Blending the old with the new: Taking your advocacy campaign online
When preparing for an online campaign, it is important to remember that many of the traditional campaign fundamentals remain true - sound understanding of stakeholder landscape, key audience or customer insight and values based messaging all have an important role to play.
But in the online world, ever-evolving set of communication strategies, technologies and techniques for campaigning mean you have to constantly innovate and push the envelope to ensure success.
Once you have clearly established your objectives, mapped out audiences and influencers and devised a strategy for engagement and persuasion - you need to plan out a cut-through approach to mobilise your supporter base utilising a range of channels and technologies.
Sometimes its best to get some assistance from someone who can take you there and with the campaigning experience to get the best out of a cross-leveraged campaign.
Incidentally we’d love the opportunity to spend some time with you and talk about your communication objectives and online campaign requirements - click here to talk to our MD about setting up a no obligation campaign planning session to help you gain the insight you need to get the most out of your campaign.
In the meantime here is some insight we can share for getting the most out of online and social (”new”) media campaigns:
- Compelling ideas and compelling content is the absolute bedrock of all online campaigns - simply drafting press releases or building websites simply wont cut it any more. You need to create and meaningfully contribute content to the communities of interest with whom you wish to engage and influence.
- In terms of tools email remains a bedrock of any true integrated campaign - used wisely it can have a great effect to calling stakeholders or customers to action and to cementing online relationships.
- Social media platforms are fast becoming the “stickiest” sites on the web - the real secret to unlock their potential is not by pushing banners in front of eye balls (although they do have their place) - its creating opportunities for people to share and converse with their network about your idea, campaign or product. The ease in which these networks enable people to announce and discuss with their friends via feeds and share compelling content makes them the ultimate viral campaigning tool.
- Experiment with social media in person before jumping in as a company. Listen to the tone, observe the etiquette and actively share and contribute to online communities in each forum. You should engage as an individual around areas and communities of interest to you. It will make you all the more effective campaigner generally.
- Build a suite of tools across the spectrum to assist you in various campaign tasks:
- Compelling content! Can include creating videos, screencasts, demos, vlogs, podcasts, vodcasts, web casts, live blogging, shows on blogtalkradio or blogtv
- …Built around ideas Important to remember the simple power of the idea behind the content is what engages people.
- Blog building - have a look at wordpress, joomla and other open source content management tools out there as a cost effective platform for your company. We at Bluegrass are big wordpress fans, our blogs run on it
- Blog writing - make it punchy dynamic and to the point. This isn’t corporate reporting. Ensure the platform supports multiple spokespersons. Blogroll links to other relevant sites and ensure that each post has trackbacks to other sites
- Blog tracking - find the tools that work for you technorati, GoogleBlogSearch, BlogPulse etc for exploring and tracking the bloggosphere
- Engage in social networks - create profiles on the major social networks - facebook, myspace, friendster etc and be sure to create and share compelling content
- Create a social network - go one step further and create a social network using the excellent ning platform
- Broadcasting updates / Micro blogging - Broadcast updates through Twitter, Plazes, or Jaiku
- Bookmarks - del.icio.us profiles is excellent for corporate bookmarks, industry trends, competition tracking etc
- Networking - Linked in is probably the most serious and business savvy social network, so create profiles for company executives
- Social media releases - experiment with different formats of social and SEO releases - journalists, bloggers and broader stakeholder audiences will appreciate the more dynamic and digestible content on offer
Phew - and that’s only the beginning! We could go on - but we are running out of page space. Why not check some of regular blog posts to see more about campaigning online.
