Tom from Blue State Digital

Had the honor today to hear from Tom Gensemer, a partner of Blue State Digital, the agency responsible for Obama's 2008 digital campaign, which was obviously overwhelmingly successful.

He focused on e-mail marketing. Not Twitter, not Facebook, not Gazoobla... E-mail. Why? Because that's where the audience was.

He offered a number of tips for this kind of marketing. The distilled lessons can be applied to any communications.

• Create and maintain a narrative
• Stay on-message
• Say one thing at a time
• Make the call-to-action clear and singular
• Offer small victories along the path—make people feel like they're getting somewhere
• Don't forget who you're talking to—refer back to the strategy frequently
• Test everything, always
• Answer these questions for your audience: Why am I on this list? What do you want from me? What comes next?

Another key: Market to people so that they don't feel like they're being marketed to. Maybe disguise your message as entertainment. And I love that idea. It's times like this when I wonder whether I have any sense of ethics...