Obama gives his status update – State of the Union by tweets [infographic]

by @gordonmacmillan, posted on 25 January, 2012 at 8:59 am, filed under Social Media and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.
The results are in and below is a visual of the Twitter activity for President Obama’s fourth State of the Union speech last night, and his most crucial one in an election year, from his entrance into the House chamber up through Mitch Daniels’ response for the Republican Party.
In all there were three-quarters of a million tweets that specifically mentioned the State of the Union (#SOTU).
And the moment that Twitter saw the highest tweets-per-minute was following the President’s “spilled milk” joke (14,131 TPM):
“I’ve ordered every federal agency to eliminate rules that don’t make sense.  We’ve already announced over 500 reforms, and just a fraction of them will save business and citizens more than $10bn billion over the next five years.  We got rid of one rule from 40 years ago that could have forced some dairy farmers to spend $10,000 a year proving that they could contain a spill — because milk was somehow classified as an oil.
“With a rule like that, I guess it was worth crying over spilled milk.  Now, I’m confident a farmer can contain a milk spill without a federal agency looking over his shoulder.  Absolutely. But I will not back down from making sure an oil company can contain the kind of oil spill we saw in the Gulf two years ago.
As President Obama wrapped up his State of the Union, he said, “As long as we are joined in common purpose, as long as we maintain our common resolve, our journey moves forward, and our future is hopeful, and the state of our Union will always be strong.”

Throughout the speech, he discussed ideas for building an America that lasts. He called it a blueprint for the future and talked about ways to make his vision reality. Learn more about those ideas on the White House website. You can find the full remarks here or you can watch the video.

For other views of how the speech played out on Twitter, check out Rick Santorum’s and Governor Buddy Roemer’s accounts who live-tweeted the event.

Finally, the Vice President took to Twitter later last night to announce his first Twitter chat later this week:

POTUS is right, we need an America built to last. Join me to discuss #SOTU in my 1st @Twitter chat 1/26, 1:30pm ET. Use #WHChat to ask Qs-VP

— Office of VP Biden (@VP) January 25, 2012

State of the Union Twitter infographic (click to enlarge):