There’s no question that Obama’s marketing campaign was one of the most amazing, grandiose, and well-executed plans in the history of marketing.  But I’m honestly tired of reading about it, so let’s talk about why McCain’s online campaign kinda sucked(*) and how you can avoid his mistakes.

First of all, McCain didn’t have a chance in this election from a marketing standpoint.  You might be thinking, “Oh that’s easy to say now that Obama is president, hindsight’s 20/20, blah blah blah.”  The reason I say that is because Obama was completely congruent with his marketing.  Social networking, texting, Twitter, myBarackObama.com — all this stuff made sense.  It felt like it was a natural extension of what he was trying to accomplish.

McCain’s marketing team, on the other hand, made a completely hollow attempt at some of the stuff Obama was doing.  McCainSpace.com?  Really?  A 72-year old who doesn’t use email has his own social network? Give me a break.  It was totally incongruous with who he was as a person.  And yea, I know that he had to put up something in order to compete with Obama in the online world, but his site sucked compared to his opponent’s.  They didn’t put much effort into setting it up… and it showed.

For instance, a lot of users reported getting error messages when trying to set up their profiles.  Then once you registered with McCainSpace, there wasn’t really anything to do.  You couldn’t pull other people in as easily as you could on myBarackObama, and it wasn’t a great experience.  You didn’t feel like you were truly a part of something once you got in.

Unfortunately for McCain’s team, they were painfully unaware of how effective the internet is at word-of-mouth marketing when it is utilized correctly.  As I said in my last post, online word-of-mouth is the cheapest, easiest, and most effective form of marketing on the planet.  Obama’s team, however (which consisted of one of Facebook’s founders), was intimately familiar with the power and dynamics of social networks and highly filtered data.  They used their site to empower Obama supporters — to enable them to set up meetings, print out certain kinds of flyers, find unregistered voters, etc.  Obama gave his supporters the necessary tools they could use so that his campaign would win from the bottom up, and not the top down.

So what did we learn from the whole experience that you can apply to your company?

McCainSpace was a meatball sundae – it just wasn’t his style.  It was a “me too” marketing attempt just so he could say he was doing what Obama was doing.  Don’t do that.  You don’t need to set up your own social network or have your own viral video just so you can be like your competitor.  Ning, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, blogs, texting — it’s irrelevant which one you use because they’re just tools.  Highly effective tools, but still just tools.

If a particular form of social media doesn’t mesh with your company and what you’re trying to accomplish, then don’t use it.  If you’re not going to utilize that tool to the fullest extent, then don’t use it.  Don’t make a superficial attempt at something just because others are doing it.  Pick the tools that will work really well for you, that you’ll actually enjoy using frequently, and stick with those.

(*) And just to clarify: I am NOT saying McCain lost solely because of his marketing.  I am saying his marketing efforts weren’t that good.

Meet the “Out of Your League Hot Girl.” I’m not exactly sure who this chick is (although she does look A LOT like Sarah Shahi), but it’s a good thing Converse is paying her to help sell their shoes…

Just kidding.  They hired her to make a viral video.  Congratulations, you marketing geniuses!

I can just imagine how that pitch meeting went.  “This is brilliant, John!  Sex sells AND it’s using the internet!  And it’s going to be a viral video?!  Excuse me while I clean up the walls because you just blew my mind!”  Do companies not realize that viral videos aren’t a good way to make money?** They’re short-lived clips that people watch for about a week (more if you’re lucky), and then just forget about.  Google continues to struggle with Youtube because they can’t figure out how to monetize something that’s been seen by 30 million people.  So why would Converse waste their money on creating videos that have NOTHING to do with what their company does or stands for?

The “Out of your league girl” videos are inherently viral, which is fine if that’s all they’re trying to do.  “Check out how hot this chick is, bro!  It’s not really that funny, but… look how hot she is!”  If Converse is measuring their web campaign’s success based on traffic, they’re in for a pleasant surprise.  But if they’re looking at interest in brand, increase in sales, or anything that matters for their continued success as a company, they aren’t going to find much.

Converse: please fire your marketing agency.  They are wasting your money with cool videos for us that won’t help you.

Converse’s marketing agency: please keep using money from other big companies to make stupid but fun videos.  It’s amazing you were able to trick them into thinking your BS campaign was a good idea.

**An exception to the rule. This viral video definitely resulted in an increase in sales and good publicity for its creators.

Brown credits his blog with changing the way people find him, he created a podcast that gives him great “fishing stories” and loyalty from guides up and down the Gulf coast, he uses RSS and content tagging to automatically produce fresh blog content, and email marketing to blow his competition away at trade shows.

The amazing thing to me is how many of these smaller businesses could differentiate themselves, but simply choose not to. They dismiss the notion of using tools on the Internet because they think it’s irrelevant to their business. Or worse yet, they don’t know anything about social media and never educate themselves.

To me, if you’re a small business, social media is your best route for growing your business. That Brown guy is selling fishing lures, for chrissakes, and he’s cleaning up. He might not have the best lures or the greatest service, but he’s doing one thing that’s far superior to his competitors: he’s making it personal for his customers. They relate to him because he tells them stories about their passion. I still agree with Seth’s premise in Meatball Sundae, that if you’re in the business of producing “meatballs,” this marketing 2.0 stuff doesn’t apply so much to you. But if you’re in a business where you can tell a story, relate to your customers, and be able to use tools on the Internet to leverage your business and have new customers find you (not you hunting them down), then you need to get on top of social media.

Not taking part in social media will hurt you in the long run. More and more of your smarter competitors will leverage it to help their business, and you’ll be left behind.