US Mid-terms: the role of social media in the Republican’s success

I would not consider myself to be a fan of the Republican Party, but I am a fan of this comment by Lori Brownlee, social media director for the Republican National Committee (RNC).  Commenting on the success of their recent campaign she said “rather than simply using Twitter and Facebook as a broadcast tool,  we centered our plan around using social as a strategic listening and data collection tool.”

Check out this article just published in AdAge for more details.  There is so much that brands could learn from this approach – especially the ability to understand, in real-time, what people are talking about or asking.  Social media is a real-time game and it requires that a brand design real-time processes to play it.  This is not a game where you sit down and plan your content in advance – you plan your process in advance and this will then tell you what content you need to have out there right now.  A content strategy needs to be seen as a process that matches brand answers to consumers’ questions in real-time.

Neither do you plan your influencers in advance, people become influential because what it is they are doing or saying right now, and you therefore need to identify them in real-time.  Someone who is influential today, is not necessarily going to be influential tomorrow.

And key to this process are tools and people.  Listening and analysis tools (such as Sprinklr, mentioned in the article), but then places (such as newsrooms or command centres) where the tools can be plugged into people who can then process and share the information and make decisions about what to do.  Rather than spending time and money simply filling up channels with ‘brandfill’, brand should spend time and money creating (and then staffing and managing) command centres.

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