Barak Obama has really done it for us communicators.
I am talking about his social media campaign. In Europe these days, everybody wants it and everybody wants to be like him.
The interactive web was there before and change had started happening a long time ago. The enormous favour Obama has done to us is to awaken public consciousness to these new tools.
This was the subject of a talk I attended last night.
Obama’s wisdom has been to realise that the world had changed and to go for it.
Through his MyBarakObama.com site, he gave supporters the tools to take ownership of their part of the campaign. 27,000 groups were created on the site. These organised 50,000 events in the last 3 weeks of the campaign (100,000 were organised in total). Control of these events was left to the organisers and their communities.
The Obama campaign was present on YouTube with 14,500 hours. This corresponds to £ 32 million worth of TV spots!
People will be studying the social media side of the Obama phenomenon for many years to come.
But, the most interesting lesson for us communicators is the sense of connection that Obama was able to create through his online presence. This is what we have to able to create in our work.
We have to generate so much passion around an issue that people will want to spend several un-paid hours of their week to comment on it.
I heard something else last night that got me thinking: “where people hung out yesterday is not where they are going to hang out tomorrow”. It’s all part of the acceleration we are going through and it’s all so exciting.
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