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Mark Logic CEO Blog: Notes from Tom Siebel's Speech to the Alliance of Chief Executives

Mark Logic CEO Blog: Notes from Tom Siebel's Speech to the Alliance of Chief Executives

Social Media & Elections

 It seems ages ago that Kevin Rudd beat the incumbent PM John Howard in Australia. Both of these guys did a few things on the web, but nothing mindblowing.

At the same time they were going at, in the US, one of the founders of Facebook decided to join the Obama campaign. Now wether it's the influence of him (Chris Hughes) or simply a younger, more internet savvy candidate, I dont know. 

The fact of the matter is that Obama's campaign's use of the internet (My.BarackObama.com) in general and social media specifically has made the 'grass roots' movement not only much more scalable (gone are the days of putting stupid phamflets in people's mail boxes) but also a formidable cash generation machine. It is widely published that over 3M people donated to the campaign. Why ? Ofcourse for one because the man has a compelling proposition. But IMHO also because he's made it darn easy to contribute.

Case in point is his use of the 3G iPhone only introduced early July. Download Obama 08 from the appstore (more than 10M people have) and there you find tools not only to Donate, but to get your (local) news, all of Obama's positions on the things that matter, tools to call upon your friends, tracking how many times you called them to lobby for Obama, guidance on how to get involved as a volunteer and a constant stream of Obama in the media.

I fully agree with the NYT scribe that the use of social media by the Obama team will go into marketing case books used in the MBA schools of the world.

What do you think ?

Here we go

If it wasn't for Groundswell I would still be a lurker, spectator, anonymous, whatever. That book so neatly encapsulates all that is relevant to me, my customers and the industry that I work in (discloseru, I am employed  by Oracle and sell CRM software for a living, but all opinions here are my own) I thought, let's give blogging a go !

4 years ago, before blogging was blogging, maybe it was, my than partner and me shared our personal lives with family & friends on a site so that we wouldnt be forgotten back home in the Netherlands. That was all about us, nothing interesting unless you are in that circle of friends. I will try to be more considerate here and share what I think is interesting beyond my front door.

In the last 2 weeks I have met journalists in Australia, Indonesia and Singapore whilst promoting the concept of Social CRM, and it amazes me how undifferentiated the experiences and the questions seem to be. Whilst the social network of choice may be different, the fact is that it hasnt only caught on, its forcing organizations to think how they can/should leverage the phenomena and the questions they ask are not all that different.