Location based marketing tech darling Foursquare is playing a role in the election drama that unfolds as Americans participate in yet another Election Day. Tech savvy voters are checking in at the polls and earning the #IVotedToday badge and doing their part to raise awareness and urge others to take part in the election. You can go to their website to track check in and voting activity, which is kind of cool. If I had a national restaurant chain account as a client, you can be sure we would have been using Foursquare to make an offer to voters who check in on Election Day. Hmmmm, wonder if anyone else thought of that…..
Rock The Vote is using mobile marketing and helping people find their polling places by circulating messages like this one:
If you’re looking for your polling place, you can text WHERE to 30644 #electionday #ivoted
on Twitter, Facebook and through other mediums and has volunteers staffing the phone lines to provide assistance, too.
As hotly contested races are soon to draw to conclusion all over the country, I love seeing how technology plays a part in the excitement of Election Day and the whole campaign process. Savvy political strategists have been relying on social media monitoring tools and analysis as they’ve crafted their strategies during the course of this campaign season and our client Spiral16 and their monitoring and analysis services have been in high demand, much to their delight. Pollsters have wasted no time in also turning to the Internet and social media for updates and information and technology has played an increasingly significant role. Candidates themselves are embracing connectivity – at least the smart ones – and are reaching out not only through traditional mediums like TV and direct mail, but also through a variety of social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
All told, there’s a lot of buzz and excitement about what is certain to be a pretty significant Election Day. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear drew over two million TV viewers to Comedy Central and over 10,000 attendees showed up to the Washington, DC event. My colleague Michelle Lamar, wrote about it earlier on the V3 blog and included snippets of Stewart’s conversation which I found pretty moving. But then, I’m easily moved. I get all patriotic on every Election Day and fired up about the fact that it wasn’t so long ago that we didn’t all have voting rights in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Apathy pisses me off. And should never be an option when it comes to an American’s right to vote. Don’t let it be a cop out for you. Even if there’s no one you want to vote for, get out and vote because you can. And not voting only makes you a part of the problem, not a part of the solution. So go do it! And check in on Foursquare while you’re at it!
Shelly Kramer is a Principal Analyst and Founding Partner at Futurum Research. A serial entrepreneur with a technology centric focus, she has worked alongside some of the world’s largest brands to embrace disruption and spur innovation, understand and address the realities of the connected customer, and help navigate the process of digital transformation. She brings 20 years’ experience as a brand strategist to her work at Futurum, and has deep experience helping global companies with marketing challenges, GTM strategies, messaging develoment, and driving strategy and digital transformation for B2B brands across multiple verticals. Shelly’s coverage areas include Collaboration/CX/SaaS, platforms, ESG, and Cybersecurity, as well as topics and trends related to the Future of Work, the transformation of the workplace and how people and technology are driving that transformation. A transplanted New Yorker, she has learned to love life in the Midwest, and has firsthand experience that some of the most innovative minds and most successful companies in the world also happen to live in “flyover country.”