The politicians and their consultants do not understand that Social Networking is NOT Social Media Marketing. You will never succeed if you simply have an approach of ticking a checklist of social networking sites.

I also see lots of people from time to time comment about the Obama campaign but they are misinformed and keep perpetuating the myth that Obama succeeded because of social media.

The Obama campaign succeeded because of email first, mobile second and social media marketing third. It was strongly supported by ATL and therefore it was a great 360 degree marketing campaign which used digital marketing in the most effective way to support the campaign goals and objectives. The team who led the Obama campaign has stated this on numerous occasions but it keeps getting lost in translation.

Social technologies are not simply Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and YouTube. It is blogs, forums, communities, product reviews & ratings, RSS, chat & WIKI’s, social media newsrooms, social media press releases, social bookmarks and widgets to name a few.

As Tiphereth points out social influence marketing is about engagement and conversations. Social Influence Marketing is not just another monologue broadcast channel and yet so many marketers (and politicians) continually treat Twitter and Facebook as an RSS feed to broadcast yet more messages.

We’ve moved on from the Conversational Marketplace pre 1949 to the era of Mass Marketing Advertising circa 1949 to 2000 we are now in the current era of Conversational Marketing 2001+. But it seems a lot of people cannot grasp the fundamental changes in consumer behaviour underlying these new rules. If you don’t understand your target audience, where they are and how they use the social technologies then you will fail.

I won’t even go into the art of storytelling and content but simply stories sell, facts and figures don’t and this is particularly true across digital marketing.

Lastly, influence is not about the number of followers a person has or the volume of their tweets or status updates or blog posts. True influence by its very nature is the power of that individual to influence another person’s behaviour or opinion. Sadly way too many people are also using the wrong KPI’s to measure social influence marketing and are spending way too much time on speaking and or engaging with the wrong people.

This failure to understand the power of digital marketing and social influence marketing is probably the single biggest lost opportunity of this election.

I blogged about this at http://lc.tl/auelection and compared the hype to what happened in the UK for the recent general election.

Andrew Grill
I’m here for 2 weeks so will be able to see first hand if my theory is correct.

And surely those icons of the advertising world would know how to build communities using social media?

Genuinely engaging people and building trust and respect takes time and considerable effort (both on and offline) so little wonder the major political parties aren’t yet ready to take full advantage of the social web.

Seems like only Kate Ellis has any understanding, yet ninemsn users think the Libs have a better understanding. Hmmm! What does this say about the 9msn audience????

Surely it’s not that hard for even half aware pollies and/or their parties to get the potential power of social media. AND that it should extend beyond some lame tweets and even more lame YouTube videos.

The UK election and now, seemingly, the Australian election demonstrates that political decision makers don’t get it and perhaps feel that what happened in the US was an aberration and it won’t work here.

Hopefully, we’ll be blown away by a candidate that does get it and does do a meaningful job of leveraging social media in this election. If nothing else, it’s a pretty good way to stand out from the pack.