Maybe you were one of millions choked up last night as Obama gave his acceptance speech. Or, maybe he wasn’t your candidate and you had to stomach historically key red states flipping to blue one after the other. Regardless of your personal politics, you have to marvel at the marketing efforts of the Obama team. They made marketing history. And, experts of every type will deconstruct his strategies for months and years to come, but this simple email may some it all up — his tone, timing and message of gratitude. He has mastered the Love Triangle that I wrote about in The Open Brand. See for yourself: Kelly — I’m about to head to Grant Park to talk to everyone gathered there, but I wanted to write to you first. We just made history. And I don’t want you to forget how we did it. You made history every single day during this campaign — every day you knocked on doors, made a donation, or talked to your family, friends, and neighbors about why you believe it’s time for change. I want to thank all of you who gave your time, talent, and passion to this campaign. We have a lot of work to do to get our country back on track, and I’ll be in touch soon about what comes next. But I want to be very clear about one thing… All of this happened because of you. Thank you, Barack

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Yesterday’s New York Times ran a feel-good article about Comcast Cares, a social media outreach program. 10 capable Comcast employees people scan the web for mentions of Comcast service issues and work towards resolution, cutting through red tape like only an insider can. This seems like a pretty good idea. But if you look at the tagcloud below, created from the 84 comments left on The New York Times site, actual customers aren’t so easily won over by a few cases of exceptional service. (To create the tagcloud, I uploaded to the comments to IBM Many Eyes, a free, public visualization tool. Go ahead, click on it and play.) ,
I applaud any company’s efforts to become more on-demand through social media but Comcast may be missing a critical ingredient to social media success. Comcast is courting the community while ignoring the individual consumer. The new brand relationship is a “love triangle” where all three parties (brand, consumer and community) need to be satisfied for the relationship to work. By mishandling the standard issue service requests via phone, this dive into social media smells suspiciously like a PR stunt, where public critics are given star treatment and poor schmucks without a blog get the run around.

Thanks to the comments on and commentary about The New York Times story, there are hundreds of new candidates for Comcast’s social media outreach. Is this an opportunity to add more staff to the social media outreach team or a wake-up call for true investment in customer satisfaction? Comcast can get a much bigger return on its social media investment with a really good comeback story. People love to share surprises.

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I’m catching up on a few blogs and reports this week (I’d been cheating on my RSS reader with actual books). A couple of things caught my attention. Coremetrics’ “Face of the New Marketer” study found that 78% of marketers see social media as a way to gain a competitive edge, but fewer than 8% have budgets devoted to it. Over at the online spin blog, Joe Marchese poses the question, “What role should social media play in a marketer’s media plan?”

I’ve been thinking about the term social media lately. What is it? Media is something you hire an agency to buy. But social media is created by people, not companies. Brands can’t get too far by creating a budget and buying their way in. Sure, there are ad networks that serve banners on social sites and a few plucky start-ups even integrate with the content. But let’s be honest — it’s really just another part of the advertising budget.

This differs from social media marketing – which starts with establishing a culturally-relevant social media footprint on behalf of a brand. Brands need an address to be invited to the party, right? Like a good guest, social media marketers listen and learn. They believe they are at the service of the community and provide something of value that people can share – invaluable advice, an inside track, a lol video, a human response. Social media marketers share passions, or at least friendships, with various members of their often diverse communities. Social media marketing is not a new channel or line item on a budget — it’s a new way of doing business.

What’s it cost to create a social media footprint? Probably more of your own energy and creativity than an ad campaign – but it’s also a lot more fun. There’s a place for both social media advertising and social media marketing – but we can’t confuse the two. At iCitizen, P&G’s Steve Knox shared one gem of an idea:

• There is a message the consumer wants to hear.
• There is a message the consumer wants to share.
• They are always different.

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