Influential Marketing Blog

Why Google & Virgin America's Online Scavenger Hunt Campaign Rocked

Early this morning Google Apps partnered with Virgin America to launch a unique campaign where they invited people taking Virgin America flights all day, as well as those sitting on computers at home or work to participate in an online scavenger hunt for clues to answer questions they would pose at you on a website called "Day In The Clouds." The scavenger hunt offered questions requiring you to use many different Google apps and online tools to find the answers, and integrated with Virgin America both for some questions as well as by offering free WiFi to any passenger on one of their flights today.

The campaign generated lots of positive word of mouth for the brands and though it is just coming to a close a few hours from now so the numbers haven't been reported yet, it will likely boost both brands and work strategically to promote what each of them wanted to: Google Apps and the cloud architecture from Google's side, and the ready availability of WiFi on all flights for Virgin America. Going beyond, here are ten quick lessons that you can take from this engaging campaign on what they know about marketing that is fun and engaging that many brands forget.

1. Built on their core products/services. The level of integration so that users had to use many of Google's tools to find the answer to questions and learn about Virgin America's planes, technology and flight schedules as well as how to use the Internet on flights was brilliant. It was done in a way that no other competing brand could have done.
2. Designed for simplicity without compromising. The site was easy to use and great looking at the same time. For every marketing person who has sat in a meeting and listened to a designer argue that it is impossible to do both, just send them the URL for this site.
3. Forged the right partnership. The choice of these two brands together worked perfectly to add to the popularity of the scavenger hunt. Both have high goodwill among their fans and drew a tech-savvy audience to participate.
4. Integrated the brand without being overbearing. The brands were definitely integrated in the questions without making every question about something boring and branded. The light hearted approach worked in this case, because people know clearly that they are on a branded site, and we should realize value of that - but don't necessarily need to shove it into a user's face at every turn.
5. Engaged through fun and competition while educating. The engagement on this campaign was high because the content was great. The format was fun and competition as built into this in a way that made people want to engage and do even better. There were even tweets from flights encouraging plane-mates to do better to beat a competing plane.
6. Created a sense of urgency. The timer counting down to zero as well as the choice to make this only a one day long promotion all added to the sense of urgency for this campaign. It also meant that even on an LA to SF flight (like the one Virgin America took media on in the morning) the time would be enough to complete the quiz.
7. Offered a real challenge. Like most puzzle and game related marketing that Google has done (including their smart Da Vinci Code promotion), they don't tend to dumb the solutions down or make it easy. As a result, they keep people engaged and have them try harder.
8. Involved the right ambassadors. In the morning, there was a media flight that several high-influence tech bloggers including Ben Par from Mashable and Beth Blecherman from Techmamas were on where they played the game and participated in the start of the campaign. These early ambassadors posted about it and drove more interest and traffic to the site throughout the day.
9. Made it shareable. Once you complete the hunt, you get your score and you have the opportunity to share it immediately (which I did) through Twitter and Facebook. It might have been smart for them to have prefilled text that didn't share a score too (in case someone was embarrased by their score and didn't want to broadcast it), but either way this final step meant that people could share via Twitter or Facebook, and also follow the campaign's Twitter account for updates.
10. Had real and tangible prizes. The last smart move the team putting this promotion together did was going beyond recognition and bragging rights. Those are nice, but the winners with the highest scores will get tangible prizes and that is a big motivator to continue to participate even if you may be in it and not want to finish.

Disclaimer: Virgin America is a current client of Ogilvy PR (my employer) and I have consulted on social media efforts for them in the past. I personally did not work on this campaign, however, and am not being compensated or incentivized in any way to write this post. It is my personal opinion of their campaign and nothing more.

How Social Media Could Have Saved FlyClear

This is the sad story of a company that died. Actually, it's more of a question of how it could have been saved. I'm talking about the now defunct FlyClear service run by a company called Verified Identity Pass that launched in nearly 20 airports across the country with a paid service that promised a way to avoid the travel lines at security with a dedicated "VIP" line. The reasons for their demise are relatively easy to understand ... as the number of travellers has reduced, the lines too have reduced and fewer people are seeing the value of paying $99 or more per year to access these special lanes.

Unfortunately for me and about 250,000 others who already signed up and paid for the service, we are now officially out of luck and left with many questions about the service. Will something take it's place? Will we manage to get any of our money back? What will they do with our profile data (including in most cases retinal images and fingerprints)? As a marketer, though, my first thought is about how preventable this seemed to be. After all, the people who had the service loved it. And as soon as travel from major airports started to recover (which is fairly inevitable), the security lines and hassle will again drive more people to consider joining.

So how could social media have saved FlyClear? Here are a few ideas:

1. Collect real life stories. One of the truths about the travel industry is that just about everyone has a negative story to tell. FlyClear was one company that could have benefited from this conversation, because their entire mission was to make the process of travel easier. If they did collect stories of the negative (and the positive stories of customers who had good experiences because of FlyClear), social media would have been ideal to capture them and prove the necessity for FlyClear.
2. Create an army of blog ambassadors. I was only one among many other bloggers who loved the service and blogged about how great we felt it was. Guy Kawasaki agreed, and even tweeted today about its demise echoing what many card holders felt when he said "Clear has shut down http://www.flyclear.com/ I just want to cry. I loved that service..." What if they had reached out to bloggers like myself and Guy and any others that had blogged about the service and brought us together to tell their story and drive members more than just offering us a "refer-a-friend" discount code? My bet is Guy would have jumped on it, and I probably would have too.
3. Leverage Twitter for secret offers and promotion. FlyClear did have a Twitter account that is now taken down, so it is tough to go back and see what they did or didn't do with it, but it would have been the ideal platform to run membership drives, share updates on travel delays and answer customers and potential customers directly.
4. Extend memberships through social media. The nice thing about the business model for FlyClear is that it scaled well ... ie, the more members they had, the better they could do. The problem they had was that they never hit that critical mass. To try and get it, they did offer free memberships to members of hotel frequent flier programs, but they could have done it more actively through their existing members - such as letting them extend free memberships to some friends, and then sell those friends extensions.
5. Launch a last ditch effort. Part of conversation about FlyClear's demise was how sudden it seemed. Surely they would have known about this financial trouble before today - and assuming they did, they could have taken any number of steps to try and get the people who loved the service to help make sure it would stay around. Some might have renewed, while others may have more actively gone out to their networks.

Like many of the FlyClear fans, I was sorry to hear it's gone and will definitely miss the convenience. The worst part is, I would bet that as soon as travel volume (and airport crowds) pick back up again, the other people who might have signed up will be sorry its gone.

4 Reasons Facebook Won Big Last Night

In case you were under a rock last night or away from the computer (which is unfortunately the same thing for many people) - what you missed what an online event that is now being called the "Facebook Landgrab." On Friday evening (or sometimes Saturday depending on where you were) - Facebook invited every user of the site to claim their own "vanity URL." These custom URLs could be your name, any part of your name or some other term - and would replace the long string of numbers that used to be your profile URL on Facebook.

Today, the day after, the praise for Facebook is almost universal for how they conducted this. Why was it such a successful rollout? Here are a few reasons:

1. The process seemed fair and logical. From the beginning, Facebook let every user know about the timetable at the same time. They limited the offering to people who had their accounts for some time, and they took the right measures to prevent cybersquatting by requiring Pages to have more than 1000 fans.
2. The site didn't crash. This was the subject of significant speculation among the "Twitterati" as they wondered whether the crushing load of so many people logging on at the same time to choose a username would crash the site. It began to feel like an impending web crisis of Y2K levels ... and just like back in 2000, the hour arrived and passed without incident. When compared to the notoriously unreliable Twitter and even the unfallible Google that went down for a few hours for "some users" back in May - Facebook's tech team passed the test last night with flying colors.
3. Getting a profile is talkable. Satisfying the biggest criteria for a successful word of mouth marketing effort, Facebook realized that anyone getting a new profile name on Facebook was inherently talkable ... you just couldn't help telling everyone else that you know about your brand new shiny username.
4. Inspiring people to reappraise Facebook. There were more than a dozen people I saw in my Twitter stream who commented on how getting a new profile name offered a reason for them to return to Facebook and use it again. In the process, they rediscovered new friends, new applications and other parts of the Facebook experience that caused them to return to the site and potentially use it more frequently.

Do you agree that this was a big win for Facebook or do you have a different point of view?

PS - My brand new Facebook URL is http://www.facebook.com/rohitbhargava - connect with me!

Untangling Your Brand: 4 Marketing Lessons From Lost

Last night was the season finale of the TV show Lost - and just in case you haven't watched it and have it sitting on DVR waiting for you, don't worry ... there are no spoilers in this post. Actually, though I'm an enthusiast of the show, the reason for this post isn't to gush about how great I think it is. It is about what you learn from how the show has been promoted. Like many recent dramas, it is not an easy show to follow. It isn't about nothing, and you can't just miss a few episodes and still get into it. Yet as I wrote about in PNI (search for "Lost" with the Search Inside feature on Amazon - it is Page 108) - the show's unique format of taking you into the backstory of each characters builds an emotional investment from the viewer in a way that many other shows never manage to do. You believe in the characters because you know about the situations that make them the way that they are.

There is a marketing lesson in that, as there is in several other choices the show's producers and marketing teams have made. Here are a few things that the show does and the marketing lesson that you can learn from them:

1. Share the backstory. As I mentioned above, giving viewers a look at where the characters come from gives each of them a sense purpose and allows you to feel more empathy towards them. As any good screenwriter knows, the point isn't for you to love every character - it's for you to feel something towards them. Once you do that, you're engaged in the show. Marketing Lesson: Make sure you share the story behind your brand so you can give people a reason to believe in it.
2. Untangle the complexity. One of the smartest things the show does is they feature a simplified 3-5 minute version of every episode untangled (see video below in this post). These descriptions are from the outside looking into the show, referring to a character who wears too much eye makeup as "eyeliner" and poking fun generally at the actors in the show and the way they portray their roles. Alongside this irreverance, Lost Untangled explains the plotline of every episode in a way that allows you to understand it despite the complexity of time shifting, multiple characters and hidden clues. Marketing Lesson: If you have something complicated to sell, get creative about how you can simplify it.
3. React to your critics. Early in the show, the creators were criticized because they got people emotionally invested in the core characters of the show, and then introduced new characters and shifted the focus. Many viewers were confused because the characters they knew had essentially vanished. Though this was presumably part of the broader story arc, the producers recognized that viewers needed some connection to the characters they already loved, and found a way to bring that back - while still progressing their story and introducing the new characters they had planned to. Marketing Lesson: Don't ignore your critics, but don't change your strategy because of them either.
4. Have a finite ending. As the trailers after last night's finale noted, next year will be the final season of Lost. For a top rated show, it cannot have been an easy decision to let the show end at what seems to be the height of its popularity - yet having a finite end is important for both audiences and for the writers of the show. Everyone knows that the show is leading toward something. There is a sense of anticipation and excitement, as well as urgency to watch. It's not a soap opera where people go into comas, die, wake up and go on again. Marketing Lesson: Having an ending is important - even if it's just a campaign that ends so you can start a new one.

How To Live Blog (Or Twitter) An Event Effectively

Photo Credit: Josh Hallett (hyku)

There are two types of content creators at any event. The ones who are creating content because they want to, and those who are creating content because they have to (often because they have been sent to "cover" the event for a team or organization). For both, the toughest question to answer is how to do this in a way that results in quality content, but also doesn't detract from your experience of actually being at an event and participating in it. This post is about a few tips and ideas that should help you deal with that challenge based on what I've learned from attending dozens of events and watching how hundreds of people create content:

1. Have a purpose. Creating content in a live context can be a great traffic driver to your site, or a brilliant way to connect with those who are sharing ideas and will be reading your efforts soon. Before you get into it, however, make sure you know what you want to get out of it. Are you trying to educate colleagues? Drive more visitors to your site? Have a goal before you start.
2. Focus on the 1st take. In a real time environment, you don't have time to touch up a photo in photoshop or edit a video. A blog post must be 95% right the first time you write it. Speed is the toughest part of covering an event live - and the best way to manage it is to practice getting things right on the first take so you don't have to go back and fix them.
3. Create realistic targets. Do NOT ever think that you can live blog every session you attend and pack your day. That's the surest way to give yourself a major headache and feelings of inadequacy. Even pro bloggers who are covering events professionally take breaks - and your goal should be to share great content, not a high volume of crappy content.
   
4. Publish nuggets, not manifestos. Think about this - real time means you need to get content up and out quickly. Using shorter content sharing quick thoughts is much better for this. So save the big ideas for a recap post or something that comes later and focus on speed in the short term. Twitter is great for this as well - but don't just tweet everything a speaker says. Instead, focus on finding the best soundbites. And always tag your content with the hashtag (keyword) being used by people at the event (or create one if one does not exist).
   
5. Have a point of view. Speed doesn't mean lack of substance, however. The worst kind of content to come out of events is where people share what is happening on stage in a word for word "book report style" format. Most social media events already have someone assigned to do that. And trust me, you don't want to be "that guy (or girl)." Always have a point of view on what is happening on stage.
6. Share the real pulse of the event. Often the most interesting thing about an event isn't just what people say, but the intangibles about the event. Did everyone head back to their hotel rooms during the breaks or were they networking? What sessions were the most popular? Keep your eye out for broader trends that help you to understand the vibe and pulse of the event on a greater level.
7. Offer an insider perspective. Being an attendee or speaker at an event gives you a unique insider view of what is happening. If you can, try to share as much of that experience online as you can. Remember, the people following live are most likely those who were interested in the event but could not make it themselves, so give them a good look inside the event.
8. Get help on content promotion. Creating content from an event in real time is complicated enough, but you will probably find yourself simply running out to time when it comes to effectively promoting all the content you're creating. So get some help to submit your posts to Digg and other sites, or to point people to some of your content. Promotion is great real time, but it's most effective if you can split the duties.
   
9. Represent the virtual attendees. When you find yourself with an audience following your content in a live fashion, you have the option to be their representative at an event. This means you could poll your audience and ask a question in a session on their behalf - or ask others to follow up directly with those individuals as well. Be their voice and they will thank you for it.
10. Do a recap. No matter how many posts or tweets you get out during an event, always do a recap of the event and what you learned as part of your effort. Often, you'll find this post lets you talk about things you just didn't have time to during the event. And it will most probably be your most visited effort from the entire event.
    

The Personality Project: Women of Personality

There are generally three kinds of ideas. The most popular two are the ones that you act on right away and those that you never do anything about. Those are the majority. Most of us love the third kind. Those are the ideas that are too big or complex or important to do quickly, but that you simply cannot let die because of how you feel about them. Today I finally launched that kind of idea. Since Personality Not Included came out about a year ago - I have been getting emails from people sharing their experience with the book and how they felt about it's main premise that businesses (like people) need to have a strong and authentic personality.

Soon after the book launched, I noticed that many of these emails were coming from women working in professional roles and those that had started their own businesses. These female entrepreneurs were responding to the message of personality in a way that I didn't expect. So since that moment I started thinking about bringing those voices together. Of course, part of the reason would be to promote my book ... but like most authors the important thing for me was for my idea to find a home and actually help people change their careers or make their business more successful.

So today, you can download a free ebook called "The Personality Project: Women of Personality." It is an extension of a site that I launched some time ago with a similar mission - to get visionary people in many industries to talk about why personality matters. This ebook features 20 business women that I respect and admire who each agreed to share their story as part of the ebook. These include founders and CEOs, best selling authors, popular bloggers and online personalities and even the first woman to ever row solo across the Atlantic Ocean (and she's now making her way across the Pacific).

See the ebook embedded below and click on it to download a free PDF copy:

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Books marketing blogs

Once you get a chance to read it, please visit each of the contributors sites and blogs, buy their books and support their efforts. The best thing you can do is to validate their ideas and use their examples to improve your own business and your career. And then let them know they made a difference.

PS - If you mention this ebook on your blog or twitter or facebook or anywhere else online, use the tag #wop (on Twitter) or "WOP" (anywhere else) as this is the one that all the contributors will be watching and responding to.

5 Ways TurboTax Is Reinventing Tax Day With Social Media

If you are among the millions of Americans dreading the next few days until April 15th, you are not alone. Tax season is upon us and as every form of media conspires to remind you of the significance of Wednesday, whether you do your own taxes or not, you are likely feeling some pressure. In this midst of this 1099-imposed national rise in stress, TurboTax (a leading self-service software solution to do your own taxes) is finding their authenticity through social media and helping to reduce (if not to remove) the stress involved in these last few days of taxes.

TurboTax has been pioneering in their use of the web for several years now, using crowdsourcing to let people answer one another's questions at every step of the tax process and offering integration between financial systems to move tax information around - but this year they are using Facebook, Twitter and Myspace to help them not just stand out as a tax software solution, but to reinvent many American's experience of tax day in the process. Here are a few unexpected things they are doing - mostly powered by social media:

1. Understanding the urge to procrastinate. Let's face it, social media tools and sites offer just about the best distraction you can think of to avoid doing your taxes. Rather than offering a guilt trip on why we need to refocus on our taxes, TurboTax has a contest called the "Super Status Challenge" so you can waste time on your social media sites answering challenge questions (where your answer needs to include the word TurboTax), while still remaining somewhat connected to your taxes. And instead of offering relatively useless prizes, like free product ... they have a smart partnership with NBC to let people win dream trips to meet casts and crews of some of the most popular shows on the network. The whole campaign is like putting a sandbox in the classroom. We play a little, and (hopefully) get back to work.
2. Talking like a human. From the first moment you log into TurboTax and are asked to agree to a legal message because their "lawyers made them do it," you don't have the sense that you're entering into a serious financial transaction. You are about to give TurboTax what may be the most sensitive financial data you own, and they are not weighed down with the perceived need to take you through thousands of words of legal disclaimers. This dedication to using natural language instead of legal mumbo-jumbo is carried through the entire site, which makes you thankful they seem to have hired copywriters in place of lawyers to write the content on each page of the site.
3. Offering you a friend at a tough time. For many people, tax season seems like a time when the government is out to get you. It is the ultimate of an "us versus them" kind of situation, though arguably it should not be. At a time like this, you need a friend in the business, and that's what TurboTax wants to be. The site will offer helpful suggestions, guide you through every deduction and help you keep more of that money you worked so hard for.
4. Allowing people to share the lesson they just learned. Doing your taxes every year is a bit like a treasure hunt. You learn new tricks, techniques and answers every year. As you do it, you get smarter about what is possible - and sometimes you can apply those lessons to next year. The other benefit of this, however, is that there is always going to be someone who has just learned the lesson you need to learn, or has the perfect answer to your question. Rather than assuming their own staff will have all the answers, as many customer service teams try to do, TurboTax has a robust community that lets anyone answer anyone else's question. Combined with many of their own moderators, it is a powerful way offer a support group for people as they do their taxes.
5. Answering the unanswerable questions (in a way that actually makes sense). Pages of frequently asked questions are good, but the toughest questions are not frequently asked - and if they are, they are answered in a way that is nearly incomprehensible. If two unmarried people buy a house together, who gets the new $8000 homebuyer credit? You can imagine this question coming up for someone, but not among any list of frequently asked questions. TurboTax answers this very question on their blog, and has many such blog posts aimed at big tax questions like this. Sometimes you need more than 140 characters to explain something well. The TurboTax blog is a great resource that aims to do that.

Take all these tools together, and you'll see how TurboTax is taking a nationally reviled day and making it a little bit easier to get through.

6 Ways Ford Is Finding Its Own Voice

Yesterday evening I co-hosted a tweetup in New York City where Ford was unveiling the new Ford Fiesta and a brilliantly conceived social media program to get 100 influencers to take the car on an extended test drive for 6 months as part of the Ford Fiesta Movement. The event was a gathering designed to help put a more human face on Ford and talk about a new Ford car that many of the 20 and 30 somethings who showed up (and are the target market for the Fiesta) may not have known about.

The effort is just one example of a greater shift that has been taking place at Ford over the past year as the company has worked to not only reshape its image in the eyes of the American public, but also to change the way that they tell the story of Ford. It is a rich story to tell, one that is linked to the history of America in a way that few companies can authentically claim. And despite being in the maligned automotive industry that seems a permanent fixture in the negative news cycle, things are changing at Ford. How are they managing to do it? Here are six elements to consider:

1. Having a strong story to tell. In the midst of all the scrutiny, Ford is (and has been) shifting their image from stodgy truck maker to a more forward thinking company making cars that the American public actually want to drive. The relaunched Taurus was a hit, winning top safety ratings - the Flex has had rave reviews, and other cars like the Fusion and Focus are winning many fans.
2. Tapping the passion of employees. Ford has always described itself as a family, and employees often demonstrate a stunning loyalty to the company ... even describing themselves in terms of the cars they have always driven. The old mode of communications would be to keep all these voices silent, and instead only authorize a small group of people to speak on behalf of Ford. Today many of these voices are being encouraged to speak and share their thoughts and experiences online.
3. Making a commitment to social media. Social media has played a big part in this evolution to using the voices of "accidental spokespeople." Scott Monty was hired nearly a year ago as the Head of Social Media for Ford and has actively been offering a voice to the brand and adding social media as a core element of all their communications.
4. Getting out of Detroit. One of the most powerful effects of this shift has been a willingness for even the most senior members of the management team at Ford to get out of Detroit and meet customers. Ford's President of the Americas, Mark Fields and Ray Day (the VP of Communications) even came to the Tweetup last night. Alan Mullaly, CEO of Ford showed up to a blogger event during the Consumer Electronics Show (in a sweatshirt instead of a suit and tie!) and stayed graciously for nearly an hour answering questions and doing podcast interviews.
5. Capitalizing on being Ford. There are not many companies that are as visibly at the epicenter of the American economy as Ford is. Like it or not, the success or failure of Ford is seen by many as a symbol of the success or failure of America. From a communications point of view, this is a major positive ... for the simple reason that the fate of Ford matters to people in a way that AIG or Enron just don't (unless you're a shareholder, of course)
6. Overcoming the American ego. One of the most interesting things for me has been Ford's recent willingness to take cars that have been huge commercial successes overseas and introduce them to the United States market (like the Fiesta and the Transit Connect). For many years, most of Detroit would never have considered taking these foreign cars and allowing them to be revised and sold in America. Finally ego and turf wars are taking a back seat to solid business decisions and introducing cars best suited to succeed.

Any other lessons you think Ford has learned which are contributing to their growing reputation?  Or if you think one (or all) of my points are completely off base, leave a comment and share that point of view too.

Disclaimer: I currently work for Ogilvy and Ford is a client of our team. The Ford Fiesta Tweetup was an official party organized as part of our efforts with Ford and I was on the team that helped organize these events. I have NOT been paid or compensated by Ford to write this blog post, though - and the opinions I share in this post are my personal views only and don't represent what Ogilvy, WPP or Team Detroit thinks about Ford.

Marketing To The Social Media Reverb

About six months ago in the NY Times, Clive Thompson published "The Brave New World Of Digital Intimacy" - one of the most brilliant explorations of the cultural context of social media written to date (and well worth a read if you have not yet seen it). In the article, he talked about the idea of virtual connectedness and how our "ambient awareness" of all that our friends and family are doing is helping us to grow closer to one another, and perhaps become more self aware of ourselves in the process.

Among the more inspired parts of the article was when he described every piece of social information as "little snippets coalesce[ing] into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting." As each of us creates this painting, we are sharing the combination of information that helps anyone in our social network to know us better. The interesting extension of this idea is that we are also creating a "reverb" with all that we do.

A reverb (or reverberation) is typically used to describe sound - or more specifically the instance where a sound continues despite the original source of the sound being removed. Extended beyond sound, the idea of a social media reverb is that every action in social media is not just done, but also broadcast across a particular individual's social graph online. The newsfeed on Facebook is an example of this, as it not only announces life changes and hourly moods, but also whether someone is going to an event or not and what groups or causes someone supports. On Twitter, who you follow and retweeting posts are further examples of this concept. There are even tools like MyBlogLog that you can join in order to broadcast and share each time you visit and read a particular blog.

What does this mean for your brand? In social media marketers are often tempted to think in terms of absolutes ... either a blogger writes about your campaign or cause - or they don't. What the social media reverb should teach you is that every action, from declining an event invite on Facebook (but still broadcasting it to your friends) to just visiting and reading your blog (without leaving a comment) has value. In a world where we are enjoying ambient awareness of one another's lives, one reason for any brand to engage with social media should be the opportunity to stand out as part of that ambiance.

Why Government Needs Social Media NOW

Recently there has been some talk on a few other DC-based social media consultant blogs about the rise of "Government 2.0" and whether the so-called experts in the space really deserve that title. Yet for all this attention on expertise in social media (justified or not), those of us who at least work and provide advice in the space have not done as much as we need to offer the ammunition to the people who are really in a position to move government forward into using these tools. These are the web masters, communications managers, PR directors and other such people who are the voices waiting to be unleashed within government offices everywhere.

For them, there needs to be a simple reason to care about social media - and actionable advice to sell it into their organizations so they start focusing on it sooner rather than later. Thankfully, the new administration coming in offers that simple reason in three short crucial words: Get Obama's Attention. Since government loves acronyms, let's call this idea GOA.

GOA means building your public support. It means getting more funding and more attention from the new administration. GOA can allow you to have a greater impact on people in the US and have an easier time finding and connecting with those who believe in your mission and can help you. It can even make recruiting to get the best and brightest working with you easier. GOA, in short, could be any government agency's initial reason for starting to use social media.

Though this may be a vast oversimplification, consider that if used strategically social media for government can do all of the following:

1. Share real voices and stories to help bring the mission of a particular agency to life.
2. Demonstrate widespread public support for an issue or department's mission.
3. Be findable by staffers who are the first point of research for any policy or legislation.
4. Activate the most passionate voices internally and externally to promote an agency's mission.
5. Own Google search results to manage negative comments or content on a particular issue or policy.

No matter how traditional or risk-averse the leader of a particular government agency happens to be ... there is none that I could imagine who would not want to get more of Obama's attention (and by extension the attention of his administration). Those advocates of social media within government may finally have the reason they have been seeking to sell the idea of social media internally.

Update: Several responders on Twitter and people leaving comments shared the point that a social media strategy shouldn’t just be about Obama. I used him as a symbol in my original post, but the idea of GOA could more broadly be described as getting the attention of those influencers who matter when it comes to funding and support. Obviously that is more than just Obama - but the point is that sometimes the most powerful argument to support using social media is the visibility for an issue or mission that it can offer.

Note: This post was originally published on the Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence blog.