Hillary Clinton, A Poster Child for Web 2.0?

I was having breakfast with my friend Don the other day. He’s one of the best brand guys I know and so when he asked me what I thought of Hillary Clinton launching her presidential campaign on the Web I knew he wasn’t really thinking about politics.

Way back in 2004, it was news when Howard Dean used the internet as a form of grass roots organizing and demonstrated the ability to reach out to very large audiences and specifically to raise a lot of money in small amounts from a lot of people. Flash forward to 2007 and what was once an interesting side note is now the norm. Not only did Hillary announce on the Web, but it was on the heels of Barack Obama doing the same thing the day before.

So what’s new about Hillary’s announcement and what does it have to do with the practice of Marketing? Every candidate I can think of has an exploratory committee Web site where you can donate money, sign up to “join the team” or see selected press coverage of the “candidate”. What is new is that someone as mainstream as Hillary chose to use the Web as a vehicle to “begin a conversation”… engage in “chat…dialogue” and “visit every living room”. She is hosting live online video chats every day this week and has set up sites on YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and most of the other major social networking sites. I would argue that she has become the poster child for the Web 2.0 version of 1 to 1 marketing.

Every marketer worth their salt is trying to figure out how to jump on the YouTube/MySpace bandwagon and take it from a way for teens to connect, to a new marketing channel that is both engaging and measureable, driving sales at a favorable ROI, and in other words, a way to co-opt and monetize user generated content.

Intentionally or not, I think the Hillary For President committee has shown us a way. They have built a Web experience, including recorded and live video, that brings life to what would otherwise be a two dimensional product, or I mean candidate. They have centered the communication about the candidate, or I mean product, on the Web.

I laughed when I heard all the media pundits on TV and in print, all point the reader/listener to go to hillaryclinton.com, or even votehillary.com to listen to her announcement. In one weekend, she got more push to her Web sites than the most successful SEO, SEM and PPC marketing campaigns could ever hope to generate, and all for free. So maybe Hillary’s not the poster child for Web 2.0, maybe she’s really the poster child for viral marketing as a channel. Or given the number of email addresses she’s collected on the site, maybe she’s the poster child for lead generation.

Well how does this relate to the rest of us who are trying to brand and market something that won’t get coverage on the nightly news whether it’s good or bad? Hillary’s campaign demonstrates the value of placing your Web site clearly as the center or the hub of all your marketing activities. The Web site affords the best opportunity to present branded content, segmented per audience (through either self-identification or profiles) and engage in user directed dialogue, affording the real opportunity to build affinity and drive sales, and ultimately become what Fred Reichheld calls “promoters… who generate good profits and true, sustainable growth”.

Of course the value of your Web site is tied directly to two key factors, the quality of your users’ online experience and the quality and quantity of your efforts to drive people, and the right people, to your Web site in the first place.

In Hillary’s case, the online experience at hillaryclinton.com is centered on watching the video announcement of her formation of an exploratory committee to run for President. Her speech, while it is certainly one way and not interactive, humanizes the online experience. You don’t feel that you have been pitched a lot of Web copy ads, slogans or overt calls to action. Her talk is personal, inviting dialogue and chat and the call to action is simply to join the conversation by coming back to the site and participating in future live online video chats. Outside the hero graphic of the video feed, there are clear simple calls to action, “Join Team Hillary” and links to featured (and of course editorially selected) clips offering more opportunities to make Hillary the candidate, more human and personal.

But, even the best site will not be successful unless as much effort is placed on generating traffic, and the right traffic to the site. Again looking at the hillaryclinton.com site as an example, we see how good product placement, aarrg I keep forgetting I’m talking about a candidate, not a product, can generate a strong viral message that plays in formats a varied as the CBS Nightly News, Fox News and was in the top ten search terms on Technorati, the top aggregator of the blogosphere. Follow this up with more traditional marketing channels that all include the url, hillaryclinton.com and you get the point.

Anyway, let’s not make this too long. My point is that the Web has reached its transformative stage in both society at large and marketing as a discipline. It’s up to all of us as marketing professionals to understand how to use a medium that while we can influence we do not control, the consumer does. And the best way to be successful is to first produce a Web site that really does offer meaningful content, that consumers will want to visit and that it does so in a user-centered design that makes the overall experience friendly, engaging and easy to use, something we can all attest that many sites do not and secondly to spend as much time thinking about how to drive the most relevant traffic to your site using all your marketing channels, both online and traditional.
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