive than the smartphone we have standardized on—might be something for us in the future,” he’s really thinking, “We’ll roll out iPhones when monkeys fly out of my butt.”

Despite the humour, I can think of many firms with exactly that view of the world. But whether any of us like it or not, the Internet is providing a treasure trove of possibilities for those that prepared to take the odd risk and be ready to fail. OK – we can’t all be Obama, but we can learn. How about taking SocialText Free50 a spin. It is what it says on the tin – free for up to 50 users with almost everything you’d want to run an internal knowledge management system that could be partially outward facing and provide you with a taste for what the technology can offer at zero risk. Where’s your YouTube account? Are you running your business with GMail. If not then why not?

My sense is that we need to learn very quickly – something with which professionals are unfamiliar. When this blog started I was told in no uncertain terms that saas would have zero impact on the professional market for at least five years. Sift Media, the people who own AccountingWeb and which was my fiercest critic, have opened BusinessCloud9 in the last year. It’s all about cloud computing. Many articles are turning up on AW from that source. The market has been accelerating at a healthy clip. I’m aware that several of the mainstream professional solutions providers are working on saas. What does that tell you? Is it not time to consider alternatives? That is before the alternative firms come and take your food from you. What do you think?

Related articles by Zemanta

• The Realtime News Network (techcrunchit.com)
• Montana Town Stops Asking Applicants for Facebook Logins (blogs.wsj.com)
• Google tool targets Microsoft Outlook users (money.cnn.com)
• The Craigslist of Service (activerain.com)
• Google Asks Common Man “What is a Browser?” Common Man Has No Clue [Video] (mashable.com)

Tagged as: Ben Kepes, Cloud computing, facebook, google, iphone, my.barackobama.com, SAAS, youtube