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November 14, 2008
Obama Facebook Page Reaches Historic Activity Levels
Barack Obama's Facebook Page has unprecedented activity for a leader and will continue to serve as a growing social media monument. Just think about it for a second... will your actions online persist alongside Obama for generations to come? When else in history have you seen millions of people from across the world contribute themselves to a digital movement? If you have comparable examples, please comment!
As of today, the actions of 3,134,949 real people on Obama's Facebook Page are echoed by:
-578,708 Wall Posts
-1,670 Notes (1000+ Comments)
-41 Videos (700+ Comments)
-21 Posted Items (100+ Comments)
-15 Photo Albums (500+ Photos)
Whether people stay active and continue building momentum is up to you. Stay tuned for more examples of Obama's Mass Interpersonal Persuasion (MIP) strategies.
Other interesting Obama social media stats:
-19, 687,519 YouTube Channel Views
-1,500,00+ MyBarackObama Active Users (35,000+ local organizing groups, 200,000+ events)
-927,156 MySpace Friends (147,621 Comments)
-130,522 Twitter Followers (263 Updates)
-1,502 Flickr Photo Sets
*Potential double counting
Posted by Enrique at 06:16 PM | Comments (0)
November 04, 2008
Donate Your Status Message for Votes and Psuedo-Community
How would you respond to a handwritten or mass mailed letter asking you to vote in 2004? At least initially, you might assume the handwritten letter was more sincere and open it because it was not simply sent through computer spam. The handwritten message might persuade you to vote, however, it's impact would be limited unless you were inspired to handwrite letters to other people too. Fast forward to election 2008 and ask yourself how you responded to a Facebook Status Message Update (SMU) from friends asking you to vote?
Your response is influenced by the perception of interpersonal (direct, personal, and sincere) and mass (indirect, selfishly motivated and not likely sincere) communication on Facebook. You may view a SMU from a friend as sincere and feel inspired to show solidarity by also donating your status to the application Causes shown above. In doing so, you have enabled Causes to massively distribute your call to action to other friends on Facebook, thus creating a pseudo-community around the election rally. According to Beniger (1987), "there is a long history of efforts to personalize mass media communication by disguising the size of intended audiences, targeting messages and contriving intimacy. These superficial interpersonal relations cause us to confuse personal with mass messages. The capacity for this pseudo community is limited by technology’s ability to confuse us. " This begs the question, did Causes confuse you by showing that millions of people have donated their status, including a number of your friends? I don't think nearly 2 million people were confused by the actions of their friends. I interpreted the simple SMUs from my friends as sincere, reassuring my own beliefs and triggering me to be apart of something bigger than myself. I'm hopeful that we can replicate this type of Mass Interpersonal Persuasion (MIP) for more causes in sustainable ways.
*Important to note that the cost of sharing a personal Status Message Update (SMU) is close to $0 versus sending a handwritten letter.
*Also interesting to note that about 10% of the total user base on Facebook participated in the Causes election rally
Posted by Enrique at 08:11 PM | Comments (0)