Focus on strategic, not tactical execution
Published Saturday February 21st, 2009
Technology Purpose and method are essential factors in new media business
Rahaf Harfoush doesn't remember a time before Google.
"I'm just completely immersed in the web," says Harfoush, a graduate of the University of Western Ontario's Richard Ivey School of Business.
A self-professed Internet nerd, Harfoush has managed to merge her passion for online media with her business background.
The twenty-four year old was a key member of U.S. President Barack Obama's online social media team and a researcher for the books Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything and Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing the World.
Harfoush will be in Fredericton for the New Brunswick Securities Commission's annual Fullsail Summit in May. As a panelist she will inform delegates about online technologies that can help advance business goals and transmit messages in new and innovative ways.
While Harfoush has long been a surfer on social media networking websites like MySpace, Twitter and Flickr, her real foray into new media took off after interviewing Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes as part of her research.
Hughes left Facebook in 2007 and moved to Chicago to work for Obama's new-media campaign. He then became the co-ordinator of all online organizing and My.BarackObama.com, the campaign's online social networking website.
When Hughes invited Harfoush to volunteer at the Obama campaign headquarters for three months leading up to the election, she jumped at the opportunity.
Since the campaign's new-media strategy was lauded by many as a key ingredient in the Obama campaign, Harfoush has been in steady demand by businesses and organizations looking to learn how to employ online media successfully.
"Every morning I just hit the ground running," she says.
Harfoush is currently putting the final touches on her book Yes We Did, due out in mid-May, which will examine how the Obama campaign employed technology and new media.
"We called the headquarters Barack University," she said. "Every day I was learning from all these incredible people doing these cutting edge things in the field."
But Harfoush admits that she got swept up in the campaign.
"Really I was there to learn but at some point something changed and I became a total believer," she says. "I didn't realize it until Election Day."
Harfoush met Obama in passing at the headquarters or during conference calls with the new media team.
"He was usually pretty relaxed with a baseball cap and chatting with people."
Although she doesn't consider herself a "political person," she says Obama was "a nice jolt of hope after all the cynicism and corruption that we usually read about in government."
Harfoush just heard about her position on the Fullsail panel this week. Although she is still ironing out what she'll talk about, her main talking points are already clear.
"Often a mistake companies make is focusing on tactical instead of strategic execution," she says. "A lot of companies think 'Oh, we should be on Facebook, we should have a blog and we should be on Twitter' but there's no purpose or method to their madness."
Harfoush says the first thing companies need to do is decide what the type of relationship they want to build with consumers is and how they want their brand to be perceived.
"That will really drive the type of social media campaign you'll build," she says. "Building an online community is different than building awareness.
"But the technology is moving so fast you have to be really quick on your toes," Harfoush says. "I mean Twitter barely existed last year and microblogging is changing all the time."
Disabled
Search Articles
More CE Network Sites & Partners:
