US and THEM or Us vs THEM?

In recent posts we have all discussed the use of social media in Public Relations to bring back the public, so lets take a look at some of the campaigns that have truly succeeded in doing this, creating change, and acceptance for their brand.

In 2008 US president Barack Obama, found his way to the White House through the implementation of one of the most successful online campaigns. Obama understood that in 2008 the Internet held the capabilities necessary, to truly run a citizen based campaign.Obama launched his own social media site My.BarackObama.com the site allowed Obama followers to create their own sites, fundraise, host events, door knock, interact with other followers, watch key speeches join affinity groups and other activities. These individuals held the power to this campaign, it was truly grassroots and in every aspect of Obama’s campaign he acknowledge this through the “we”, it was rarely every “I”. The campaign saw success on every level, it raised over 600 million dollars, got the largest number of people out to vote since 1908 and contributed to the success of Barack Obama in his journey to the white house. (Norquay 2008, Talbot 2008)Through employing almost every social media platform available including, Youtube, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, blogs, Flickr, and Digg, Obama interacted with his supporters in ways that have never been seen. He used the platforms to inspire, motivate and mobilise publics, the result, was the highest number of voters since 1908.

Lets take a look at a more recent campaign.

Greenpeace International boasts some 500,000 followers on Facebook, which when you think about the worlds population probably isn’t really a great deal, but when you think about in terms of reach, it is a lot of people. Recently Greenpeace international along with its geographical counter parts set forth a campaign to stop Nestle’ from using palm oil from suppliers destroying the habitat of orangutans.

Over a few weeks Greenpeace international posted many status’ around Facebook urging followers to send emails to Nestle to urge them to stop destroying our rainforests, they posted a ad to Youtube depicting a man eating an orangutans finger, which has had some 20,000 hits, and when this didn’t worked they urged us to pick up the phone.

Nestle retaliated, angrily requesting people did not replace the Kit Kat logo with Killer and this just made people angrier, and when Nestle did decide to stop using these palm oils, their message was merely a whisper in the abundance of noise Greenpeace had created.

I first heard of the campaign when it came up in my Facebook newsfeed, then we discussed the issue in one of our classes, and since it has been a topic for bloggers as they discuss the poor management of Social Media campaigns.

I guess the point here is that social media is a great way to get the public involved in your campaign, but we need to understand what to do and how to manage the situation when the campaign is against rather than for us.

Bianca Agius

Norquay, G. (2008) Organising without and Organisation: The Obama Networking revolution. Accessed 13/5/09 from http://www.irpp.org/polarchive/0ct08/norquay.pdf.

Talbot, D., (2008) How Obama Really Did It. Social Technology helped bring him to the brink of presidency. MIT – Technology Review 111(5) 78 – 38. Accessed from EBSCOHOST.