What physician business owners can learn from Obama's campaign

Irrespective of your political persuasion or vote, I believe there are inspired business lessons to be gleaned from the highly disciplined and almost flawlessly executed campaign Obama and his team ran for almost two years.

For a couple of years, I have been fascinated by and impressed with 21st century marketing. It is working well for my business and I've had numerous clients "get it" and start to build steady service businesses. How? - by positioning themselves as helpful thoughtful and trusted "Expert Advisors".

This Fast Company article "How Obama Won It With the Web" reveals the thoughtfulness and skill with which the team created an "Obama tribe" (referencing Seth Godin's fascinating new book "Tribes").

According to Rasiej, the Obama campaign's enthusiasm for the Web belied its financial cost. While the candidate's staffers certainly poured plenty of sweat equity into creating Obama's distinctive site and social network, MyBarackObama.com, many of their efforts were low-overhead strategies that utilized free resources. Using open platforms like Facebook, MySpace and YouTube, they honed how they communicated with young voters, and redoubled their efforts. With online campaigning, Raseij says, "you can see where you get traction, and then reinvest, based on data."

That's right: Obama has his own proprietary social network. Hundreds of thousands of supporters have volunteered their information to the campaign by joining the network on MyBarackObama.com, finding local events, signing up to volunteer, and helping coordinate other efforts to get out the vote. While candidates had used websites in the past, it was mostly as one-way fundraising tools. With a two-way network, Obama not only brought in more money, but developed a more robust and informed base. This will be especially true going forward: According to Rasiej, social capital will be increasingly more valuable than fundraising dollars. (emphasis mine)

It seems that this article over at msn.com agrees with me! Or maybe I agree with it.

Businessmen and politicians will reverently study the campaign for years to come as a model of innovative branding and an example for digital sales strategies.

In The 'Obama Way': Seven steps to success, the steps the author describes are:

1. Be decisive 
2. Have a tight circle (your personal "board of advisors")
3. Stick with the plan
4. Sweat the details
5. Understand your brand
6. Go digital (reinforces what Fast Company wrote)
7. Use caution

I couldn't agree more! And it is great to see this "getting slightly famous" stuff in action when it really works.

How does this apply to your business?

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Update on Thursday, November 6, 2008 at 08:20PM by Philippa Kennealy

Here's another nice analysis of the Ten Marketing Lessons From The Barack Obama Presidential Campaign from a favorite blogger David Meerman Scott.