Dan Siroker - Five Lessons Learned in Social Media and Online Tactics

This post contains paraphrased notes from SoCon10 keynote speaker Dan Siroker.

Five lessons learned in Social Media and online tactics during the Obama campaign:

1. Define quantifiable success metrics (First focus on what your goals are, then prioritize what you can do. A lack of quantifiable success metrics is a big problem; you will only know that your experiments work if you can measure them.)
   
2. Question assumptions (Experiment with what you can. Try even simple things. Perform multivaried tests. An ability to experiment and to learn from experiments proves really valuable.)
   
3. Divide and conquer (Different things can work based on demographics.)
   
4. Take advantage of circumstances (If you can capitalize on something in the news, then do so.)
   
5. Always be optimizing (Create an hypothesis and test it. Measure the impact. Take the things that work, put the best ones together, and test again. Build variations in context of your page; always experiment. Think about your audience and what they want.)