An awesome exercise in the power of Social Media and Social Networking
Many people talk theory about the power of Social Media, but few put it into practice. In my blog I’ll speak about social media, social networking, and blogs. Specifically, how it can make your marketing efforts more targeted, cheaper, and more successful. Let me show you an example of how with only an hour of work on a Saturday morning, a zero dollar budget and a 56K modem, I made international news, within 48 hours.
The Clinton Obama Gun Mailer.
I live in Chicago, but I was visiting my parent’s house in early May for the week in rural Indiana. They received this negative mailer from the Clinton campaign office concerning Barack Obama:
It’s a typical negative political direct mailer. Instead of throwing it in the trash, I decided to have a little fun with it. I decided to conduct an experiment, I wanted to see if I could make this go viral online.
The first thing I did was scan it and upload it to Flickr, a social media site for sharing pictures. You can see the original here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/47595300@N00/2461403671/
Next, I went out and I made submissions to the major social news aggregators like Digg and Reddit.
Digg:
I listed it with various spellings and misspellings, on various social news sites it can actually help gain attention to a particular article.
I didn’t just stop there. I also seeded some other blogs that had Obama supporters and seeded other articles from Obama supporters and pointed them to one or two of these submissions. I used my online social networking connections and requested them to either “Digg” the article or “vote up” the article. In another article I’ll write in more detail how you can get the most out of social news sites. These types of sites can push an amazing amount of traffic if you utilize them correctly.
Barack Obama also has a MySpace page. I let his supporters know about this negative mailer. So with a little smart blog marketing, in a matters of hours I was the number one submission on Reddit, with over 400 comments. I quickly climbed the charts on Digg.
Within hours of submitting the story, my Flickr page had over 45,000 views on it:
And that was it, from there I let the viral machine take over.
New bloggers started to pick up the story. Within 24 hours one of the top stories on Digg was how the gun used in the mailer was actually $2,200 German sniper rifle (and one the doesn’t exist in the form shown):
All weekend long the media frenzy grew with bloggers, podcasters, political sites, gun control sites and smaller newspapers picking the story up. By now the story had gone international and was being picked up by forums across the globe.
By Monday morning, major news and blog sites started to run the story:
The Huffington Post (The first of multiple articles):
Ben Smith of Politico picked it up and it had over 500 comments from readers in a matter of minutes. He also took credit for discovering it, coincidentally the image is of the exact mailer from my parents house, scanning blemishes and all 
This is not relevant though because it generated more buzz, which I was looking for.
The story became popular on Technorati:
By Monday afternoon hundreds of news stories about the mailer started to show up on Digg and Reddit (bloggers giving their own take on the advertisement):
The Daily KOS: even started polling people:
The Daily KOS: Hillary’s Anti-Obama Mailer: Too Violent?
AOL News picked up the story:
The Raw Story:
Bloggers started posting videos on YouTube:
(again my image with a banner scrolling over it was used)
Barack Obama’s own blog site was buzzing about it:
It hit Newsweek:
And finally, typically something that’s a great accomplishment for a PR person it hit CNN. More specifically, it hit Larry King Live and they debated it among guests:
Again the image shown is the same image from my parents, with the 9 digit zip code.
In a matter of 48 hours, I had taken a mundane negative mailer and had made it an international sensation. A mailer, which was probably only meant to be viewed by maybe forty to fifty thousand people, reached millions on an international level.
I did this all for free, investing only an hour of my time. This is the power of Social Media Optimization.
If your promote your stories effectively, it can take on a whole world of it’s own becoming more effective than any TV, print, or direct mail advertisement could ever reach. I didn’t use any PR connections, and I didn’t need to go through any traditional marketing or PR channels to get my news out there.
Whether you’re a politician running for office or small company you should be monitoring and promoting your stories on social news sites and blogs. I’ll get into this in more detail, how you can find your niche and how to create compelling stories users will want to read.
In my next six parts of this blog, I’ll go more in depth in shaping a social media strategy, the basics, and how your organization can harness this social technology. I’ll cover:
- Social Media Optimization Basics
- Social Media Marketing Basics
- Social Networking Optimization
- Social Networking Marketing
Thanks for coming by, and I hope you found this information informative. You can contact me about this further @ andy@smoexpert.com. That’s It!
Also, you can check some of the hundreds of links on google that link to the mailer( simply search for “Obama Gun Mailer”:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Obama+Gun+Mailer&btnG=Google+Search
Ben Smith’s Blog - Politico.com
The Huffington Post
The Daily KOS: Hillary’s Anti-Obama Mailer: Too Violent?
