The Sebinomics Blog 1.0

President Obama proved that social networking platforms are the wave of the future in  marketing. Even conservative institutions like the Vatican entered the cyberspace with a Youtube channel, as soon as they smelled what the Net Generation is cooking. 

Swiss International Air Lines Ltd. is the next company diving into the jungle of social media marketing. An internal project group sent out a questionnaire to 3,000 members of their Miles & More program–everyone between 18 and 38 years of age–asking how well they know different social networking websites and how often they use the respective platform. According to Jean-Claude Donzel, Senior Spokesman at Swiss International Air Lines, the airline will use the results to create a strategy for banner positioning. Also, there are already five Swiss-groups on Facebook, which include about 1,000 members. Update: The Swiss International Air Lines page on Facebook has 3,994 fans by today.

The idea behind this project is to foster online ticket sales. Donzel states that 70 percent of their tickets are sold through external travel agencies, and the rest through direct channels. In my opinion, Swiss is doing the right thing, even though I wouldn’t spend too much time and money on web banners, but focus more on direct interaction with potential customers in online communities. 

I’m rather surprised that Swiss has not engaged in community marketing yet. Isn’t it obvious that a company can control their sales activities better and in a more efficient way, if they do it themselves–especially online? After the Swissair Grounding in 2001 the airline gained back its good name and is performing very well, according to different magazine rankings. I fly from Europe to Asia or to the US very frequently, and I’m always relieved when I get to fly Swiss, because I know that the flight will be more comfortable than with many other airlines.  

The company needs to foster its good brand name through social media channels. Many people, especially Net Geners, don’t care which airline to fly with. They simply choose by price and convenience. That is why it is important to give happy customers tools and incentives to spread good stories, and the Internet is the most efficient tool for that. Web banners will probably not help making the choice between Swiss and another airline, but individual customer reviews will. I found an Anti-Air Abcdef (not going to tell the name) group on Facebook, and those stories really scared me. I will never ever fly with that airline!

Since Swiss has many happy customers, the company just needs to give them several platforms where these happy customers can share their stories with others, and incentives for them to keep sharing experiences and stories online and offline. Swiss International Air Lines has a great service and their prices can compete with those of other airlines. All Swiss needs to do is to let potential customers know these facts. And it is most effective if they know from other happy customers, not from a web banner.

Obamamania

President Obama is writing history. Wherever we look, whichever channel we watch, whatever newspaper we open, Obamamania is omnipresent. An American friend told me on November 4, 2008, the night Obama was elected the 44th President of the USA, “I guess you have to be American to understand this.” He meant, to understand the euphoria surrounding the (most probably) biggest superstar the world of politics has ever seen. But on January 20, 2009, the day of Barack Obama’s inauguration anyone across the globe understands the euphoria! 

It’s amazing how many people the Obama team is able to reach. Obvjously, his team is very tech savy. CNN teamed up with Facebook to bring the inauguration event also the Net Geners, who do not really follow CNN. And before that, Barack Obama was on countless covers of all kinds of magazines. Even teen magazines like the German Bravo, put on hold their popstars-only rule, and included a poster of Obama in one of their 2008 issues. Many marketers ask themselves, “How did he do it?”

The book BARACK, INC.: Winning Business Lessons of the Obama Campaign by Barry Libert and Rick Faulk, discusses three pillars of Obama’s successful campaign strategy: 

BE COOL. 
Leadership requires focus. Barack Obama built a widely recognized brand by staying focused on the main issues, remaining constantly on message, and always keeping his composure- lessons that can benefit even the most seasoned executives.

BE SOCIAL.
Barack Obama created a nationwide community, using social technologies to develop his own team, increase brand visibility, and generate unprecedened revenue for his campaign. Learn how your business can do the same.

BE THE CHANGE.
He embodied the change he professed, and thus persuaded Americans that he could lead the nation in a new way. Leading any successful business requires the same commitment and innovation.

Today, I was watching Larry King on CNN and saw Will.I.Am performing his song “It’s a new day,” one of many songs written for and inspired by the first Afro-American President of the USA. Let’s not forget that other artists wrote songs to and about presidents before. But the change here is that  songs written for Obama actually praise him and motivate to support him. And there is a lot of support in Europe and in Asia for President Obama. It seems to be “cool” (again) to be American.

A woman attending the inauguration said on TV, “The world is changing. This is unbelievable!” It really is. And besides his political views, President Obama is changing the way companies will do marketing.

CNN and Facebook

It is just a few hours away – After the longest and hardest presidential elections in history, Barack Obama will finally be inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States of America.

Jem Aswad and Jennifer Vineyard write on mtv.com, „The is an event that’s about as close to a royal coronation as American government gets. It’s a day filled with ceremony, guards, salutes, parades, speeches, a party that’s actually still called a “ball” and, of course, symbolism: of new beginnings, rites of passage, of change.”

The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland says, „Today a magic spell will be performed. A man who 12 weeks ago was a mere political candidate will be transformed with the incantation of a few words, before a vast crowd and a television audience in the hundreds of millions if not billions, into the head of state, even the embodiment, of the most powerful nation on earth.“

BBC News reports, “Events across the UK will be held later as Britons share in US celebrations marking the historic inauguration of US President-elect Barack Obama.”

But what really made my jar drop was that CNN and Facebook teamed up and passed another milestone, as TMCnet Editor Michael Dinan writes:

„Today, it appears that Obama, our most tech-savvy president (to be), has passed another milestone: More than 1 million Facebook (News – Alert) users have joined a group on the social networking site that’s agreed to watch a live stream of tomorrow’s ceremony online.

At last count, the “Obama Inauguration on CNN.com Live with Facebook” group counted 1,077,673 attending members – as well as 152,105 “maybes.”

“What will your Facebook status say when Obama becomes President? CNN.com and Facebook are partnering to enable you to update your status, and follow your friends’ updates, while you watch the inauguration live online, all on http://cnn.com/live,” the group’s message says. “On Tuesday, January 20th, watch President-elect Barack Obama become the next President of the United States on http://cnn.com/live. You can watch the live video online from anywhere with broadband access.”

This is revolutionary, and I’m very glad that the most powerful man on earth and his team figured out that this is the most effective way to reach the Net Generation.

Garr Reynolds, author of Presentation Zen, had a slide from Marty Neumeier’s new book ‘The Designful Company‘ up on his blog that stated, ‘Americans view 7,200,000,000 online amateur videos in a single month.’ That is an enormous number even without the rest of the world surfing on Youtube or any other video platform.

The Designful Company

Checking out Wikipedia’s Video Clip article today, I read under Rise of amateurs, ‘Unlike traditional movies largely dominated by studios, clip movies were overwhelmingly supplied by amateurs. In May 2006, The Economist reported that 90% of clips on YouTube came from amateurs, a few of whom are young comedians. It, in effect, also brought amateur talents. In 2005, two Chinese students Huang Yixin and Wei Wei, now dubbed as “Back Dorm Boys” showed their talent in lip-synching in a song of the Backstreet Boys, with their self-conscious grimaces in a video uploaded to some clip websites, has instantly become renown. Not only did they appear on television shows, concerts, but were also granted a contract by a media company in Beijing for lip-syncing for cash. An earlier celebrity was David Elsewhere, a talent at popping and liquiding. His performance to Kraftwerk’s song Expo 2000 at the talent show Kollaboration in 2001 was widely spread on the internet leading later to his being hired to participate as a dancer in advertisements for Heineken, iPod and Pepsi.‘ And these are not the only names one can mention when taking about Youtube making stars.

Barack Obama on Youtube

Fred Aun writes in his Over Long Campaign, Obama Videos Drew Nearly a Billion Views article, ‘Social network video dissemination certainly wasn’t the reason Barack Obama won the election, but his campaign’s deft use of it played a role in the senator’s success, according to digital video expert Rajeev Kadam, [CEO of divinity Metrics]. According to divinity, 104,454 videos about Obama were uploaded during the campaign, and these were viewed about 889 million times. The 64,092 videos about McCain were viewed 554 million times. “You can see just how much Barack Obama did with social video,” said Kadam. “He was very, very participatory in that field and it really did help him with younger audiences.” ‘ Living in Switzerland and being interested in news from every possible source, I tried to keep up with the US presidential elections and have to admit that I got way more news from Barack Obama, because I use social networking platforms a lot. And because of that, I knew more about Obama than about his opponent, John McCain.

I signed up for a Youtube account about two years ago and never really knew what to do with with other than uploading my own music videos and hope that people would watch them. Unfortunately, not many found their way to those videos until I uploaded a bass guitar battle I did with my friend T.M. Stevens, a living music legend. Then, in November 2008, I started playing the ukulele and got inspired by many Youtubbers and their awesome videos. Especially ukulele players like Julia Nunes, Wade Johnston, Seeso, Paulina Sinaga, Lisaxy424, Keone Pax, among others inspired me a lot to create videos for a small niche of music lovers. These artists made me realize that you don’t need to spend thousands of dollars to create a remarkable music video. All you need is a great idea, a song, a camera (a webcam already does it), and film editing software to entertain thousands, if not millions, of people with your online videos. 

Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur: How blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the rest of today’s user-generated media are destroying our economy, our culture, and our values says that a sea of amateur content threatens to swamp the most vital information and that blogs often reinforce one’s own views rather than expand horizons. I disagree. We should embrace amateurism as an addition to professionalism. Amateurs are generally not trying to sell their ideas. They simply want to share their work with others, which usually promotes the original, like ukulele covers of top 10 pop songs or music videos for Japanese animation. Go Amateurism!

Today is a historical day, not only for all Americans, but for the entire world: The United States of America, the country that has been shaping the globe in many (good and bad) ways for past centuries, elected the 44th and first African-American president in her history. Barack Hussein Obama II will be the most powerful man on earth for the next four years. He is the man, who can change the image the world has of his nation. His predecessor, George W. Bush, messed up the USA, making it probably one of the most hated countries in the world. Last Sunday, my finance and I were having lunch with a smart, young Japanese woman in Osaka, Japan, who is thinking of studying in a foreign country and the one country she simply does not want to go to is the US, because she hates the USA. Her exact words. And I have heard many statements like that all over the world from students, business people, and travelers.

I was able to follow the disturbing US presidential elections in the year 2000 in Minnesota, USA, where I was studying at that time. Unfortunately, my love for the US had a bitter taste, because I was very disappointed by the way the election committee handled the problems, and because I could not understand how the media could proclaim a winner and then take it back.

In 2004, I struggled with my decision to actually follow the US presidential elections, because everyone around me, and especially European media, were bitching about the USA. Also, I was afraid that the good image I had of America would fade completely, and I expected that nothing would change anyway. Why should it? The way America was run did not give hope to non-Americans, who care about her that anything good would happen in the near future.

But then, four years later, I happen to be in an aula at Kansai Gaidai University in Osaka Prefecture, Japan, with hundreds of International students from all four corners of the world, caring about the future of the world, watching CNN on a huge screen waiting for something to happen. And then, something happened. Barack Obama passes the 270 electoral votes threshold and becomes the 44th and first African-American president in the history of the United States of America. That is a historic moment that moves even me, an Italian citizen, who was born in Switzerland, has been studying in Japan, and sees himself as a citizen of the world.

When Obama gave his speech, I was sitting next to a Japanese lady and a Swiss guy with Indian roots. Behind me, three American girls were discussing the outcome and a group of Europeans were visibly enjoying the fact that the USA elected a democratic president, who will most probably bring more peace to the world than his republican predecessor. All things are possible. It is true. We must march together into the future and make changes happen. We cannot look back to a destructive past and let our mistakes and the mistakes of others affect our future. It does not matter if we are black or white, hetero or homosexual, young or old, or whatever our differences are. Yes, we can. And I strongly believe that together we can.

The third and final US presidential election debate saw one national hero: Joe The Plumber. No, it isn’t a metaphor for the state of the American psyche. Joe The Plumber’s real name is Joe Wurzelbaum and he is a real plumber from Ohio, who got mentioned almost thirty times during the debate.

Joe has one problem: According to Times Online, [Joe] is a tradesman who has worked 12-hour shifts for years and now plans to buy his own small plumbing business. The trouble for Joe the plumber is that this would take his earnings to more than $250,000 – making him a target of Obama’s plan to tax the wealthy. 

The following is a crucial excerpt from the debate (Source: Huffington Post)

“You were going to put him in a higher tax bracket which was going to increase his taxes, which was going to cause him not to be able to employ people, which Joe was trying to realize the American dream,” McCain said to Obama.

McCain then looked directly into the TV camera and said: “Joe, I want to tell you, I’ll not only help you buy that business that you worked your whole life for and I’ll keep your taxes low and I’ll provide available and affordable health care for you and your employees. And I will not stand for a tax increase on small business income.”

Obama denied that was true.

“Not only do 98 percent of small businesses make less than $250,000, but I also want to give them additional tax breaks, because they are the drivers of the economy,” Obama said. “They produce the most jobs.” 

Democrats’ Vice Presidential Candidate Joe Biden countered the attacks on the Democrats’ tax policies with, “I don’t have any Joe the Plumbers in my neighborhood that make $250,000 a year and are worried. The Joe the Plumbers in my neighborhood, the Joe the Cops in my neighborhood, the Joe the Grocery Store Owners in my neighborhood, they make — like 98 percent of the small businesses — less than $250,000 a year and they’re going to do very well under us.”

Read the next post for my subjective opinion.