When it comes to social media, building a relationship with your users is the first step. Naturally CRM or Customer Relationship Management should be a part of your campaign if not a major part of it. A perfect example of the power a well managed social media campaign along with CRM is Obama becoming America’s 44th President.

The Obama camp took advantage of many social media outlets to increase their influence amongst the younger generations and obviously it worked. They developed relationships on networks including Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, and others. The Barack Obama website also played a large role in connecting people with Obama. While it is obvious that Barack himself does not manage, reply, and update these accounts on his own you can still see what a major role social media marketing can play. I think that without leveraging social media the way that the Obama camp has, their early victory may have been delayed or possibly never happened at all.

By focusing on creating a more one on one relationships with citizens, the Obama camp developed a highly scalable social media campaign that proves SMM is not just for bloggers and affiliate marketers. Their campaign was designed to:

• Get the message out, more importantly to the young people.
• Keep the message fresh.
• Stick to their story and let the truth be known.
• Track and stay in touch with interested visitors.
• Develop a worthwhile, engaging relationship with voters.

Non the less it was interesting to see what a major difference the online presence made. While social media played a large role in Barack’s win, I still think John Mccain would have won if he campaigned the way he did his concession speech. I think they went the wrong direction trying to make Mccain appeal to an audience he should not have and it cost him the election.