Inauguration Day’s Impact on Social Media
January 25th, 2009 
Business, Innovation, Law & Politics, New Media, Research, Social Media 
Mark Kizelshteyn
The international nature of this inauguration was unprecedented, but the magnificence lies in the active engagement it offered to millions of people across the planet via the social web. No longer limited to the those directly around ones vicinity, people were sharing and engaged with Obama, DC and the entire world. This campaign has set a precedent for the way politics will employ social media. From the protests at Bush’s inauguration 4 years ago to the hyper-happiness and participatory culture of Obama’s — we will never see politics in the same light. Thank you social web.
One of the neatest things that happened were all of the social image mash-ups that were put together. Millions of people emailed photos to one of the many aggregators (NYTimes, CNN, et cetera), and we were able to see some incredible footage that was simply crowd sourced. CNN, thorough Microsoft’s PhotoSynth, did one of my favorites. Check it out here.
Mark Ghuneim, Founder/CEO of digital marketing agency Wiredset and social media service Trendrr, put together can excellent post on Mashable.com about the incredible impact the Social Media Sphere saw on inauguration day. Not only was it a politically memorable day, but technologically too. Check out the numbers (as put together by Mark):
Twitter — “Tweets containing “Obama” hit 35,000 per hour during his speech, and topped 150,000 for the day.”
YouTube Uploads — “There have been 332,000 new videos uploaded to YouTube with the tag of “Obama” this week, and 17,000 new videos for “Inauguration” in the last five days, 10,000 of which came in the last 24 hours [of the inauguration].”
Images on Flickr — 30,000 new uploads tagged “Obama” in last 24 hours of the ceremony.
And Blogs… — This is was just record breaking. Technorati reported 18,000 new blog entries related to Obama on that day alone.
These are all mind blowing figures. After allowing this to digest for a few days, I am left with the question of whether this all happened because of Obama or the factor of Social Media. Undoubtedly, it is a mix of both, however, what would we have seen if McCain had won. I am sure we would have also hit unprecedented social media happenings as result of technology today, but, is it the embrace of the Obama campaign that has and will keep this fervor alive?
Tags: Blogs, Cnn, DC, Flickr, Inauguration Day, Law & Politics, mash ups, Nytimes, Obama, Social Media, Statistics, Twitter
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