Social Marketing Dragonfly Effect Social Marketing and the Dragonfly Effect: The Case of Barack Obama

"All of this happened because of you. Thanks, Barack," that was the message Barack Obama sent to all of his many online supporters on the night he won the historic presidential election (Chang & Aaker 2010 p 20). Part of Obama's success was his ability to capitalize on the emerging trends of social media. In his teams' efforts, the dragonfly model was implemented seamlessly, allowing him to gather a specific focus, grab attention, engage and finally empower his audience.

In his first run for president, Barak Obama implemented new and innovative strategies utilizing tenants of social media to help spread the message of his campaign. Not only did Obama utilize existing social networking platforms, but he also hired a team to create his own that was featured on his campaign website. Here, the research states that "the campaign's social network, www.my.barackobama.com (MyBO), allowed individuals to connect to one another and activate themselves on behalf of the campaign," (Chang & Aaker 2010 p 16). The Obama camp hired some of the most innovative social marketers and programmers to create and maintain the strategies of the site. They focused on using social networking as a new implementation of a grass roots campaign that aimed to make real connections with real people, rather than simply getting money and votes. It turned out to be one of the most successful implementations of social media to date; "the

The dragon effect is aimed at achieving "a single, focused, concrete goal" (Green 2011 p 3). First, focus is created through a concrete goal is identified and targeted. Getting Obama elected and gathering support from all walks of life to achieve that goal. This was successful in view of the dragonfly effect because the goals set were humanistic and actionable, two key elements to setting goals appropriately within a social media context. Moreover, the goal was set in concrete and concise terminologies, "hope, change, action," (The Dragonfly Effect 2012). The next step is attention grabbing, which is often done through expressing your own personal story or goal (Green 2011). Obama's team really tried to gather up attention from all types of individuals across America. Not only was a site set up specifically for Obama, but he created pages on fifteen other existing social networking sites that helped increase the scope of his audience tremendously. This was incredibly unexpected and innovative; two elements which prove crucial to succeeding within the dragonfly effect (The Dragonfly Effect 2012). The strategies used to grab attention appealed to the senses and the hopes of the American…