24 Jan The Inauguration Goes Social
We had a conversation in the office over the past week concerning the top most viewed photos on Twitpic, and the number 1 spot being overtaken by the photo of people standing on the wing of a downed plane in the Hudson river. It basically came down to delineating between social media as a way of promoting cool stuff, and social media as a way of documenting events of national importance. It isn’t really fair to compare the numbers on the two, in my humble opinion.
With another event of international importance happening this week, the inauguration of President Obama created ample opportunity for social media to work its magic of documentation, and CNN.com stepped up to the plate.
There was the much-lauded partnership with Facebook, so that we could all update our stati while watching the live feed of the ceremony. You didn’t have to have a Facebook account to watch the stream, but if you did, you could update your status and it let everyone know that you’d done it via CNN.com. And everyone watching the feed could see your status update, if you wanted. It was a way of incorporating everyone into the moment, and wasn’t that really the message of the hour after all? Since it was in the middle of the day, a lot of us were at work, it was a way to bring us all together to share the moment virtually. Even the occasional social media eyerollers can’t diminish the impact of bringing a country together to celebrate during one of the most important moments in our history.
And come together we did. According to Mashable, as of 1:15pm ET, there were 600,000 status updates from the CNN feed, averaging about 4,000 status updates per minute during the actual broadcast.
CNN.com also teamed up with Microsoft to create a project called “The Moment,” using their Photosynth technology. They crowdsourced the photo documentation of the moment President Obama took office, putting out a call for people to send in those photos. Photosynth then fuses all of those 2D images together for a 3D visual of what experts are saying is the most documented moment in history. And from a professional standpoint, it’s a really rad and inspiring way of capturing a moment that changed all of our lives.
These particular examples of companies using social media just reinforce the fact that marketing isn’t always just about a good ROI. No one is really going to be able to say that Microsoft will sell more Windows operating systems, or that CNN will now have X-number more viewers because of this venture. But think of how limiting it would be if that was the only reason you, as a company, did anything. Because selling products and services is one thing, but how do you put an ROI on a memory?
Photo by CP via Creative Commons: http://flickr.com/photos/techbirmingham/3213791844/
