ON i ON comunicación Digital video producers for the internet

November 5, 2008 – what a historic day to start our modest company blog! A black man will be the next president of the United States of America and he has not been killed in the intent. Doesn’t it feel as we had all voted for him last night?

Many times it was commented that Barack Hussein Obama could not have won without having used the web 2.0 in the way he did. Others before him have tried to engage with digital natives and not so natives but Obama’s online campaign had all the ingredients to become a decisive factor.

First,  he had a scalable online social network that allowed to sustain and expand a campaign into an online movement. The social network site that also served as a fund-raising platform – more than 300 million USD were raised online! – was designed and operated by Blue State Digital a Boston-based consultancy.  Click on the video to see “How Obama Really Did It”, and watch the interview with Blue State Digital’s CTO and co-founder Jascha Franklin-Hodge produced by Technology Review Videos (which unfortunately have no embed option in there player…).

So there was scale but second, there was emotion on the web and a lot of that was transmitted by  user-generated video contents. According to Prime Visibility, by mid-October YouTube had more than 530,000 videos with the name Obama, in contrast to just 297,000 who had something to do with McCain. The clip “Yes We Can” has been reproduced almost 12 million times on YouTube and has become the most sucessful political viral content so far.

“I got a crush on Obama” by Super Obama Girl follows suit with almost 11 million views on YouTube, which confirms that a good viral needs girls and sex, or light sex to be precise.