Wendy Meadley's @SocialWendy Blog

Lucky MIMA (Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association) members got to learn from Simple Scott this past week at the monthly meeting.  If you don’t know who Simple Scott  or Scott Goodstein is and you are a Social Marketer or in the Interactive Marketing world, you have been living under a rock.

These are the two key voices that are out “being pretty transparent” about the daily operations and build of the Obama Presidential Campaign web presence and social campaign. I saw Scott Goodstein, of Revolution Messaging, earlier this year at what was likely one of the best panels at SXSWi.  He and the rest of the panel team provided a glimpse at the rapidly changing messages, testing, and learnings that helped them break the mold on traditional marketing thought in this highly visible and clearly successful campaign.

Fast forward to this week and I was excited to hear about the web operations, the backside of how they so rapidly, built, qa’d, tested messaging and whatever else this Scott was willing to share.  Well, he didn’t disappoint! Just as candid as the panel was on the mostly positive with some opportunities messaging, Simple Scott gave a fairly in depth view at how the project work was done on their web presence.  He even provided some staffing structure overviews and daily routines.  This was really appreciated, at least by me, because it seems like most Social Marketing experts taking the microphone these days are sharing stories about other people’s work, that as a professional in the field, I have seen shared in either my Marketing Profs subscription, on Media Bistro, Sphinn or something similar. How awesome to hear straight from the guy who did it!

Okay, here is the shameless posed photo after the event, all I can say is that my colleague Mike Arulfo, most of you know his as @ValkyrieX instigated it- I have witnesses.

SocialWendy SimpleScott & ValkyrieX at the MIMA Event

So here are the key things I thought made his presentation strong, keeping in mind I am highly interested in the topic as I am building the National Civic Summit and feeling the slight discomfort of building in front of the team and the consumers.

1. Simple Scott had a graphic of the team structure so an experienced practitioner could do a quick overview/ analysis and assimilate it to other projects and teams.
2. He shared about the importance of daily deliverables making a difference in the campaign- this is really common on a rapid campaign or event build, the nature of the beast is that is continually changes and a few days later it is a whole new (and hopefully better) “thing”.
3. The part that was inspirational was that he talked about the Hope and Change messaging of the campaign and how they needed to run parallel to one another and yet have their own place.  He particularly defined the feel of what was happening as listening to the voice of America through the various web functionality, A/B testing and social tools that were being sent out rapidfire. (the funny comment was in the comment of trying to rhyme with Hope being a hard thing to do- I hear that- we don’t always get easy campaign messages or directions)

The one thing he wouldn’t/couldn’t answer- as  I have seen it written as confidential in other articles and briefs is the exact staff number of the web presence team.  He did share that multiple people shared the same cubes, so think call center, and that they heavily relied on volunteers, and defined the work by state and other geographies, so you can imagine the amazing energy and mayhem that must’ve characterize this team who truly changed the world.

Thanks for reading- you can follow me on Twitter at @socialwendy

You can access my FREE SOCIAL MEDIA TRAINING SERIES (yep) at CIVICTRAINING.COM compliments of Target, General Mills, the Citizens League, Blue Earth Interactive, The Simple Service and the National Civic Summit.