It is amazing to look at the development of Viral TIME concepts over the last year. For those of you who have not yet contemplated on the title of this blog and what it really means, here it is:

Viral, as in viral,
TIMEs, as in time(s) of course, but also as in: Telecom, Internet, Media, Entertainment, and the “s” can stand for whatever you like: Society, conceptS, diffuSion or Spread maybe? Why not Social change?

Now, prior to last year we had only seen truly viral campaigns based on one or at the most two of these areas. Typically, Internet is involved in pretty much everything called viral and “web 2.0 viral” has so far been 80% video (Internet + Entertainment) and 20% other stuff like Facebook apps, flash campaigns etc. (Internet + Entertainment/Media).

I think (and about a million other bloggers) that everything in the viral domain changed with the Obama for America campaign. There’s no need to get into campaign details here, there is plenty of blogs and websites out there that cover the campaign strategies and execution well, but I want to make an important note to self and others:

Obama for America managed, for the first time, to fully embrace all TIME branches under a viral strategy. They used Telecom not just to make “robot calls” but really managed to integrate telecom concepts (e.g. call your friends widgets) to drive viral diffusion. They used Media as Media (also to get people online) and Entertainment as Entertainment, mixing them appropriately when needed, and turned Media into Entertainment (news casts turned into viral videos) and eventually they also managed to turn Entertainment into Media when the news media started to report about Obama’s viral videos. Plouffe, Hughes, Slaby (campaign CTO), Axelrod and a bunch of other campaigners are clearly viral geniuses…

Lets hope they can deliver some change in other areas (than TIME) as well! I’d love to see some viral social change strategies executed… Need technology, Mr President?

Posted on January 4th, 2009 by Linus
Filed under: Advocacy, Innovation, Internet, Media, Politics, Technology