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To measure interactivity in Twitter, I counted @’s in tweetstreams. The @ symbol means that message is a retweet, a public reply, or a reference to somebody else on Twitter for all to see. Any message (tweet) with an @ symbol in it is interactive; anything without it is flat and 1-way. By scanning 1,500 tweets on the public timeline across a weeknight, weekend and weekday we can understand how the general public is using Twitter.

The results? For every 5 tweets, only 2 contained an @ symbol. That’s means we’re interacting with others in just 40% of our messages. The other 60% of the tweets are 1-way blasts sent into the Twittersphere.

Metrics on hashtags and links will be discussed in future posts.

there really is no point to this.

http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/473686/Goodfellas_script

On the heels of his impressive web marketing campaign and following a 4-week quiet period in web communications, Barack Obama has released his presidential transition website:  Change.gov – The Office of the President-Elect.

It’s buggy but that hasn’t stopped over 3,000 people from responding to the Transition Team’s first question:  “How is the current economic crisis affecting you?”  As expected, the site goes beyond a simple “tell us what you think” blog.  Obama is also inviting every American – and Canadian, oddly – to take our Seat At The Table where we’ll have access to Transition Team documents and community discussions.

Missed Obama’s televised weekend address where he discussed key parts of his economic recovery plan and stimulus package?  You’ll find it on this site, complete with the full transcript.  Ready to organize a community discussion on Health Care reform?  The Obama machine has begun recruiting.  Want the government org chart?  This site will link you there.

After gathering 13 million email addresses, 4.4 million Facebook and MySpace friends, and 1M mobile subscribers, the Obama team has an unprecedented invitation for ongoing 1-to-1 dialogue with the public.  Many of us have been asking what that would look like.  We’re about to find out.

Notes from an insightful presentation by Rahaf Harfoush, New Media Strategist and staffer on the Barack Obama campaign.  November 27, 2008 in Toronto, Canada.

How do we transform a crowd into an audience, and that audience into a partner? Using what Harfoush called the FLIRT model of crowdsourcing (Focus, Language, Incentives, Rules, Tools), the Obama team embraced 3 main differences from a standard campaign:

1. Employ a 50-state strategy:  following Howard Dean’s original goal to approach everybody in every state, the Obama team established field operations everywhere.  McCain, in comparison, focused only on the states he felt he needed.
2. Target the disaffected center:  why focus left or right?  The Obama camp believed that many Republicans, unhappy with the last 8 years, represented possible votes.
3. Focus on small donations:  millions of small donors can exceed a handful of large ones.

Results vary according to report, but Harfoush estimated they raised $639M to John McCain’s $360M.  The Globe and Mail reported Obama actually raised $750M – more than double his rival.  Of the $150M raised in September, 67% of it came from online donations.

How was this achieved?  Through benchmark successes in:

• Social Networking:   Obama had 3.2M Facebook friends to McCain’s 620,000.  He had 1.1M MySpace friends to McCain’s 221,800.  Obama videos on YouTube amassed 20M views to McCain’s 2,200.
• E-Mail:  they sent over 1 billion emails to over 13M email addresses throughout the campaign, hyper-segmented by state, issues, and donation history.  Current donors never received emails themed toward new donors, and those concerned primarily with health care were sure to receive emails focused on health care.
• Mobile Text Messaging:  Over 1M subscribers had first notice, through a mobile text message, of Obama’s selection of Senator Joe Biden as his VP nominee.  Throughout the campaign they received 20 messages each per month.
• iPhone Application:  by autosorting address books into local lists, the app turned iPhones into mobile campaign offices.  After every call a window would pop up asking how that person felt about certain events; it could then be forwarded to the campaign organizer in that area.   It also gave talking points on each event to keep all volunteers accurately on-message.
• MyBarackObama.com:  the king of all targeted social networks, this custom beauty housed over 2M profiles and 400,000 blog posts.  35,000 volunteer groups organized over 200,000 offline events.  Each member was measured on an activity index including events hosted, events attended, calls made, doors knocked, amount raised, and groups joined.  The higher the activity index, the more access that member was given to training tools and key campaign staff.  Personal fundraising pages told others where each member stood and why they should be supported.

Harfoush wrapped the talk up with a few key lessons learned:

1. Give new media a seat at the table.  This required a substantial capital investment up front and ongoing time investments throughout the campaign.
2. Tools are useless without a blueprint.  Half of all new media campaigns fail yet 75% of Fortune 1000 companies will embark on them.  I would argue both of these numbers are much higher.
3. Hold to a clear message and vision.  McCain was criticized for changing his message.  Obama stuck to his 3 key words and elevated his vision to a lifestyle:  Hope.  Change.  Action.
4. Know the lay of the land.  Map out your digital landscape.  Know the top bloggers, the top social networks, and the central communication hubs.  Be clear on why you’re entering the space, how it will improve your brand, what value you’re adding, and if it’s a good fit.
5. Build relationships.  Listen, be authentic, and ask questions.  Don’t rush into unfamiliar territory without first observing and learning the etiquette.
6. Have a clear call to action:  What do you want people to do?  Every action in the Obama campaign was geared toward getting people to vote.  The sole purpose of online activity was to create offline activity.  In the weekend before the election over 1M doors were knocked on in Pennsylvania alone.
7. Give up control.  Empower brand ambassadors.  Embrace co-creation.  Let the brand evolve.

By building communities and relationships, Harfoush and the rest of the campaign team enabled Obama to win an overwhelming majority in what was initially regarded as a tight race.  What’s next?  Government 2.0 has just begun.

Hover banner ads are the equivalent of pushy salespeople.  They’re the rose vendors trolling restaurants, interrupting patrons’ dinners with their unwelcome sales pitches.  We’re there to eat dinner, not buy roses.

I took a screenshot of the latest annoyance: hover ads without a “click the x” option to make it disappear.  I can’t read the text under this interruption, and I can’t get rid of it.  The negative impact is a double whammy – one hit against the content network since I can’t read their content, and one hit against the advertiser since they just annoyed me.

People eager enough to read the content will try to click this away, thereby boosting the ad clickthrough rate.  Even if I don’t click it, the fact that I accidentally moused over it to make it expand will register as an interaction.  Yes, I saw it.  Yes, I may even click on it to push it out of the way.  But are these really accurate measures of success?

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A few quick searches on Technorati confirms it:  we’re not all talking about Palin.

The Obama machine continues to dominate the web, with mentions of his name in over 1.5 million blog posts.  McCain has 58% of that number.  The surprise here is Palin: For every blog mentioning her there are 12 on Obama and 8 on McCain.  Surprising considering how much of a spark she lit but not shocking since her looks, family issues, and rousing speech are about all we have to go on right now.

Joe Biden seems to have the same “boring” label on the web as he does in the press, with only 65,000 mentions.  That’s half of his rival VP and even less than – wait for it – Cheney.

Clinton is virtually tied with McCain and still attracts 7x more mentions than Palin.  That’s Clinton today, on Sept 8th.  And Bush beats everybody but Obama.

Where do Britney and Madonna fit in this chart, you wonder?  Both beat Palin and Biden.  Shame.

Summary of the top 1000 Facebook Pages ranked by size on September 2, 2008.  A few observations:

• musicians captured 1/4 of the top 1000 pages
• tv shows, film, and actors took another 1/4
• all brand names comprise another 1/4
• the remaining 1/4 are made up of a few dozen other categories including politicians, other celebs, sports teams, and random fan pages like chocolate, tattoos, and summer

Looking at the detail charts, a few other random observations:

• only 18 brand names made it into the top 100 pages
• Michelle Obama, a lawyer, is ranked as the 5th most popular politician on Facebook
• vodka, red flavour pringles, and Spider Pig are each more popular than John McCain

Traditional advertising agencies often take their print advertising, push it up on a website, and call it interactive. Ineffective? Search engines can’t read it? Whatever.

Pureplay interactive agencies should do likewise. Let’s all slap a website screenshot up on a highway billboard. Ineffective? Drivers can’t read them? Ah well.

]]> http://happywookie.wordpress.com/2008/09/03/if-interactive-agencies-designed-billboards/feed/ 0 happywookie stick to what you know