It has been an interesting period since Ozean Media released our landmark Twitter study on the twitter usage by Florida’s elected officials.
I say interesting because of the calls we received since the release of the study.
These calls generally fall into two categories:
1) Politicians who want to improve their social media outreach, but have political consultants who are not or can not help them with the project.
-or-
2) Fellow Political Consultants calling under the guise of “Hey man, interesting research….I disagree with….” but then guiding the discussion to ask about improving their clients’ social media outreach.
Frankly, we were expecting calls from the press NOT calls from politicians or other political consultants.
I guess the number one thing we discuss during these calls is that a robust social media outreach is not easy, free, or able to be put in the hands of the intern. Digital Media needs a spot at the table with its own goals, measurements, budget, and strategy.
On these calls, we talk about the different kinds of digital outreach: video, social, websites, micro-sites photos, fundraising, email outreach, newsletters and how each one of these should match the politicians branding archetype. We talk about conceptually how a social media program could be worked into a communications calendar. We talk about data list building activities. How these digital communications differ from communication channels they are more comfortable with. For example, is a messaged photo on facebook the equivalent to digital direct mail?
At some point, in my excitement, I realize I have lost many of them. They know in their gut they should be doing more digital, but I think they honestly had NO idea that a robust digital program would be so much work or this labor intensive. I mean one should just be able to snap their fingers and create a web video that “will go viral”, RIGHT?
So in this discussion just about the time when all is lost, Ozean receives “Boy, Ozean really understands this stuff, thanks for the information. Can I call you in the future?”
It has happened so much in the past months that I am considering re-positioning Ozean Media to:
Ozean Media: The digital agency other political consultants and politicians call when they don’t understand digital.
What do you think? Yeah you are right, needs to be shortened up a little.
