Senior Content Strategist Cecile Ablack recently came back from a successful and fascinating campaign to help elect the new Prime Minister of Trinidad & Tobago, Kamla Persad Bissessar . Cecile ran the campaign with some initial guidance from the very same team that helped create Obama's powerful online movement in the 2008 election here in the U.S.

The goal Cecile defined for the online effort was simple: "Get Out the Vote" and "Vote The People's Partnership". She knew that growing an enthusiastic fan base on facebook would empower a generation (18 - 34) that either had not voted and/or didn't care about "politics" and most certainly did not read newspapers or watch news on TV.

Trinidad & Tobago has a parliamentary system so it was important to "brand" Kamla as representative everywhere since votes are cast for the Member of Parliament candidate running in each constituency and not the party leader. The party with the most seats wins the election as it does in the UK. The Kamla brand had to influence every constituency, which was challenging. So it was always important to highlight instances where she went with the other candidates into their constituencies. We developed a dynamic 'Events' tab, to publicize joint appearances, and an active 'Notes' section, to run speeches, on Kamla's Facebook page, which underscored her involvement and drove support for each constituency.

As Cecile puts it: "Facebook posts were based on straight information combined with strategic communications knowledge. We looked at what Kamla's fans were responding to and saying repeatedly and also where we thought the discussion should go in the best interest of growing voter support for our client, all the while remaining accurate and credible. We also recognized early on that the ability to address misinformation quickly and repeatedly was one of the most powerful of our online tools."

Concurrently, Cecile set up a second online campaign of volunteers that was developed through the party's website from roughly 100 to 2,000. Those volunteers received a daily email letter (similar to the ones Obama supporters received from David Plouffe in '08) with specific requests for each day, again based on Cecile's assessment of The People's Partnership strategic communications needs. The volunteers then were given assignments based on Cecile's analysis and discussions with our client. The assignments included writing letters to the editor at the newspapers, posting comments to news articles, calling into radio shows, running phone banks, organized grassroots campaigning, and on election day providing an interactive online service to help voters find their polling places, understand the documents needed to vote, provide transportation when needed etc.

Some significant facts:

• Our pro-Kamla online ads on Google’s ad network and Facebook were viewed 59,211,006 times and had 127,300 clicks.




• The average cost per click (CPC) was extremely cost effective at $0.12.




• Our ads helped grow the “fans” on Kamla.tt to almost 44,000 In contrast, losing incumbent candidate Patrick Manning had 7,850 Facebook “fans” at the time of the election.




• Our Kamla Facebook presence delivered messaging directly to almost 44,000 voters, with no media filter – which represented approximately 12.5% of the supporters who voted for the People’s Partnership. (In contrast, Barack Obama’s Facebook presence served 3.7% of the supporters who voted for him in November 2008.)




• Kamla’s supporters actively shared our Facebook messages with their own network through their comments and “likes” on our posts—which shows up in their personal Facebook feeds. For instance, the popularity (1,087 “likes” and 283 comments) of the following post propelled redistribution to friends of our supporters, so that the post was served 150,466 times.