I was recently invited to share my views on the effect of social media on the 2008 Presidential Campaign for an upcoming feature article in the Public Relations Strategist.

Here are a few highlights:

Is the use of social media mainly tactical or strategic?

• If a goal of the candidates has been to convey a message of change, the use of social media represents a clear change from traditional ways of reaching out to and engaging voters.

• If a goal has been to engage with young voters, the use of digital has been a hugely successful strategy. According to Rock the Vote and CIRCLE (Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement), voter turnout among 18- to 29-year-olds has doubled and tripled in almost every state primary and caucus. These young voters’ preferred way of learning about candidates and participating in the campaigns is through social media and word of mouth marketing. According to a Pew Research Center for the People and the Press study that looked at voter behavior, two-thirds of Web users under 30 use social networking sites, and only 25 percent watch television news for campaign news.

• If a goal has been to manage positive and negative feelings about the candidate - and help people connect with candidates’ personal characteristics — social media has been strategic for Obama, but far less so for Clinton or McCain. Obama has shared more about himself- and social media is about people wanting to connect and share with people. He has also used a relaxed conversational communications style vs. speaking in “message points” during interviews and in videos. Clinton and McCain have used social media more as a channel, filling it with traditional “produced” videos and ads. Clinton and McCain haven’t adjusted their content or communications style for the new medium nearly as well as Obama, although Clinton has done a better job than McCain.

How has social media changed the game of the campaign so far?

The three biggest impacts of social media on the 2008 campaign:

1. Fund raising: Changed the game on how candidates raise money, putting more power with the everyday people than in any previous race. In March alone Obama raised $40 million, largely from the campaign’s 1.5 million Internet donors. According to Clinton’s campaign she raised $2.5 million after winning Pennsylvania primary and asking people to go to her site and donate. According to the most recent Federal Election data, 43% of contributions to Obama’s campaign have come from donors of $200 or less, compared to 27% for Clinton and 20% for McCain.

2. Traditional media: Changed the influence and role of traditional media, with more and more people going direct to hear and read about the candidates - viewing speeches on YouTube vs. TV, and going direct to sources vs. reading journalists’ coverage and analysis. For example, after Obama’s speech on race in March, the transcript of the speech “ranked consistently higher on the most emailed list than the articles written about the speech,” according to The New York Times (“Finding Political News Online, the Young Pass it On.” )

3. Advertising: Showed the diminishing effectiveness of “packaged” TV advertising. Leading up to the Florida primary Mitt Romney spent $29 million on 34,821 ads, more than three and a half times as much as John McCain who spent $8 million on 10,830 ads, according to analysis of data through Jan 27 by the University of Wisconsin Advertising Project. The effect of the big advertising spend? No lift for Romney who soon pulled out of the race.

In addition, millions of people are tuning into candidates via video vs. TV ads - on their campaign sites and on YouTube and other video sharing sites. Obama’s speech on race, “A More Perfect Union,” has been viewed by almost 4.5 million people on YouTube since March.

In an age where people are tired of marketing hype and gimmicks, it seems odd that Verizon would decide to use a teddy bear as the spokesperson for its FiOs marketing campaign. What’s even odder is that the teddy Twitters, reaching an audience that is even more suspect of inauthentic marketing.

Jason Chupick of Campfire, the agency designing the campaign, explains in today’s PR Week:

“[We] needed a spokesperson, an ongoing voice that people will listen to because everyone is trying to come up with a novel Twitter campaign.”

If the teddy is really bizarre it just might become a viral hit. But sorry Verizon and Campfire, a teddy bear isn’t an a”voice” that this consumer is going to listen to, never mind take seriously.

I predict that marketers will have great fun but lose even more credibility with this new strategy: tuning in to business psychics. That’s right. All kinds of businesses seem to be turning to psychics, otherwise known as “intuitionists,” to make important decisions, according to a Newsweek article, “The 10,000-a-Month Psychic.”

Kevin Clancy, author of Your Gut is Still Not Smarter Than Your Head, has a good post on what this trend means to marketers over at The Marketing Fray.

“Aside from the utter lunacy of a business hiring a psychic for anything other than entertainment at the company Halloween party, we’re concerned that when business folk want to make sense of uncertainty in the present, they get completely preoccupied with the future as if they have no control over it. It’s understandable, but it can be dangerous if they forget that the past and future are not mutually exclusive. “

All that said I am looking forward to tuning into a webinar on July 11 over at Learn From My Life with psychic Ainslie MacLeod, author of The Instruction: Living the Life Your Soul Intended. Why? Maybe it’s summer and I just need a fresh point of view that has nothing to do with marketing, the recession, or presidential politics.

The Ryan Montbleau Band is an amazing up-and-coming group that knows how to use Marketing 2.0 to build a fan base and sell tickets and music, with almost no money for marketing. Here are 10 Marketing 2.0 lessons from the band for all marketers:

1. Love what you do: passion is the center of marketing and propels all tactical components. The greater the passion, the more powerful the marketing.

2. Listen to your customers (fans): Ryan Montbleau hung out after a recent performance, talking, signing t-shirts, and genuinely connecting with fans in the lobby. I had a great conversation with him about some of his lyrics and how he’s so come to be so wise at such a young age. (Which goes back to listening and passion again; he’s in the world.)

3. Make it easy for people to help you: The band makes it easy for people to act as word of mouth advocates, inviting anyone interested to join the Bleau Crew, their street team community.

“What is the Bleau Crew, you ask? We’re a community of fans that do our best to help the band on the road, giving them time to do what they do best: make music! Projects include postering for local shows, handing out handbills, posting banners on our Myspace pages, adding new songs to our profiles, and more! Benefits include free tickets, music, and being part of something truly special. We also get personal teleporters. Awesome, I know.”

4. Go where your fans are online: (Which also makes it easy to help you again.) The band doesn’t just rely on its site or a social network. They’re all the places their fans — and potential fans are — MySpace, FaceBook, Flickr, even a simple message board community aptly named Bleauboards that is thriving.

5. Reveal your points of view and personal stories so people can connect with people in band, not just band. You get a sense of the artist and person Ryan is through his blog, and you get to know all the band members through their quirky profiles. (I especially love band member Ted Wilson’s profile — and that the other members welcomed someone like him.)

6. Keep “old” marketing tactics that work: Want to stay in touch through email? Montbleau also offers a newsletter.

7. Say thank you: When a recent tee-shirt order arrived there was a a handwritten note on the order form, thanking me for supporting the band. Small touches grow fans.

8. Be distinctive, even if people can’t categorize you. Old marketing was that you had to fit into an established category or create a new category. Yet too often trying to fit in to a category blands down the product or service. In today’s super-competitive world, distinctiveness can be a powerful differentiator. So what kind of music is Montbleau? He describes himself as “something of a Martin Sexton by way of Van Morrsion and Stevie Wonder.”

9. Give away free “products”: Giving away free stuff helps people experience the “product,” have something to share as they pass along word of mouth, and builds fan-dom. You can download for free one of the band’s most popular songs, “How Many Times,” as well as tour posters and handbills. The band is also contributing 50 cents from each ticket to Rock The Earth, and contributing 50 cents from each ticket to HeadCount’s “Cents for Sense” campaign until the 2008 presidential election.

10. Make it easy to buy: The band makes it easy to buy music whether it’s on their site or on MySpace, and you can buy concert tickets right on their site.

One of my favorite lyrics from Ryan’s music is:

“It’s time to ease from concentration to focus.”

This is true for so many things in life, and relevant to marketing. It’s time we stop concentrating on the tactics and tools, and flip our focus on earning customers with all the new 2.0 tools.

PS – Montbleau won second prize in the 2007 International Songwriter’s Competition, competing with 15,000 songs written by amateur and professional songwriters from over 100 countries.

A big part of SOCIAL media is being more social as companies — online and in the real world. But many executives have asked me, “how do you measure sociability and friendliness?”

In a 48-hour experiment with blackjack dealers at Ameristar Casino J.D. Power & Associates found that a highly social, outgoing blackjack dealer collected 13 percent more money at his table than at the serious table where the blackjack dealer held to the standard, “don’t talk unless spoken to” rule.

In explaining the experiment Chris Denove of J.D. Power and author of “How Every Great Company Listens to the Voice of the Customer,” told a group this week that there’s no reason to believe that the same relationship doesn’t hold true in other business environments. Why? People like spending time with people who are likeable.

Forget conventional wisdom when it comes to managing corporate reputation. In fact, transparency matters the least in building stakeholder trust (employees, customers, suppliers, investors) and can actually erode trust, according to a fascinating new study by Harvard University’s Michael Pirson and Deepak Malhotra, published in the summer issue of MIT Sloan Management Review. (”Unconventional Insights for Managing Stakeholder Trust.”)

The authors studied four different organizations to find out what matters and to whom. Highlights:

• Transparency is over-rated. In fact, transparency can diminish trust depending on what is disclosed. Also, it has little relevance in terms of building trust.
• Integrity is important, but. Stakeholders close to a company (employees and customers) need to feel that the company genuinely cares for their personal well-being. Integrity alone doesn’t cut it if people feel the company is being fair but “callous.”
• Trust is built on different types of competencies. Employees and investors look for management competency. Customers and suppliers more concerned about technical and quality competency.
• Shared values is hugely important to all stakeholders: All stakeholders want to associate with organizations with values they identify with.

“We have found that that although value congruence matters most to employees, it is also an important factor for every other stakeholder group we studies. In other words, stakeholders of all types are interested in associated with organizations with whom they can identify — and with whom they perceive a match in values.”

This study has interesting implications for marketers and corporate communications professionals.

• Trust means different things to different stakeholders.
• Marketing needs to focus more on two key trust-building factors: the company’s genuine interest in their customers’ success and well being, and the company’s technical ability to deliver quality products and services.
• What beliefs? It’s essential to clearly articulate the company’s values and beliefs. (Maybe even help uncover them. ) In my experience few organizations — especially marketers — focus on these beliefs, or even know what they are. But as this study shows they are critically important to building affinity and trust with customers.

You aren’t alone if you’re trying to figure out where to begin when it comes to doing more — or doing at least something — in social media in your organization. At last night’s Social Media Club meet up in Boston, we surfaced some great tips for building support with management, setting up projects for success, and getting used to the realities and joys of non-stop trial and error.

Here are seven ideas for taking the plunge or expanding what you’ve started:

1. Embrace experimentation as a way of life.
By it’s very nature, social media is participation-driven and enabled by technology — which means it’s always changing and the variables are pretty much infinite. Measurement is evolving. You and your executives need to develop an appetite — actually, real enthusiasm — for experimentation. As panelist Michelle Glorie of Kronos put, “Your executives have to understand the need to take action. They have to be willing to try things and see what sticks.” (To mitigate risk and increase the comfort factor, keep reading below.) Mike Volpe of HubSpot had a great analogy for the experimentation mindset: “Think like a VC, with a portfolio of possibilities. Some will hit, but not all.” Spread the risk, learn from everything you do, and keep investing.

2. Start small. Think evolution, not revolution.
You might even be “doing social media” already. Next time you’ve got big news, something as simple as creating a companion podcast/video interview makes your news more engaging and shareable. As a number of PR folks in the room advised, just post it to YouTube, on your website and share the links via email to customers, prospects and bloggers who follow your industry. You’ll see that it doesn’t hurt and nobody dies. So make it a series. See what kind of downloading action you get, and ask for feedback wherever you post it.

3. Monitor what’s going on (and make new insights easy to appreciate)
John Cass (now online community manager at Forrester) shared an example from interviews he’d done with Wendy Harman at the Red Cross. She created daily reports for Red Cross execs on what’s going on online, what people are saying about the Red Cross by using free tools like Twitter, Google alerts, and Flickr. She helped them see the value of this new source of insights and offered advice on specific action the Red Cross could take, building a case for more proactive involvement.

4. Start inside.
Lots of companies launch blogs internally first, often within the corporate intranet. It’s a safe place to experiment, and to surface those with the natural talent and inclination to sustain blog posting. It’s also a great way to get employees used to a new style of communicating, not to mention learning about the organization in a more immediate and less packaged way (assuming blog posts are timely, authentic, and interesting!)

5. Have trust in your people (or get some people you can trust)
The new realities of social media — always on, everyone has a voice, sharing is paramount — bring with it much less control, more immediacy and unpredictability. Which means you and your boss and your team mates have to trust each other to use their best judgment; micromanaging is not an option. If you don’t have that kind of trust, consider making a change. In your team or your choice of employer. (Thanks to Parna Sarkar-Basu of Invention Machine for this point, who credits her great relationship with her boss for their early successes in social media.)

6. Involve the legal team at the beginning (especially if you’re a public company)
It sounds counter-intuitive but the best thing you can do is proactively engage your legal folks. Much better than having them send up red flags when you’re about to launch something. Offer a social media 101 session, show the impact of social media on the business, how other companies are navigating these new waters, and encourage their collaboration on ways to overcome any concerns they may have.

7. Evangelize, and train everyone
If you’re the social media champion, unleash your beliefs and savvy on as many groups across the company as you can. Go to corporate communications and help them see how to shift from message control to two way conversations, talk to your web team about easy ways to inject more participation into the site, create a social media 101 workshop or e-learning event and resources, and work with HR or whomever to get it shared throughout the company. (Evidently Intuit has a great internal training program pioneered by Scott Wilder, group manager of Intuit’s QuickBooks online community. Will try to get more on this.)

You can also do the old fashioned social thing and get yourself and some colleagues to physical events like those hosted by the Social Media Club which has chapters all around the world. When a bunch of smart people who care about the same thing get in a room, something interesting and useful always happens…

What obstacles and ideas for getting over the hump to do more in social media have you thought about?

One of the biggest mistakes in selling is not making easy for a customer to make a decision.

That’s some of the advice from Mahan Khalsa, vp of the Franklin Covey Sales Performance Group, in an interview in this month’s Sales & Marketing Management.

I found two points especially interesting.

1. The sales reps job is no longer getting information — or simply developing relationships; it’s about providing intelligence and insight to the prospect. (I’d add that most of marketing should be focused on this today.)

2. Most sales presentations don’t make it easy for the client to buy. We forget to address: what does the client need to believe, intellectually and emotionally, to comfortably and confidently make the decision?

Khalsa’s advice:

• Start with the end in mind. Within the first few slides the client should know what decision you want them to make.
• Identify the 3 -5 beliefs that the decision makers need to check off to make the decision, then organize what you say to address those beliefs.
• Gain a decision on each belief after address it vs. waiting until the end for Q&A. When the beliefs supporting the decision have been successfully addressed, the final decision is much easier.

The buzz is that CBS may “divorce” itself from anchor Katie Couric long before her contract expires in 2011. What went wrong?

Maybe it has nothing to do with Katie Couric or the fact that people are tuning out of television for their news. Maybe it comes down to a Viagra problem.

Watching the evening news — CBS or the other networks — we are bombarded with ads for one medical ailment ad after another. Penile erection, bladder control, constipation, bone loss, arthritis, diabetes. What kind of customer experience is this? Terrible. Erections and constipation happy messages while trying to make dinner, and maybe catch up on the news.

CBS, like most companies, has different silos responsible for different functions, and no one organization is looking at the customer’s experience. CBS News is responsible for Katie & Co., while the advertising group is bringing in the television dollars — and the Viagra ads.

In many retail companies, marketing is responsible for branding while operations oversees the stores, and never the two shall collaborate, often creating a mixed message and uneven customer experience. Similarly, customer service isn’t usually part of marketing, yet the customer service group often has more influence on customers than advertising, promotions, or pricing.

I hope CBS doesn’t put the blame for poor ratings on Katie Couric, a fine journalist. CBS has bigger issues; the customer’s experience matters more than the ad revenue. If the first is bad, the second will become disastrous.

Sen. Harry Reid , the House Majority Leader, sent me an email today about his new site:

“I believe it is important for you to stay updated on the work I am doing on your behalf in Washington. As part of this effort, my website has been completely redesigned with the latest online tools available to help keep you informed about the issues I am addressing and the services my office can provide for you. “

I checked out the site, but it misses something very, very big: there’s no way for me to talk back. No way to post comments. No way to see what other folks have to say and connect with them. If I want to send Sen. Reid an email I have to fill out a long form. Geez.

Social media has fundamentally changed our expectations. We don’t want to be communicated to; we want to be able to connect with.

Sorry, Harry. Hope you didn’t spend a lot of our money on just prettying up a Web site and adding a couple of videos.

PS — When I have sent Reid emails with questions and concerns, he sends back form emails saying he can’t respond to me as I’m not a Nevada citizen. If you’re the Majority Leader shouldn’t you be willing to listen to more of us?