(at least in my books for his outstanding use of digital marketing…)

The Obama's latest campaign initiative: an iPhone Application

I’m consistently impressed with the Obama campaign’s innovative marketing campaigns. They’re not doing anything particularly revoutionary by the marketing world’s standards, but in the world of politics they might have well been transported here from the ninth dimension.

Let’s compare the campaigns.

Facebook:
Obama has over 1,000,000 members across multiple groups while McCain has around 230,000 members across multiple groups. Each campaign has multiple Facebook applications that cover everything from pridge badges for your page to tools that help you do voter outreach, but Obama has over twice the number of available applications and over 120,000 monthly users on his lead application compared to McCain’s 25,000.

MySpace:

Obama has over 687,000 “friends” on MySpace. McCain has over 162,000.

Here’s an unexpected and interesting discovery. Obama’s biggest group on MySpace has just under 7,000 users and McCain is only a couple hundred user behind that. There are multiple groups for each candidate, but nothing signficicant of any form. I’m truly suprised by the lack on initiative here. MySpace isn’t that dead…

There are multiple applications for both candidates as there were in Facebook. The big difference is that both of the most popular apps had around 10,500 users. Amusingly they were both designed by the same application designer (three cheers for capitalism) and none of the applications appeared to be officially sponsored by either party.

I was suprised to see how little the groups function was in MySpace in comparison to Facebook. Although the gap in application adoption is not quite as suprising.

Blog Exposure:

There are 40 links backs, courtesy of Technorati, to Obama’s official blog. Now here’s a stat you wouldn’t have expected. There are 1484 link backs to McCain’s official blog. I was suprised to note that neither campaign appears to be “claimed” within Technorait so I was unable to gauge either blogs authority level or ranking globally using their system. These huge shift in terms of links back to the original blog was consistent when tested within Google by searching the URL.

Both candidates are getting notable exposure in the blogosphere in terms of being discussed.

The numbers split on these two campaign blogs is quite suprising. If I’m misreading it in some way please send me an email or leave a comment and I’ll do more research and update my post.

Mobile:
Both campaigns have been doing their traditional (and annoying) automated calling services sending out notifications and theoretically positive messages.

The biggest change since previous years has been an attention to the mobile space in terms of mobile sites and text messaging services. Obama’s campaign showed a particular streak of brilliance this year when they publically announced that the running mate would be announced via text message. This generated some media buzz and drove the subscription to their SMS service up substantially. After the running mate was announced subscribers were invited to send in their zip code which would obviously prove very valuable in the coming months.

The latest addition to their mobile strategy has been the iPhone application shown above. It’s very useful in terms of the information it provides, but from a developer standpoint I can state that it appears to have been designed and developed very well. The quick facts function is probably the most interesting as it allows politically opinionated people to win most of arguments (which I tend to avoid at all costs).

Search Engine Marketing:
Obama’s campaign has spent almost $3.5M up to the end of August on just paid search campaigns ($5.5M if you include display ads) according to the Federal Exchange Commission. Unfortunately McCain has not broken out their media spend so I can report exact figures.

I searched a myriad of search terms and wasn’t able to find a broad reaching keyword strategy for either candidate on a lot of hot subjects. Although their organic rankings were both very strong they could have shown a greater level of foresight in terms of monitoring hot subjects in the press.

Online Tool Set:
Both campaigns have a fairly impressive toolset to help supporters reach out to their friends, but the level of  training that is available in both text and video formats to Obama supporters takes the cake.

And Let’s Not Forget:
The first truly brilliant move of either of the campaigns was releasing the video “Yes We Can” on YouTube. Although not officially part of Obama’s campaign it’s important not to forget the amount of press Obama Girl had on the campaign. You can view an interesting interview of Obama Girl on YouTube here.

Obama’s also the number one person on Twitter with over 95,000 “followers” compared to John McCain’s 2100+. I’ve noticed around a 3,000 person increase on Obama since my last post on the subject.

Summary:

Obama has really been levering social media far more successfully than McCain. The quality of their digital marketing work in both design and technological prowess is superior and they appear to be demonstrating well planned and executed strategy on par with today’s top marketing campaigns.

Sadly, I realized after I dug into this subject that I could have wrote about 30 pages with ease. I hope you found this top level analysis helpful.