In order to cre­ate an engag­ing dig­i­tal expe­ri­ence to accom­pa­ny Pres­i­dent Obama’s 2015 State of the Union address, the White House’s dig­i­tal media team end­ed up dri­ving 75,000 engage­ments in 61 min­utes. How did they do it? And what can brands learn from it?

Lesson 1: Listen To Your Audience, Give Them What They Want

The president’s annu­al State of the Union address is the White House’s ver­sion of the Super Bowl. It’s the time of year the brand knows it can expect the most site vis­i­tors and when they must focus on its top-line objec­tives.

That’s accord­ing to Leigh Hey­man, direc­tor of new media tech­nolo­gies at the White House, who deliv­ered a keynote address at Dig­i­tal Sum­mit Phoenix on Feb­ru­ary 5.

For the 2015 State of the Union, which took place Jan­u­ary 20, Hey­man said the White House estab­lished three objec­tives for its engage­ment strat­e­gy:

Nailing The Mobile Experience

Not only is mobile traf­fic up over­all every­where, but con­sumers told the White House they want to engage via mobile, Hey­man said.

While 34 per­cent of U.S. con­sumers as a whole use their mobile devices as their pri­ma­ry means of access­ing the Inter­net, that num­ber jumps when the data is seg­ment­ed demo­graph­i­cal­ly, Hey­man said. Minori­ties, low-income con­sumers and con­sumers under the age of 30 are more like­ly to use mobile devices as their pri­ma­ry means of Inter­net access.

“So by focus­ing on mobile, [Oba­ma] is mak­ing it a pri­or­i­ty to engage with peo­ple that are not best served by tech­nol­o­gy,” Hey­man added.

Providing A ‘Really Fantastic Social Experience’

Three years ago, the White House site was not respon­sive, images were blur­ry, and the mobile expe­ri­ence was not ide­al, so the brand sought to build more engag­ing con­tent for the 2015 speech.

Now, con­sumers can watch a livestream on WhiteHouse.gov or on part­ner sites like YouTube or Hulu with enhanced graph­ics and addi­tion­al infor­ma­tion “to the things the pres­i­dent is talk­ing about in real-time,” Hey­man said. “We embed that into the stream itself, so our part­ners can pick it up.”

Creating Curated Content

2015 was also unique because pres­i­dents have typ­i­cal­ly used their State of the Union address­es to intro­duce new ini­tia­tives, but have kept the announce­ments under wraps until the speech itself.

This year, how­ev­er, there was a “slow roll­out of the ini­tia­tives [Oba­ma] was going to talk about,” Hey­man said. That meant Heyman’s office came into the speech with a fair­ly sig­nif­i­cant body of con­tent and “rather than just present the speech, we want­ed to give frame­work and con­text to the speech.”

Lesson 2: Creating Good Content And Digital Experiences Is A Team Effort

Hey­man’s office sees a copy of the speech about five days before­hand and then his team spends the next week pro­duc­ing some­thing on the order of 150 visu­al prod­ucts to com­ple­ment it. From there, the team needs to spell- and fact-check, as well as acquire rights to images. And this is all under a strict timetable.

“It has to be done to the design stan­dards that go to the White House brand, which speaks to the lev­el of team­work that goes to cre­at­ing a fan­tas­tic dig­i­tal expe­ri­ence for an event like this,” Hey­man said.

In addi­tion, the White House couldn’t pull off the chal­leng­ing task of real-time con­tent synced to the livestream of the speech with­out fur­ther team­work.

Lesson 3: Make It Easy To Share Your Content

Shar­ing options for graph­ics the White House dis­played dur­ing the address used to be lim­it­ed to find­ing a tweet with the graph­ic with­in the White House’s live feed or sim­ply doing a screen grab.

How­ev­er, if a con­sumer opts for the lat­ter, “We’ve lost the con­ver­sa­tion,” Hey­man said. “We’re com­mu­ni­cat­ing in siloes rather than a col­lec­tive con­ver­sa­tion.”

To pre­vent that from hap­pen­ing, the White House added the abil­i­ty to take graph­ics embed­ded in the livestream and embed them in a share­able for­mat right below the video play­er. So instead of just tweet­ing out graph­ics in one chan­nel, Hey­man said the White House switched this year to curat­ing a body of con­tent. “We knew we could deliv­er a much rich­er body of infor­ma­tion around the speech. We need­ed a rich­er expe­ri­ence for engag­ing with con­tent,” he said.

Lesson 4: Provide The Functionality Your Users Want

“As any­one from Myspace and Friend­ster can tell you, it’s not enough to reach crit­i­cal mass,” Hey­man said. “You have to have func­tion­al­i­ty and fea­tures that peo­ple com­ing to the plat­form want.”

Lesson 5: Do More Than Just Ask To Share When Engaging Users

The 2015 State of the Union also saw the advent of “real­ly excit­ing engage­ment meth­ods on the site,” Hey­man said. “Now, it’s ‘let’s not just share about it – let’s do more.’”

That includes adding drop-down menus that allow view­ers to select their states, which pro­vides real-time infor­ma­tion around the speech tied to wher­ev­er the view­er is watch­ing, kind of like “pitch and swing info in real time on MLB Game­day,” Hey­man said.

That means the brand can do more than just say, “Hey, tweet out this info,” he added.

For exam­ple, when the pres­i­dent was talk­ing about teach­ing chil­dren to code, Hey­man and his team were able to ask view­ers if they knew how to code and then cre­ate a call to action by send­ing a link for those who answered in the affir­ma­tive to teach oth­ers to write code.

Lesson 6: Brainstorm With Your Team For New And Better Ideas

“All this comes about not sim­ply because dig­i­tal strate­gists said it was a good idea, but because [we had] a col­lab­o­ra­tion hap­pen with the engi­neers sit­ting in the room with the con­tent peo­ple brain­storm­ing new ways and tech­nol­o­gy to achieve our dig­i­tal objec­tives,” Hey­man said.

The end result was, “Basi­cal­ly our best year ever,” he said.

Lesson 7: Give Your Content Team The Tools It Needs To Create Great Content

The brand built the dig­i­tal tools that con­tent strate­gists need­ed to get their jobs done. Dur­ing in the 61 min­utes it took Oba­ma to deliv­er the speech, the White House received:

• 18,000 poll respons­es.
• 40,000 email respons­es.
• 17,000 con­tent shares.

Lesson 8: Have A Genuine Conversation With Your Audience

The White House also has a peti­tions web­site that allows con­sumers to eas­i­ly sub­mit peti­tions and those with a cer­tain num­ber of sig­na­tures are guar­an­teed a response.

Look­ing at a tongue-in-cheek peti­tion about build­ing a Death Star, Hey­man said the White House brand has anoth­er engage­ment oppor­tu­ni­ty, point­ing to the num­ber of clicks on the links embed­ded in the White House’s response. That includes infor­ma­tion about the U.S. space pro­gram and the like.

“We get a lot of peti­tions from across the polit­i­cal spec­trum,” Hey­man said. “That’s a con­ver­sa­tion hap­pen­ing between us and the peo­ple who cre­at­ed the peti­tion and is not fil­tered by talk radio and cable news. It’s not a real con­ver­sa­tion we could have any­where else.”

What do you think about the White House­’s efforts to engage view­ers?