President Obama’s Facebook Town Hall

President Obama is conducting a Facebook Town Hall on Wednesday – very cool.

Designing Obama

Take a design director from the most emotionally-charged political campaign in recent history, add an innovative online fundraising platform, sprinkle liberally with design from across the land, and what do you get? Why, Designing Obama, a hardcover look at the artwork and graphic design inspired by and supporting the 2008 Barack Obama campaign.

Only as many copies as are ordered will be published – the book is being funded through KickStarter. It costs $50 and if interested, you can pledge to help fund the project – and the book – now. 

[Via Flavorwire]

Bit by bit

There is some SERIOUS detail in this piece by Shepard Fairey. It’s easy to think that there isn’t in a lot of modern art, and then I see a video like this and I remember that it’s all in the details. The video is part of Arkitip’s Issue #51, which celebrates Fairey’s work in the light of his famous Obama ‘Hope’ portrait, and his talent at remixing. (As an aside, I didn’t know ‘Hope’ hung in the National Portrait Gallery in the Smithsonian. Neat.) 

Shepard Fairey from Arkitip on Vimeo.

The world wants Obama, apparently

No huge surprises, but still an interesting exercise. The Economist gives us the results of a ‘What if’ scenario with the American elections. Obama trumps McCain with 9,111 votes in the global electoral college as against just 163 for McCain.*

* as of 9.32am UK time today. 

Thoughts on the US general elections

I’ve been paying attention to what’s happening with the US general elections for a while now, and thought I should note down some thoughts I had about Palin and Obama that have been occupying my mind of late.

I’ll make my stance clear on the subject – I dislike Sarah Palin. I hope all this (mostly negative) Palin publicity is actually going to help Obama win. However, over the last few weeks, I have noticed way more creative videos surfacing to defame Palin, if you will, than to popularise Obama and Biden. The news-related ones are well-known, not least her interview with Katie Couric, but some of the more inventive spoofs and videos are the Tina Fey spoof on Saturday Night Live and the P.Diddy video where he asks ‘children’ to vote in the elections because ‘Sarah Palin scares him’. Today I also found this, (it’s titled ‘Pumpkin’, which could be bad news for Palin when you consider the fact that Halloween is round the corner!) – but it is too reminiscent of this Obama image for my comfort. (In case you haven’t seen them already, other interesting election-related sites to take in are Apathy Party ’08, Brand Advocacy ’08 and Palintology – the last of which is a Palin-supported site but it’s interesting to see some of the videos linked there.)

When I keyed in ‘Barack Obama’ and ‘Sarah Palin’ in Google Trends, Palin’s graph does shoot higher than Obama’s when you take just this year into account. And this, when you consider the fact that she was only announced as McCain’s running mate on August 29th. 

Palin doesn’t really have a personal campaign manager or separate agency for herself (Rick Davis is the manager for the joint McCain-Palin campaign), so this is a case of negative psychology, or publicity, as the case may be, being put into gear by Obama supporters. I fervently hope it doesn’t become a case of reverse psychology instead. 

*UPDATE: Since I’m on the topic anyway and hope not to revisit it too soon, take a look at this Common Craft video, ‘Electing a US President’ – it’s a super simple explanation of the process behind electing a president, and why your vote counts. Also, if you haven’t already, the Google voter film featuring top Hollywood stars pushing you to vote is a good example of reverse psychology – and fun to watch as well.

The argument for digital strategy in a consumer-facing world

The New York Times has a piece about how the Obama campaign has been executing an intelligent, targeted social networking strategy to bring more voters into its fold, and succeeding remarkably. This may be a rather obvious fact but the truth is that today no person or entity that has its ultimate aim as getting more people to back them (if an individual, like Obama) or promote them (if a company/brand) can afford to ignore the importance of social networking and having a digital strategy of some sort.

If you are an artist, for example, it will be useful to start a blog and have a Facebook or MySpace page to speak about your work and interact with your fans. You can also send email newsletters to them to publicize new work and ensure that your name stays in their minds. People have a very short attention span these days because there are so many things when they step outside that clamour for their attention, so the mere power of recall will be a very useful tool to have as the world moves forward. Artists and musicians didn’t have such widespread options to get more business for themselves even five years ago – you can read about the experiences of my friend, fellow Tuttle Club member and musician Steve Lawson here – and if you feel that as an artist you don’t get enough recognition, then make sure it’s not because of your own shortcomings in the online sphere.

It is old news now that many companies are Web 2.0 savvy and have a Twitter account in addition to a blog and perhaps a Facebook or MySpace page, if they are that involved. Some, of course, aren’t. I recently spoke to some people who work with PR firms, who said that some of the companies that were approaching them as clients had no idea what social media was or how it could help them. Those are the people who are late to the party, and if they don’t buck up now, they will soon be too far behind to catch up. The traditional forms of advertising can only take a brand so far today. I can’t put it better than this piece from Wired (emphasis in bold mine):

“The future of media is the future of advertising; the future of advertising is the future of media. The fundamental difference, however, is that the design philosophies of digital media will exert a greater influence on traditional advertising than traditional advertising will hold over the design philosophies of the digerati. In other words, tomorrow’s soft-ads are going to reflect the values of the Net more than tomorrow’s Net will evolve into a digital regurgitation of today’s advertising.”

At the end of the day, however, a digital strategy will only be useful if you have a product that people want, and that works well. If the Mac was not a viable alternative to machines that run Microsoft and offered only its sleek good looks, then no amount of ads would have helped it sell. (The way it’s going, for example, it looks like the Macbook Air may not be as successful as its original Mac brother even though it has a nice ad to bolster it, because users are beginning to feel the lack of basics like a DVD drive). So if Obama wins in November, it will not be just because he is perceived as a viable alternative to Clinton and McCain, or even because of his brilliant online presence. It will be because he is a candidate that people truly believe will deliver the goods (and he better!).