By Mark Fidelman, Contributor

(Photo credit: Wikipedia) Forget what you’ve learned in business school. Forget the marketing consultants, public relations gurus, and social media experts. It isn’t working because they don’t have the big picture. The big picture as it turns out, played out on Election Day and is the reason Barack Obama was sworn in again as President. There are a lot of lessons for business that played out that day – lessons for you, lessons to do, lessons to act on. It’s beyond the politics, the debates, and the spin. This isn’t another political analysis editorial because, really, what the world doesn’t need now is any more of that. This is about how a legion of technologists and political advocates was able to help reelect a man whose last four years – let’s face it – was the political equivalent of Les Miserables. In the last few months I’ve interviewed the true operatives behind the Obama campaign and if I were to If I were to distill one main lesson for businesses, it is that we are all checkers competing on a game board now designed to be won by chess. As former CIO of the United States and now VP of Emerging Markets for Salesforce.com, Vivek Kundra told me, “Every company in the world has to rethink how their business is connecting with suppliers, partners, influencers and customers to amplify their brand in a positive way.” So why is this so important? I’ll give you 7 key reasons: 1. Big data has purpose, little data has hope “If you’re selling mattresses and you have the ability to look down the sidewalk and say, ‘that guys going to buy one today and that guy’s not, then your business can profit immensely,” explained Larry Grisolano, who helped lead the Team Obama’s advertising campaigns and a system called the Optimizer, “when you can cross the data with behavior and develop a scoring process to measure the likelihood that someone will buy from you, you can target and direct resources to those people efficiently and effectively.” In other words, businesses must dig deeper to analyze their current and prospective customers’ needs and wants, and then use that data to target them with laser-like precision. Spray and pray messaging and advertising won’t cut it anymore. 2. Always measure and publicize – this will anger some and motivate the rest NationalField’s founder Edward Saatchi explained to me how by using a Facebook like community mybarackobama.com they were able to get 15-40% more productivity out of the people working on the reelection campaign: “We had leader boards all over the place. Every single profile page for field staff and volunteers had a data table for and charts showing how each of them performed over the previous 30, 60, and 90 days. That allowed them to compare themselves to everybody else and the mean – then raise their game if they weren’t doing so well.” Saatchi realized that by posting community leaderboards, people in the community feel more accountable …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest