Case Study: White House Video Response to Video Attack
The blogosphere and news outlets are abuzz this morning with the Drudge verses White House video showdown. For those of you not familiar, a brief recap…
The Drudge Report recently posted this video from Breitbart.tv with the title “SHOCK UNCOVERED: Obama IN HIS OWN WORDS saying His Health Care Plan will ELIMINATE private insurance.” The video quickly went viral.
Early Tuesday morning, the White House released their own video on the WhiteHouse.gov blog in a post titled “Facts are Stubborn Things” featuring Linda Douglass, the communications director for the White House’s Health Reform Office addressing the video directly.
Though Douglass never says “Drudge Report” the camera does focus on a screenshot showing the original Drudge headline “Uncovered Video: Obama Explains How His Health Care Plan Will ‘Eliminate’ Private Insurance…” with the URL bar clearly visible with the address “http://www.drudgereport.com.” The White House video is without a doubt, a direct counter strike against the video above.
Though reform of American Healthcare is a large, complex issue, a Social Media campaign dealing with negative feedback is actually fairly straight forward. Love him or hate him, you’ve got to admit that the Obama Administration employs some of the best executers of social media campaigns in politics today. So let’s see what we can learn from this defensive strike…
Social Media Rule #1: Listen First
We’re always stressing to our clients the importance of listening. Many companies either don’t know about negative comments against them circulating online, or they know about it so late that they are unable to respond in an appropriate period. The White House was all over this issue – they turned out their response video literally overnight.
Social Media Rule #2: Join the Conversation to Get Your Message Heard
You can not control your message once it gets into social media – the first video could not demonstrate this better – however, not talking is simply not an option in today’s connected world. If you’re not spreading the message about you, someone will spread their own message about you. The only way to get your message heard is to say it often, clearly and as loudly as possible. The three minute video from the White House and the accompanying blog post repeats over and over again “the President has consistently said that if you like your insurance plan, your doctor, or both, you will be able to keep them.” It’s even underlined in the original blog post.
Social Media Rule #3: Approach Your Customer on Your Customer’s Turf
The place that this story was spread was blogs and online media. The White House similarly posted their response on their blog. The White House video is also hosted through YouTube on the White House YouTube Channel.
Social Media Rule #4: Take the High Road
For the most part, the White House succeeded in this rule. Though Douglass uses some loaded language to make her case, you certainly don’t see her getting into it with the “trolls” in the comments section. And it’s not like they are slapping Breitbart.tv with a lawsuit ala the Horizon Group Management fiasco. To be honest, they needed to make their message a bit on the dramatic side for rule #5, as we’ll discuss in a moment.
To their credit, they do “one up” their opponents on the transparency issue. The 3-minute White House video contains 2 short clips of the President they use to back up their argument. However, to show they are not being hypocritical in their use of selected sound bites, they include, in the same blog post, the full videos of the speeches the sound bites were taken from. Well done.
Social Media Rule #5: Prep It To Go Viral
Though you can never “make” something go viral, there are certainly steps you can take to prep it to go viral.
a) Make it easy to distribute – The White House video is on a SEO optimized page on the WhiteHouse.gov blog with a permanent link that is easy to direct someone to. The videos are hosted on YouTube and easy to embed in anyone’s website. (Of course, so is the Breitbart.tv video.)
b) Make it something that people will want to share – This is what I was talking about above – though the subject matter is a bit on the dry side, the drama of the “us verses them” is what got the story picked up by the major news outlets and blogs Washington Times, CNN, HuffingtonPost, etc.
From a Social Media marketing standpoint, the White House response to online negative feedback is practically textbook perfect, but will it work?
I do think it will stem some of the bleeding caused by the original video – mostly because the White House video will now likely be posted along side the Breitbart.tv video when people talk about this issue moving forward. At least it will be by anyone trying to claim they are writing a “balanced” story. However, many of the blogs, etc. who helped spread the Breitbart.tv video in the first place don’t make any claims on a balanced journalistic perspective and they may not feel the need to share the White House response with their readers.
One way I think the White House was not able to out-do the Breitbart.tv video is its viral potential. The White House content is just not as provocative and therefore not as compelling to share. Though it does stir some outrage that someone would use tactics like selective clipping and quoting out of context, it does not even attempt to whip its intended audience into a frenzy of anger the way the first one aims to. Of course, the White House cannot resort to such tactics without derailing it’s current brand message of moderate, bi-partisism, but it does put them at a disadvantage on the viral front. However, they do have many other brand advantages, not the least being a MUCH more trusted and recognized source for information.
In the end, only time will tell how many news cycles this will occupy and how much it will affect the President’s ability to fulfill his promises of Health Insurance reform. We’ll keep our eye on the blogosphere and perhaps we’ll do a follow up story if there are any interesting developments.
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Categories: Marketing, Social Media, Web |
Nice summary of the debate and its relevance to social media. Too bad the side that plays nice seems to get less “buzz” for that reason.
I was just talking about this with my friend Vin (who happens to be the best brand consultant I know – vindesign.us). I was trying to argue that if someone wants something to be “buzz worthy” it needs to be:
funny, freaky, phenomenal or free
Though he agreed that those words catch the majority of buzzy worthy content, he reminded me that it was important to also stay true to your brand voice. (He referred to Andy Sernovitz who we both agree is a master of creating buzz-worth, brand appropriate content – http://www.damniwish.com/)
I personally would like to see Obama use more humor to spread his message. Obama can be very funny – his dry humor is part of his brand voice. And the situation definitely merits comedy – Jon Stewart gets me giggling about healthcare reform on an almost nightly basis. Of course, it’d have to be done very carefully, but I think the late night circuit might be a more powerful medium to carry this debate than the town hall meetings. And it be much more likely to produce “funny” content that would go viral in a way to actually war against the “freaky” content being put out by the right.
[...] If they cannot be reasoned with, consider creating your own (calm, polite, rational) counterattack, like the online videos the Obama Administration created to counter the Healthcare Reform rumors. [...]