Monday, August 10, 2009

Are you there, Obama? It's me, Rebecca.

I thought we were almost BFF's. We were tight. You were emailing me every day! 
But for a president who revolutionized the way candidates interact and rally their troops during a campaign, your team has apparently forgotten that using both mainstream and social media might also help with pushing your agenda. That is until today, with the launch of the Health Insurance Reform Reality Check. 

I will say that this is a totally bipartisan blog post, but it was just yesterday that I was so frustrated at the difficulty of finding out specifics about the program. And I'm not talking about finding the actual bill that's proposed. I want laymen's terms, is-my-grandma-gonna-be-put-to-pasture and is-my-dad-gonna-go-broke kind of details to respond to to circulating rumors. To me, this type of communication is essential for people like me, Gen-Y young professionals who can't study the 1000-pg. bill right this minute, but truly want to know what's going to make it work. 

It seems that more right-leaning networks as well as opponents of the bill know exactly why Obama's health care plan can't and won't work, and those are the things I'm hearing. I want facts and statements just as simple about why it WILL work. In a fairly decent example of integrated marketing communications to push the message, today I was finally reached by the administration with the campaign, both through my social networks and of "Reality Check" coverage on my local news (which I only saw because it was on one of the TV's at the gym). 
If you're like me (typical Gen-Y attention span and fairly unfamiliar with the health care industry), the videos on the site may help get a better, more balanced idea of what the president is proposing. I'm anxious to watch the polls over the next few weeks to see if the campaign is the "reality check" America wants after all. 

If the Obama campaign successfully utilized social networking (and built what I thought was a strong relationship!) to disseminate information and gain support, why would the Obama presidency not do the same? 

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

great post and even greater headline. keep it up you wisslin' motha! (ok, that's a play on whistler's mother.. i don't know who gets what anymore.) xoxo - alecia (aka, aioseh)