“Yes We Can”: How Online Viewership, Blog Discussion, Campaign Statements, and Mainstream Media Coverage Produced a Viral Video Phenomenon

Abstract

"Viral videos"-online video clips that gain widespread popularity when they are passed from person to person via e-mail, instant messages, and media-sharing Web sites-can exert a strong influence on election campaigns. Unfortunately, there has been almost no systematic empirical research on the factors that lead viral videos to spread across the Internet and permeate into the dominant political discourse. This article provides an initial assessment of the complex relationships that drive viral political videos by examining the interplay between audience size, blog discussion, campaign statements, and mainstream media coverage of the most popular online political video of the 2008 campaign-will.i.am's "Yes We Can" music video. Using vector autoregression, I find strong evidence that the relationship between these variables is complex and multidirectional. More specifically, I argue that bloggers and members of the Obama campaign played crucial roles in convincing people to watch the video and in attracting media coverage, while journalists had little influence on the levels of online viewership, blog discussion, or campaign support. Bloggers and campaign members, in other words, seem to occupy a unique and influential position in determining whether an online political video goes viral.

Emotional Convergence in Mass and Social Media in Election. Case Study: Romania 2014

“…These messages were both textual and visual in nature. Video messages ranked highest, given their increased communication potential, some of which went viral (Wallsten, 2010). Pictures showing hundreds of Romanian expats standing in the cold waiting to cast their vote were used by Prime Minister Ponta's adversaries to reveal both the government's faulty setup of the election process abroad and its attempts to impede the fundamental right to vote.…”

InfoExtractor—A Tool for Social Media Data Mining

“…At the same time, the ubiquity of new social media has stupefied some of the best students of social change, with the prominent exceptions of marketing, advertising, and information science researchers (Blythe & Cairns, 2009;Xenos, 2010). Meanwhile, transformative social and political norms are emerging in online social practices and their offline corollaries (Glynn, Huge, & Lunney, 2009;Wallsten, 2010). The pace of change and innovation is a significant challenge for researchers armed only with traditional tools and techniques (e.g., spreadsheets).…”

An Analytical Literature Review of State of Art Works on Online Social Media Platforms

“…We believe that the LokSabha elections of 2014 of India are an example of this. Another researcher who has written about the newsworthiness of viral videos is Wallsten [20]. He suggests that the blogosphere has attributed to the rise of many viral YouTube videos.…”