John Treadway

Yesterday a post from Barack Obama appeared on my Facebook feed.  It was about the Open for Questions system on Whitehouse.gov.  The Open for Questions application allows anybody to register and vote up or down on questions related to the economy, health care, security and other topics of interest.  You can also ask your own questions.  On Thursday (tomorrow), President Obama will answer some of the most popular questions in a town hall setting.

It cannot be overstated how innovative and powerful this concept is.  The established model is that you communicate your wishes and concerns to your elected representatives in Congress, and they’re supposed to advocate for their voters.  Of course, nobody trusts these (mostly) guys to listen or to do anything other than what’s in their own interests – which are often not in alignment with the voters who elected them.  Plus – to get your voice heard you need to get to three members of Congress who may or may not have a great and responsive staff.

Obama just bypasses Congress to gather the Will of the People on a national level, and uses highly viral social media to do it (bypassing old media as well).  He can then look at the results -  and with the support of hundreds of thousands or even millions of votes and voters he can steer the discussion with far more legitimacy.  By letting us in, he’s binding himself to the people.  By giving us voice, he’s removing the filters and communication blockages that occur with any leader.  Obama describes the presidency as a “bubble.”  When you’re in the bubble, you can’t know that people are thinking or feeling.

Open for Questions is a powerful way to burst the bubble and get close to the voters — his customers.  Sure, this makes for good policy – but this is mostly about marketing.  His supporters love him even more for his openness and proof that he “gets” the social graph and why that matters.  Even his detractors have to stop and admire the openness and leveraging of new media, and some of them will – perhaps grudgingly – grow closer to Obama’s view of the world.

What are you doing to listen to your customers?  Are you using social media to bypass the filters from sales, marketing and customer service that make it difficult to know what your customers are really thinking?

Many hours are spent on building the best website for the money.  We think about site structure, content, look and feel and other elements to the design and delivery of the site.  As much work as it may be to get this new beauty out the door, it’s just the start.

There was one client I worked with a while ago who wanted a new website.  We discussed where there business was coming from, how they wanted it to grow, and the types of clients they wanted to attract.  Once we had an idea of what the site should say, I tried to engage this client in a discussion about how they were going to get people to see it.  If a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it… Well, you get the picture.

Let’s make something clear – their monthly unique visitor count is in the low hundreds.  Very low hundreds.  Most of the inquiries they get from their site are related to a service that they have listed but they don’t perform anymore.   The website was actually worse than nothing – it was costing them time and effort to respond to these unwanted inquiries.

When I tried to steer the conversation towards marketing, the client looked at me like I was from Mars.  The site was their marketing, right?  At least that’s what they thought.  Even in B2B, many people get to a vendor or service provider site through search.  Or ads, or PR, or some form of marketing activity.

They were willing to spend $ on redoing their site, but nothing on marketing it so people would visit.

Folks, it’s simple.  The website is a tool – it’s not the marketing plan.  The really hard part is driving traffic to the tool to start them down the sales funnel.  And programs that work for one company may not apply to yours.  So, you need to have a comprehensive plan to test different marketing vehicles — and this can be done without spending a lot on the programs.

Would paid search yield results?

What about SEO?  Is the content relevant, current, and do you have people linking to you?

Do you post your own blog?

Do you have lots of great referenceable clients and can you post their stories on your site and alert a bunch of bloggers who may care about them?  Not just in your industry, but in theirs?

Can you showcase your talents by making something interesting for people – like a microsite on something with interest in your target audience?

You don’t need to have  a huge budget these days to generate traffic.  Note – for this client, a few hundred more visits by people who are interested in their offerings could result in a big jump in business for them.

Normally here I don’t say much about politics.  This is really about marketing, strategy, etc. for technology.  But in this case I can’t help myself.   As has been widely reported and discussed on blogs far and wide, Michelle Obama served food at a D.C. homeless shelter yesterday.  There’s a picture in the LA Times story on her visit of an unidentified man taking Michelle’s picture on a cellphone, for which the LA Times’ Andrew Malcolm questions (in a very condescending and mean-spirited way) why a homeless man has a cellphone.

Before you can say “Please pass the jelly!” the scallywags of conservative media, including Michelle Malkin and Kathy Shaidle, siezed on this as just another reason why liberals suck and the homeless suck worse.

For the record, I voted for the GOP presidential candidate from 1984 through 2000 and two republican governors of Massachusetts (Bill “Big Red” Weld and Mitt “look at my hair” Romney).  I’m a fiscal conservative but socially I identify much more with the democratic party.  I would say that Weld did too, which is why I consider myself a “Weld Republican” (or more traditionally a Rockefeller Republican).

The more and more I hear people like Malkin, Shaidle, and the “incendiary entertainer” Rush Limbaugh (so called by Michael Steele, Republican National Committee chair), the farther I want to distance myself from having anything to do with the Republican Party.  And judging from the elections in the last few years, I am not alone.  If the GOP wants me back, they know where to find me — but they better look more like Lincoln and a lot less like Limbaugh.