It’s no secret I’ve been a supporter of President-elect Obama for several years. I was in his camp even before he and Hillary went to blows. One of the many things that drew me to him was his 21st century usage of the internet. Much as been made (and rightfully so) of the Obama campaigns use of Social Networking tools to build huge networks of support across the US with a scalable and ultimately cost efficient model.  Obama’s campaign understood the power of building a network database of contacts ONE TIME and using the base over and over again for multiple functions from fundraising efforts to getting the word out about local rally's. There in lies the long term, true impact of Social Media. It’s why my social media team isn’t build around campaigns but rather a long term, sustainable committed effort.

It will be interesting to see what Obama’s team has in mind for the social media networks they have built. I’m a member of several of the networks and haven’t heard anything yet, but he’s been busy so I’ll cut him a bit of slack. This will be where it get interesting. How will Obama continue to use this huge base his has built up? I’m really hoping he doesn’t fall into the trap that campaign mentality can lead to which is spin up a lot of effort to build awareness with mass amounts of activity, then sunset a campaign and go dark until the next campaign rolls out. People will forget about you. They will go on to the next shiny object and lose interest if you don’t continue to invest in your efforts.

Think of all the ways Obama can use these networks. He has real activists that want to help spread his word. He can build consensus among core bases and test messages like a President has never done before. And since the heavy investment in these outreach efforts is in the beginning each incremental usage lowers the cost per engagement.

This morning was a perfect example of why it’s crucial to have healthy social networks established BEFORE you need it. Hotmail rolled out some upgrades over the weekend. Unfortunately there was a bug in the upgrade that only effected Firefox users running on Linux. This is a relatively small segment of the Hotmail audience but a very vocal segment and one we want to keep happy, particularly because the bug happened to effect customers using competitor products. It was not intended to effect that group but it did so the appearance may be that Hotmail doesn’t care as much about that subset of customers – WHICH IS NOT TRUE. The best way to reach customers in a pinch is to do a blog posting. After you do the blog posting explaining the situations you can then use that blog post and link back to it when commenting on blogs that are talking about the situation. It’s not link bate if it is actually offering a resolution to the problem the blogger identified as having in the blog post. It don’t abdicate spamming blogs with your products blog link unless there is a situation where it can resolve an issue the blogger may be having, as in this case it did. But if you didn’t have a communication channel set up in advance (a blog, Twitter feed, Facebook page, etc) this would not be an option for you. If Obama didn’t have the network set up ahead of time he would never have raised money as fast as he needed to when he needed to.  Don’t wait for a crisis to build your community outreach channel, do it today so you are ready when you really will need it. And don’t think of it as a campaign, it’s the cost of doing business anymore as both Obama and McCain learned.