Brent Leary has done stuff with us in the past – most notably this webinar – and he’ll be doing stuff with us in the future (stay tuned for details, listeners!). But his advocacy and examination of CRM and social media – and how one is becoming indispensable to the other – is non-stop. One of the most prominent examples of what Brent’s talking about is the campaign of Barack Obama, which has tackled the political process as a CRM issue: how do you know your constituents, respond to their input, and communicate back to them to develop loyalty? It’s tough when you’re a company and some of the data is being pushed to you by your customers; it’s really tough when you don’t necessarily know who your “customers” (or voters) in a political race might be.

Obama’s campaign has done that rather effectively – it’s helped him connect with younger voters in a dramatic way, and it enabled him to clean house in the caucus primaries, where getting people to come out was critical.

Brent’s done a webinar on this topic – not on the politics of the candidate but on the effectiveness of the campaign’s use of social media. The webinar can be heard in two parts; part one is here and part two is here. It’s Brent and David Bullock, an associate of his and an online business development specialist.