How Obama’s “Social” Inauguration Changed Traditional Media

Today we saw Barack Obama the 44th President of the United States take office, and I expect him to to do many things in his first term as our president, but today he did one really big thing, that should not go unnoticed. Today, Obama started a true shift in how we as a society receive and share news and information.

Today’s inauguration marked a major shift in how traditional media organizations deliver news. The major highlight of the day seems to be CNN.com’s live streaming of the inauguration event that involved a partnership with Facebook to integrate friends comment along side the streaming video.  C.C. Chapman has done a very good video review of how the integration worked:

Mashable has a great post on the “Mindblowing” success of the CNN and Facebook partnership which saw CNN stream nearly 14 million live video feeds online between 6 a.m. and Noon today. Facebook also saw 8,500 updates in the first minute of Obama’s speech.  These numbers help to reinforce the point that C.C. made in his video and the one that I am trying to make in this post. Something really historic happened today in the world of media. The computer screen surpassed the living room TV in providing entertainment value and interactivity.

Today, people didn’t need to turn on their TV’s to watch history nor did they have to pick up the phone to call their friends for their reaction. Today CNN and Facebook gave both to people for free on their computer.  It makes sense that we see this integration first with a cable network, but the question is how will networks and hardware manufacturers work together to bring this into the living room?

The Government Gets Social:
Something else happened today while those millions of people were watching on CNN.com. Today at 12:01 before President Obama was sworn in the new Whitehouse.gov site for his administration went live.

I hope that any one who reads this post goes and take a couple of minutes to navigate around Whitehouse.gov. Not only is the design great, but it is a solid hub of information, most companies that I know do not have such as social and information rich sites.  When do you ever remember hearing that the government was better than most businesses when is came to marketing and communications? Never!

This is a big deal, and hopefully the work that Obama’s team has done with Whitehouse.gov will lead to the change of other government communications as well as how those in the private sector view the importance of social media in their marketing strategy.  This team has create a government Web site that is so information rich that I plan to visit it on a regular basis.

Today’s events have forced traditional media to embrace citizen journalism and make news more social, while our government has jump far ahead of most in the private sector in leveraging social media for community building.  Today was a good day…