The Revolution Won’t Be Televised: Obama Web Innovation
The Revolution Won’t Be Televised: Obama Web Innovation
President Obama’s inauguration was the culmination of campaign rich with technological innovation and new ideas on how to connect, collaborate and market.
An “Obama” youtube search produces about 310,000 videos and the number grows by the minute. Most videos have view counts into the thousands, many into the millions.
His website has amassed over 5-million names, email addresses,… phone numbers, home addresses,… age and occupation demographics, and political ids.
They know you. And perhaps more importantly, they know what you want to hear.
It’s a sophisticated marketing strategy that establishes a fresh, interactive model of networking and viewership; a model that has provoked the media at large to keep up and one-up.
Strictly in terms of television viewership, the Obama inauguration was the 4th most-watched inauguration, garnering a ho-hum 29.2 household Neilsen rating. But for the first-time in American history, wall-to-wall broadcast and cable television coverage of the event was, for the moment, a sidebar, a commercial for what was happening on the web.
Shortly after the address, CNN.com announced nearly 21.3 million live streams.
MSNBC.com and Foxnews.com? 9 million and 5 million streaming broadcasts, respectively.
Facebook, who partnered up with CNN, got the conversation going and kept it going. They allowed you to comment on the event live using your status updating tool– about 600,000 of you did. And that doesn’t account for the untold number of chat messages, wall posts, and, of course, bumper stickers exchanged during the webcast.
He got you to connect, talk, and collaborate, and you didn’t even have to leave your house.
His approach sets a most innovative and tech savvy precedent, making his campaign historical in more ways than one.
It’s often said that a brilliant idea that no one talks about is equivalent to a bad idea. What can you as an innovator take from President Obama’s communication strategy?
