Selfie Stick in Hand, Obama Reaches Millennials

By Miguel Piedra

Selfie stick. #YOLO. “Keeping it real.” That’s how this president rolls.

Since his election in 2008, President Obama has changed the game with a fresh approach when it comes to selling his agenda. From his “Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis” appearance last year to delivering “The Word” on “The Colbert Report,” to his multiple visits to “The Daily Show,” the president and his team have shaken up the ways the presidential message is delivered.

And it’s paying off.

He’s fielded criticism for this unconventional approach. After all, he’s done everything from “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit, to Google Hangouts, to Twitter chats, and most recently he was interviewed by YouTube stars. It’s one hell of a diverse content marketing strategy. But at this point, the President has nothing to lose and can continue to take risks in marketing that could pay off in a big way.

Some call such tactics below the office, while others in the media establishment asked why he granted interviews to YouTube vloggers instead of more venerable journalists. But as Dan Pfeiffer, outgoing senior adviser to the president, told Bloomberg Politics, the president’s communication team understands that they “have to go where people are congregating.”

That’s today’s reality. Brands, just like the president, must search for platforms where their message is going to reach and connect with more people. BuzzFeed, for example, is one of most popular media platforms today, and Obama leveraged its power to get results for Healthcare.gov. Just hours after the grand debut of his latest viral hit — BuzzFeed’s “Things Everybody Does But Doesn’t Talk About” — the video has 21.3 million views and thousands of comments.

But it goes beyond that, too — the video has made Obama “one of us,” portraying him as accessible and relatable to the public. Putting him on a pedestal and distancing him from the people he represents won’t win people over or get anyone to sign up for health insurance.

That’s a lesson in how brands win. They have used intuitive ways to reach consumers. It’s all about authenticity and connecting with your audience where they are. In a society where the millennial mindset rules, you can’t try to sell anything to them. But here the president subtly sells his Healthcare.gov message. Obama’s video is an ad campaign that isn’t an ad campaign.

It’s the marketing machine of an administration that gets it.

A Day In The Life Of A Ghostwriter

By David Quinones

8:30 a.m.: Wake up an hour late for work after staring at blank Word document until 3 a.m. previous night.

9:30 a.m.: Arrive at office, beset on all sides by clients begging for brilliance. Spend 15 minutes cleaning coffee mug.

10:00 a.m.: Peruse Gawker, post snarky comments. Intake processed sugar.

10:30 a.m.: Stare slack-jawed and baffled at the client’s request and direction, reading the same paragraph over and over until it loses all meaning. Assure self that client, the entire office, and in fact the whole world is just minutes away from uncovering what a fraud you are, a hack masquerading as a writer, who can’t back up the big talk on his résumé and clip book.

11:00 a.m.: Get 250 words into piece before identifying completely flawed premise. Take out frustrations on keyboard and desk. Start over, homeboy.

12:00 p.m.: Make rash, unhealthy lunch choices based on stress, fear and loathing.

12:30 p.m.: Consider the irony that while no one cares about your words when you apply your byline to them, people are willing to pay good money for your words when they can apply their own byline to them.

12:45 p.m.: Consider the proper usage of “irony,” and how ironic it is that you’re misusing it after correcting others so often.

1:00 p.m.: Begin three-hour jag of uninterrupted writing, cranking out 5,000 brilliant, fevered words. Passive aggressively alienate coworkers with oversized noise-canceling headphones.

4:00 p.m.: Celebrate creation of elegant, incisive prose with a light proofread and quick send-off to client. More intake of coffee and processed sugar.

4:30 p.m.: Grow dubious over alleged brilliance of 5,000 words. Allow self-doubt to creep in. Spot a lone typo. Commence bathroom crying. Assure self that you are, in fact, a fraud. Research apps that can unsend sent emails. Consider careers in bartending, private investigations, pawnshop entrepreneurship.

5:00 p.m.: Sharpen wit rage-trolling reddit.com. Google “average salary for Las Vegas valet,” “one-way tickets to New Zealand,” and “ghost scene in Three Men and a Baby.”

6:00 p.m.: Receive feedback from client. “Incredible! Thank you for making me look brilliant! Attached, please find the details for your next assignment. Can we see something tomorrow?”

8:00 p.m.: Open new Word document. Commence staring.

Just A Brand New Internal Communications Regime Incorporating Thousands of Stakeholders For A Global Brand, No Big Deal

By David Quiñones

Companies need to communicate; this truism is at the heart of our industry. It’s ingrained in our DNA as a company.

But an often-overlooked aspect of communicating is how well we do so internally. That is to say, how good are we at talking to ourselves?

Last year, as part of our scope of work for an iconic global brand, RockOrange began the long, painstaking process of replacing an aging, ineffective, costly internal communications regime with a sleek new software system that integrates elements of multimedia and social networking. Customization in this legacy system had grown cumbersome and pricy. It was too rigid to properly scale up or down in any fashion. Users were disengaging.

The solution was easy enough to identify, if challenging to implement. Industry leading software developer Jive was exactly the answer our client was looking for. After assisting in the product vetting, we braced for the road ahead—months of development, implementation and testing.

But it would be worth it. The new Jive-powered internal community promised to bring in all the myriad stakeholders, employees, partners, vendors and such who needed to know what was happening in the company.

This week, the development process ended as we launched our new community, and our team finally exhaled. Nearly tripling the client’s traffic compared to the old site on the first day, the new internal community is also yielding more opens and clickthroughs than the previous iteration. In every measure, this 21st Century gateway is mopping the floor with its predecessor.

And we’re only on Day Two.

The final product was seamless and beautiful, sure, but how we got there was a more impactful tale of our abilities.

From the earliest days of exploring the new gateway solution, our content team advised the client how best to categorize, classify, export and sort through reams of data that had accrued over the years. Working with internal IT teams, we identified the tip-of-the-spear teams who would occupy the frontlines of the new gateway and worked to train and prepare them for the change. We launched a communications plan to include thousands of global stakeholders in our plans, work in their needs and feedback, and ensure they were pumped for Day One.

In the pantheon of communications, this was not a sexy, sleek activation. There were no celebrity appearances; there was no after-party. Instead, this project tells a story about competence and expertise, a deep working knowledge of how data and technology works. More than anything, it demonstrates the trust our clients have in us, trusting our team of RockStars with their most valuable resource—their people.

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