By Kevin McCauley
The 2012 presidential contest is the first “Twitter election,” according to Robert Gibbs, president Obama’s former press secretary who spoke today at the Council of PR Firms’ Critical Issues Forum in New York.
While the micro-blogging service played a role in the '08 campaign, now “everybody is on it,” he told the sold-out event at the Sentry Centers conference space. Twitter is the “microcosm of the social media world.”
The “days are gone” when social media can be viewed as an “add-on to do, after everything else has been done” to craft a communications strategy. Social media is now “central to growing and strengthening a brand,” he said.
Gibbs said the savvy communicator builds a community of supporters that can help “insulate” a campaign or company when things go bad. The supporters are “powerful validators” of a message. They are “real people who tell stories” to support the “larger story.”
Gibbs believes Ford Motor’s ads are a good example of people validation. The ads feature Ford owners talking about their experiences with the vehicles, shown briefly during the ads.
Ford doesn’t pitch the vehicle's power or show the it barreling down a highway, Gibbs noted, it’s just real people trying to get other real people to spend their hard-earned money on a truck. To Gibbs, that’s a powerful message.
Get Inside Head of Reporters
The former White House staffer told how Twitter can be a powerful source of intelligence. The service enabled him to get inside the heads of reporters.
For instance, during presidential briefings Gibbs would monitor Twitter to see what the reporters were tweeting about during Obama’s talk to get a sense of what they were going to ask him.
An aggressive social media campaign can “convince the filter that an issue is important enough to cover” in the mainstream media.
That’s especially significant today due to traditional media’s fragmentation. Gibbs noted that 50M of the 227M Americans in 1980 watched the evening network news. That viewership has since dropped to 21.5M of the country’s 309M people.
There’s “more information than ever before, but it’s much harder to communicate.” The use of social media allows a campaign or company to go where constituents or customers are, according to Gibbs.
Feed 'em Exclusives
Transparency, honesty, feedback and scoops are the pillars of any social media campaign, according to the presidential press secretary of 25 months.
The '08 Obama campaign forged an online list of 13M names that enabled it to have “small conversations” with supporters.
Supporters received “unique” information to get them “involved and excited “in the campaign.
As an example, Team Obama told its online community how much it would spend and what the strategy was to win Florida. Some campaign advisors thought it unwise to divulge the Florida strategy, according to Gibbs. The disclosure demonstrated the campaign’s confidence and eagerness to engage with its base.
The outcome: Obama beat John McCain in the Sunshine State by a 50.9 percent to 48.1 percent margin.
BP was No. 1 Crisis
Gibbs, a self-described “control freak,” said the three-month ordeal surrounding BP’s effort to cap its damaged oil well in the Gulf of Mexico was the No. 1 crisis of the Obama White House. The reason: fixing the well was out of the administration’s control.
From a communications stand-point, Gibbs believes the energy giant botched the initial crisis response due to the “top-down” strategy of using then-CEO Tony Hayward as spokesperson.
The company only gained traction when it switched to a bottom-up strategy, featuring members of the affected communities talking about the clean-up effort.
Once BP added the social media component to its crisis game plan, it became more “effective and believable,” according to Gibbs.
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