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♫
(Applause)
Thank you for coming out on this Thursday before the inauguration .
This is one of those really great opportunities that comes, sorta, once in a lifetime. Right?
I'm Harry Hayward. I'm with Media Relations and Communications,
here at the University of Washington.
What we wanted to do tonight was one of a series of what we call UW Insight.
UW Insight is about us being able to share with our public
the thoughts that we have on things that we know something about.
This is a great institution of great minds of a whole variety.
We had the financial crisis lectures about the first of December,
and gee that's still going on, so were gonna maybe bring that back again.
Tonight its all about the power of digital media.
And just so you know, this was all put together in about two weeks,
and we can thank the power of social media for getting all of you here,
and getting you all to find out what your gonna find out tonight.
So, we've got some great presenters, uh, were gonna put this on video,
so that we can have it streamed as a video on demand for you to watch over and over.
If you want to. Thank you for coming, and enjoy your night.
(Applause)
Thanks for that Harry. My name is Hanson Hosein.
I'm the director of the master of communication and digital media program here at the University.
and, um, it was, I just wanna tell you how this event came about very quickly.
I'm gonna quote directly from the email that I wrote
when I had this streak of this, this inspiration.
That's Harry, this is Lance. Hi Lance and Harry.
The strange appearance of the sun at lunch cleared my brain
for a brief shining moment to come up with this idea.
An MCDM sponsored event for January called,
"the first social media president: How Obama uses the internet."
So, this, um, this came about when the sun last made its appearance here in Seattle,
and, I think it came out a little bit today. So I think its all very fortuitous.
But, its, its something that we've been paying really close attention to
in our Master of Communication program.
We focus on social media story telling, and basically the business of communications
using technologies such as digital media.
And, for us it was a - it was this incredible - it was a moment to see Obama win.
For many reasons, but the fact that he had been able to leverage a lot of the technologies
and platforms that we've been talking about in our program,
made us feel like we were on the right track.
And, the fact that some of the people here on this panel tonight
are telling me that their phones haven't stopped ringing since then,
because there are just so many opportunities using these new communication tools,
sort of tells me that this is something that's worth discussing.
That we, that there's some lessons to be drawn from how Barack Obama used this.
Also, this gives us, the inauguration next week is a great news peg.
It gives us a chance to create community here in the Puget Sound area
to talk about these really important issues related to communications.
And this is something we're trying to build through our program,
and through our new center that we're building called the Media Space,
where we hope to have a lot of events like this on a regular basis,
bringing everybody out from the community to talk about this and try to figure it out.
And so, this is just the beginning of that.
Um, and, this is just a significant time.
just listening to the radio today, on KUOW, they had Don Tapscott who wrote the book
"Growing Up Digital" and then "Grown Up Digital", and he announced that
"the net generation has just elected their first president."
And to me that was very, uh, it was a very prophetic thing to say.
It was a very momentous thing to say. That we have now moved beyond
what other generations have dictated and now we're looking at younger generations
using new technologies and they're having an impact
on how we're using technology and how we're governing ourselves as well.
And, also, I th... you know, we can be very Utopian about how all this is happening,
but I got a Twitter from one of my students in the last couple weeks about this event tonight,
and I thought its worth, at least, throwing a little bit of cold water
before we think that we're now moving into a shiny happy moment.
He said to me, "Its less remarkable to me that Obama used digital media so well
than that the other guy bungled it so badly.
Politicians, or anyone who wants to communicate,
need to understand the media of their time,
and this time around the media happened to be Facebook and Twitter.
McCain's performance, on the media of the times, was comparable to Douglas showing up
at the Lincoln Douglas debates muttering something about Lincoln's beard,
and falling off the stage.
So, it might not be a fair fight to begin with, but I thought that was a very...
It was a well written...
It must be an email because that's too long for a tweet.
I think the author is here. Brooke you here? Yes.
You can help me out later.
Anyway, I'm just so thrilled to have the three people who will be talking about this tonight,
here, because I see them, in their own ways, as leaders, in terms of the use of social media.
Lance Bennett, um, he is a professor both in the Political Science department
and in my department, Communications.
He's a colleague and a friend and has been really at the forefront of how people
are using digital media and communications generally to get more engaged.
He's a true expert on the use of communications in democracy around the world.
He's a rock star not only in our department, not only in the University,
but he's recognized across this country as a real expert on this,
so I'm thrilled that he agreed to participate.
So, we'll kick off with Lance who will actually look at, specifically what Barack Obama
in his campaign used, and what it means for politics and Democracy.
Secondly we have Kathy Gill, who's right here.
Kathy is my colleague at the Master of Communication and Digital Media.
Kathy is, um, she's the quintessential early adopter.
She knows this stuff before its even happening, and I go to her to educate myself on this.
And, she's a journalist. She's been teaching in the MCDM for, seven years now Kathy?
(Kathy Gill) Six.
(Hanson) Six years.
Um, she also teaches motorcycle safety, and I just feel like Kathy really gets these tools,
and she has taught a really successful class in digital democracy,
which just happened to be taking place during the apex of the campaign.
And, so, she's got some great observations, and she also, you know,
she will also be realistic about what this means as well.
And, then, finally we have Brett Horvath who's here.
Brett is a good friend of our program, um, and a collaborator of ours.
Um, Brett 's famous for having been the Social media director of the Pickens plan,
which is a really successful campaign that T. Boone Pickens ran for the last few months,
and he also did a Facebook application for Your Revolution,
which allowed people to register online, through Facebook, to vote in Washington State..
And, so, Brett is one of these people you know you'll be reading about, if you're not already,
in the next five years, and I just felt it was really important for him to take the conversation
beyond to what the younger generations are using this technology for.
And also to look at this from a business point of view.
So, that's the order of the day.
And with that I give you Lance Bennett.
(Applause)
Thanks. Is this working? Yeah, It sounds like its working.
Um, I was on vacation when I got this email from Hanson, and I thought,
"there's no way were gonna fill a student hall here, in two weeks,
when everybody's on vacation."
It turns out I was wrong, and I'm wrong for the very thing were talking about tonight.
Twitter and Facebook and networks and lists all went out and you all responded,
and it's a very interesting audience
I'd like to find a way to see where your networks are in here.
That would be an interesting thing to discover.
The snapshots of the election I'm gonna give you are a kind of a back burner project
powered by students at the Center for Communication and Civic Engagement.
It's not one of our funded research projects, but it's one of our really fun research projects,
and a lot of the things we do, um, are based on students coming to me and saying,
"We have to look at this because its happening now, and its important and let's do it."
And so I'm happy to credit Muzammil Hussain, Deen Freelon, and Chris Wells.
Three students who work at the center who've been capturing, and helping me gather,
data and insight over this election period.
The mediascape state is changing.
We all know it, but when you begin to see it from a perspective
that isn't sitting in front of the television it really looks like its changing rapidly.
So here are the big media players, not just today, but increasingly so in our future,
and as you can see, some of these small players are actually shrinking in size.
Here's the nightly news. Ok that's where citizens once got their information,
and really aren't any more.
Are they getting it somewhere else?
Well the answer is, no. More and more, except for the old folks in my bracket and above,
are going newsless.
Is this something to be alarmed about?
That's a really interesting question.
The question I want to pose to you is actually becoming answered by polls and studies
that suggest, well people are actually, often, going online to have direct experience.
Instead of hearing a reporter stand up in front of a candidate, who's talking,
but you can't hear what they're saying,
you only hear what the reporter tells you they're saying.
People can actually go online and hear the speech.
Whenever they want. As much as they want.
So, it could be that bypassing news,
while it is sad for all my journalism friends, and colleagues,
may indicate a kind of transformation of the way information is getting to people.
So we should bear that in mind.
One of the things that strikes me as fascinating about this election
is that Obama won in a digital landslide.
If you look at the activities on any of these,
and a host of other kinds of digital media social networking technologies, Obama won.
These are just some quick snapshots.
Facebook three million to six-hundred thousand.
MySpace 930,000 to 222,000
and these are just the close friends.
There are surely more distant friends.
If you look at blogging activity
there was just one week, in the entire election span,
that Obama wasn't the most blogged about by far, and that was the Palin moment.
(Laughter)
But as we know, that passed, rather quickly.
Um, this is some data that John Hickey gathered, who's here tonight.
At the end of the primary term you see forty-million YouTube views for Obama,
and, um, Clinton has less then ten-million and McCain's kind of flat lined on YouTube.
As he did most of the way through the campaign until they finally figured out
how to prime the media space,
and for a period during the summer they were more viewed then Obama was.
So how much viewing was going on?
By one estimate three-billion video views.
That's a lot. I mean that kinda swamps what we think of as mass media.
Three-billion video views.
The YouTube campaign channels;
Obama 112 million to McCain's 25 million.
The Obama edge is, reportedly, two-to-one, in views.
This is an interesting moment.
I mean a lot of people think that YouTube is a really tacky place,
which is dominated by Beyonce and Britney and really idiotic videos.
Well, it turns out that in November Obama channel
beat out the Beyonce and the Britney channels.
Uh, so it suggests that its becoming a place where people go for direct information
about the candidates and the campaigns.
And this is an interesting picture.
We think of mass media as being the targeting device,
the strategic targeting device to pump ads at undecided voters in key battle ground states.
Well it turns out the device that really impressed me most in this campaign,
and this comes thanks to my colleague Bob Boynton at the University of Iowa,
is these are targeted YouTube videos on the Obama channel.
The darkness of the color indicates the density of the targeting,
and the content of these videos is about campaign events that occurred in those states.
So these are not Obama's race speech.
These are not the big acceptance speeches at the Democratic convention.
These are liberal content videos that were targeted,
and you can see there's a strategic pattern here to the targeting.
Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio, Michigan, Colorado,
and then the other states that were in play, and New Mexico, and Montana, and North Dakota.
Also states that were surprisingly in play in this election, and were strategically targeted
with local campaign content by the Obama campaign.
So, this may become the targeting pattern of the future.
So, one thing that I've noticed about the viewing patterns and the content, is this.
Here's a thirty-seven minute speech, that got seven million views.
That's the size of a nightly national network newscast.
And its kind of impressive that seven million people wanted to go to the source,
unmediated by journalists, soundbites, and cut outs, and look at this speech.
And, then, it went on because it was blogged about, and it continued to be blogged about,
all the way through the election itself.
Some of the content wasn't so serious, but it might have been engaging,
um, and it also got large views.
So, there's a combination of seriousness and play in this election, uh, spectacle.
This was the most viewed video.
Twenty-two million views by Will.i.Am's "Yes We Can" produced by Jesse Dylan,
and released on MySpace and YouTube and blogged about very, very heavily.
This was also the most blogged about video in the entire election.
Um, and it indicates that there is a mix going on,
but it also indicates that there were a lot of things that were very important
to mobilizing voters for this campaign.
That weren't controlled by the campaign.
This was a digital network that was interacting with the campaign,
but not as centrally controlled as you usually see campaign content.
There were discourses going on.
So after the "Yes We Can" video came out, a group of fairly low-budget producers,
the "Yes We Can' was a high-budget production,
produced the "No You Can't" McCain ad.
If you haven't seen these please go and watch them. They're quite hilarious.
One of the things we're studying, about all of this,
is "How does video go viral, when it's not traveling through the normal media channels?"
The mass media channels.
And one thing that's very clear is that there're interactions going on between desktops,
such as the desktops of Joe Cook, who home produced his own video,
speaking to mister Obama, on behalf of McCain, urging voters to vote for McCain.
I'll show you the video in a second.
To bloggers who blogged about it,
and as the blogging moved up the food chain of the blogosphere,
you began seeing conventional media grabbing it, talking about it, and reporting it.
And I'll show you that in a minute.
So, this video was produced in a park in a small town in Illinois,
and its now got thirteen million views.
This was the second most watched video in the entire campaign,
and it was not produced by McCain.
And lets look at it.
(Joe Cook) Dear Mister Obama.
Having spent twelve months in Iraq theater, I can promise you, this was not a mistake.
I witnessed firsthand, the many sacrifices made for the people of Iraq.
Those sacrifices were not mistakes.
The Iraqi people are just like us.
They want a chance to live in a secure world.
Free from tyranny. Free from terrorism. Free to prosper.
Free to raise their children, and pass on a future.
Are they better off today then they were in 2002?
You bet.
I've seen many men sacrifice their lives for the Iraqi people.
They died for a purpose. Not a mistake.
They died giving hope. They died promoting freedom.
Do you rescue a fireman just as he's about to save a child?
When you call the Iraqi war a mistake, you disrespect the service,
and the sacrifice of everyone who has died promoting freedom.
Freedom carries with it a price.
Because you do not understand, nor appreciate, these principles sir,
I am supporting Senator John McCain for president.
He too made a huge sacrifice promoting freedom,
because he understands a fundamental truth.
Freedom is always worth the price
♫
(Hanson Hosein) And that ad was not approved by John McCain.
Although, I think he was very grateful for it.
Uh, it appeared first on a very small blog, in this small Illinois town,
a blog about what's happening in our town. And it worked its way up the blogosphere,
until it hit large enough blogs that it was picked up by Rush Limbaugh, on his radio program.
Rush turned it into an anthem for 911,
and within the week that this appeared on Rush's program,
and in turn Rush Limbaugh's blog, it spiked to six million views in one week.
Um, so you can see the blogging activity, and then the spike in views,
and then that it spiked again, in terms of blogs,
at the end because it became a rallying discussion point for the vote itself.
We've tracked a number of others of these and there seems to be a pattern that's an imperfect relationship,
so were looking more at how blogging interacts with viral video,
and, uh, trying to figure this out.
So, here's some take aways.
What's the bottom line for this campaign?
Well, three million donars gave six million plus donations, both records,
adding up to five-hundred million, also a record.
We might worry a bit about how much this Obama campaign cost,
but that's another question.
These are amazing figures. And, they were mostly under a hundred dollars.
So that large amount of money was contributed in small, average donations.
An email list of thirteen million names.
Wouldn't you like to have that?
A billion emails landed in inboxes,
a million people signed up for text messages, and, um, on and on.
So, it was really quite, an astounding set of digital media and networks.
And, one of the things that impresses me the most is the youth engagement that resulted from that.
Here's a survey of voters 18 to 25,
and fifty-seven percent believe that they were more engaged in the election,
not more connected to Obama the candidate, but more engaged in the electoral process.
And one of the things that we, especially I,
had worried about for years in my own work, and as a citizen,
is the disconnection of the young citizens from the democratic process.
And here is evidence that the interactivity, with an election campaign,
re-energized a substantial segment of young voters.
And did it matter?
Yes, it mattered. The blue lines are all states, many of them very unlikely states:
Alabama? For Obama? In this age bracket. Very interesting.
North Dakota, Kentucky Kansas, so you can begin to look at...
And then look at North Carolina, seventy-two percent.
That begins to look like a youth vote turnout that might have carried a state,
that would not otherwise have gone.
So, this is kind of where the young engagement went.
So, I'm gonna end with just some, "what's next?"
uh, and then turn it over to Kathy and to Brett.
Um, well, what's next for Obama is that they surely covet their take aways.
So they got... look at that email list, look at the mobile phone numbers, the doners,
and they're already using it.
How many have already gotten their mails, after the election,
asking various things about what you plan to do?
So, ok we know how this audience voted.
(Laughter)
But what's interesting is, that not only have they been using their list in getting ready to govern,
somewhat differently, although they're still asking me for money,
but somewhat differently then they used it during the election.
The people on the list side, and the text message side
of the communication exchange, fully expect to be involved.
Look at that.
Twenty-five percent of the voters expect to support the administrations agenda by reaching out to others online.
That's a large number of activist for the administration
Uh, fifty-one percent of online supporters expect some kind of ongoing communication,
and so on and so forth.
So, these voters want to stay mobilized
and I fully expect that the administration will keep them mobilized,
and it will be very interesting to watch how that woks.
Um, they asked those on the list,
"What would you like to continue doing?"
so that they got feedback about what kinds of action their supporters could contribute.
The fireside message of the digital era.
I think that one of the things that's going to be very interesting to watch
is the weekly messages that come out, and that will enable Obama to
not just interact with large numbers of people directly,
but for these messages to become shared and mashed up and posted on YouTube,
and sent in various forms, to people who wouldn't ever see them on TV or hear them on the radio.
So, that's the snapshot of the campaign as I saw it, and my students saw it, digitally.
And, uh, thanks.
(Applause)