Obama, brands and disco dad

An interesting question raised today was whether UK politicians will try and replicate President-Elect Obama's online strategy - engaging the young and politically disenfranchised to get involved or donate through social media.

The strange thing is that it's hard to see how that could/would happen with the current leaders of the 3 main UK parties. And that got me thinking about brands.

Obama succeeded in exploiting social media successfully because, as a 'product' he could naturally exploit digital media: he's young (well for a presidential candidate, anyway), he's different (his African-American background) and he's the challenger-brand (not rooted in the current establishment but an advocate of change).

In essence he had the brand credibility to be able to use digital media as a natural channel to communicate his message to his audience.

And it's much the same with brands. Not all brands will automatically be able to exploit social media in the way that say Apple, Radiohead, Innocent etc have. These brands have the intrinsic credibility built into their values that mean, like Obama, social media is a natural extension of how they communicate with an audience who are social-media-natives.

Other brands need to work hard to establish how and why they can get involved. Social media can't simply be a "me too" approach grafted on to a brand's communication strategy.

Consumers are far too savvy to accept that and those brands that try to muscle their way in end up looking like a dad at the disco (as one of my colleagues called it the other day): just like Mssrs Brown, Cameron or Clegg on Facebook, Twitter or Myspace.