There is still an overwhelming fascination about Barack Obama’s unprecedented use of the social media which took him straight to The White House.
He used it to raise a staggering $668 million and on the day of the election, there were 1.2 billion blog posts written about him. Crucially, Obama used YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and blogs to listen to people and respond. He even set up a special blog called Fight the Smears to deal with lies that his enemies tried to discredit him with, a very clever move.
Obama’s social media techniques are described on this video by Tom Latchford, E-Media consultant for Action Planning who I met recently. He has studied this closely and offers advice to our politiicans about how they can use the same techniques.
I’m not sure whether it would have the same dramatic impact here, but it is great for politicians who understand and use the social media properly. As Tom says, the tools are there, but it is how they are used that matters.
It’s interesting to see that a UK EuroMP Dan Hannan has had over 1.6 MILLION views of his devalued Prime Minister speech in the last few days http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94lW6Y4tBXs
A speech that the BBC and other MSM failed to report on at the time!
Hi Geoff, yes, absolutely spot on. The video shows the impact a powerful speech can make. It captured the mood of the moment and Hannan’s anger about what is wrong with this country and Gordon Brown’s failure to grasp these issues.
He certainly used 21st century technology. 800th post up now.
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