Sock and Awe - Is Social Media Faster than George Bush’s Reflexes?
Everyone thought Bush was a little slow until they saw him duck a couple of shoes. As quick as he was, the reflexes of former Texas Rangers owner were no match for the speed at which news of the event spread around the world. Consider this timeline:
December 14
- Shoes Thrown
- sockandawe.com registered
December 15
- 8,300 online news articles published about the incident
- sockandawe.com goes live. It’s a game where you can throw a shoe at Bush. Used as a promo for popjam.com - a new comedy website
December 16
- Over 2 million YouTube views registered of incident
- 6.5 milllion shoes have hit Bush at sockandawe.com
December 17
- Bush shoe thrower - Mundtadhar al-Zaidi, has 5,000 Facebook fans
Amazing stuff…
(Footnote: While the social media response to the shoe incident is astonishing, you also have to put it in context. Read what happened in 1938 when Orson Welles broadcast a radio play called The War of the Worlds, or look at the ratings figures for any B-Grade Sunday night movie and you’ll quickly realise that although we twitterers and bloggers can spread news pretty quickly, we’re a long way from toppling broadcast media).
Zac Martin
December 17th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
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Those 2 million views are only counting one video. One the day it happened different postings of the footage held 8 positions in the Top 20 videos of the day.
Matt Granfield
December 17th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
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No, I averaged the postings out - total of all vids was about 2 million
Nathan Bush
December 17th, 2008 at 11:09 pm
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Will it get to the point where Mundtadhar al-Zaidi has more fans than Bush? Surely before web socialisation that would have been close to impossible to achieve!