For the first time Twitter has created a dedicated website looking back at some of the most talked about moments of the last year in the UK and around the world in a year that saw London host an Olympic Games that beat all expectations, and create some inspiring memories for all. It was also a year that saw a Tweet from Mars, Barack Obama win four more years and David Cameron, Nadine Dorries, Gary Lineker and Girls Aloud among many others finally join the 140 character conversation. Read More »

Since the dawn of television, advertising has been a mainstay of American presidential elections. From the first political attack ad, Lyndon Johnson’s infamous ‘Daisy’ spot, to the George  W Bush campaign’s John Kerry windsurfing parody, the advertising has become more and more important. With spending reaching record levels, this election was no different. But behind the scenes there has been a revolution in how both side’s ads were targeted and delivered.

Every presidential election can point to big breakthroughs in marketing tactics that are often ahead of their time, but this election was unique in the way it embraced real-time media buying in both the display market, but more significantly video advertising. Read More »

Superstorm Sandy and President Obama’s re-election are two of the biggest stories to have dominated social media in the past few weeks. In both cases, Twitter acted as a platform from which to gain breaking news ahead of the curve, as well as the usual avenue for thought trails aired the world over. Joan Collins expressed her sheer devastation following Bloomingdale’s temporary closure during the storm, while the presidential campaign engaged voters through excessive tweeting, hash tags, liking and sharing. The increasing impact of social networking is obvious.

Yet these instances can also lead us to an interesting question. In a digital world, where newspapers and websites are constantly updated and accessed through computers, tablets and mobile phones, is social-media actively changing the way news stories unfold or is it just another avenue through which to access news? Read More »

The FT reports on a new problem for Facebook where users are experiencing what they say are false “Likes” being attributed to them for products and causes that they have never interacted with.

The issue has caused problems and arguments for some where they have been shown to suddenly like causes that are antithetical to their point of view. One example that cropped up during the US election was of Barack Obama supporters suddenly finding that they liked “liked” Mitt Romney.

However, Facebook denies there is any problem and says that the issue could down to users accidentally swiping pages whilst accessing Facebook on their mobile phones. Others think there could be other issues at play. Read More »

The New York Times has splashed out on Promoted Tweets to capitalise on the amazing success that election blogger Nate Silver has had in predicting the US Presidential election results. The FiveThirtyEight: Nate Silver’s Political Calculus blog accounted for around 20% of the New York Times’s visitors the day before the election giving instant worldwide fame to the former baseball turned political statistician who the paper signed up in 2010.

Considering that the New York Times is one of the world’s biggest websites with more than 570 million page views in September 2012 that is a huge achievement and reflective of the social media sensation that Silver has become. Read More »

The US election reached a frenetic climax this week, with the two main candidates leaving a huge digital footprint in their wake. From ubiquitous search-and-display advertising to virally seeded videos and social-media trends, an estimated 12% of a collective $8bn campaign spend (or $960m) has been poured into digital over the past few months.

As any technologically minded cynic will tell you, messages of empathy and conviction were crafted with greater relevancy than ever to carefully segmented audiences. For instance, micro-targeting enabled Obama’s team to direct radio ads to specific mining communities in Ohio. New data points from Facebook meant both parties were able to reach subsets of their millions of page fans with assurances on the policies that mattered most to them. Read More »

Reddit bills itself as “the front page of the internet” and has become one of the most popular destinations on the web. We saw a demonstration of that earlier this year when Barack Obama did his “Ask me anything” Reddit interview, which brought the site crashing down.

With millions of subscribers and billions of page views, Reddit has the power to make or break any online campaign. Take a closer look at this social powerhouse, and see how you can reach out to the millions of Redditers out there. Read More »

Fadi Saleh is back with an awesome new “barackdubs” to celebrate the President’s re-election victory. The YouTube phenomenon, created by 19-year old Saleh, has in the past had the president singing and dancing to plenty of tunes including the Obama/Romney duet of Miley Cyrus’ ‘Party In The U.S.A’ and Obama doing Justin Bieber’s ‘Boyfriend’.

Now Saleh is back with Obama doing the MC Hammer’s massive 1990 hit ‘U Can’t Touch This’.

The “moves” Obama does as he removes his jacket in the various clips work wonderfully well. You can almost imagine its real. Almost. Read More »

In the early hours of this morning President Barack Obama declared he had won a second term. On Twitter. “Four more years”, he Tweeted. As Editor Gordon Macmillan pointed out, this has become the most shared Tweet in history, and marks a watershed moment for the platform.

There was no reply of concession from Republican challenger Governor Mitt Romney, whose final tweet of the campaign came five hours earlier:

Read More »

With the election now decided we take a quick look back at some of the ads that made an impact and helped Barack Obama on the road to victory and a second term as well as some of those that Mitt Romney and his supporters put out against him.

Included here is Obama’s groundbreaking ‘The Road We’ve travelled’, Girls creator Lena Dunham’s controversial ‘First Time’ as well as Joss Whedon and Sarah Silverman all stumping for Obama. And, of course, no list from this campaign would be complete without Samuel L Jackson ‘Wake the F*** Up’. Job done on that front.

We were told over and over, and I have written it many times myself, that this election has been the Twitter election and it has been in so many senses. But looking back it is easy to see the impact that YouTube has played. Many ads, which barely played on TV, made their impact online making YouTub’e role a huge one during the 2012 Presidential Election with so many videos going viral and racking up millions and millions of views.

Here are some of those ads that have scored most highly during the campaign topped by Mitt Romney going (what else) Gangnam style. Guessing he won’t be dancing like this today. Read More »