Over 130 million can't be wrong

In the 2008 presidential election between John McCain and Barack Obama, 130 million eligible people turned out to vote. That is roughly 64% of the electorate and by leaps and bounds the largest voter turn out in American history. Now on top of this the Democratic representative Obama received more than twice the amount of electoral votes.

Now I am going to let you in on a little theory I have on why this happened. I believe the turnout for this election was based on two factors.

The first factor is that this election followed 8 years of rule by one of the most widely ridiculed and questioned presidents of all time. The Republican party entered into this competition like a dog with a wounded paw and that wound did not heal.

Now this is probably the most highly regarded theory on the numbers presented above but I don't feel like this is the sole reason for the turn out. So what could it be that brought these numbers you might ask and frankly the answer might seem a little absurd.

Viral videos and why I believe they are one of the most powerful publicity tools

Yup that is honestly what I believe. Now let me explain myself. During this election I spent a lot of time monitoring the viral website Youtube. Over the many months of this campaign thousands of videos were posted on websites like Youtube, everything from simple webcam diatribes to full out celebrity produced musical numbers . Now this is probably not strange in itself, wherever there is an election there will but commentators. The strange thing in this case is the sheer volume of these videos and that they overwhelmingly focused on Obama as well as being overwhelmingly positive in nature.

Now here is where Obama supporters have shown themselves to be clever creatures, they have reached for a demographic that is honestly ignored because it is viewed as uninterested, this demographic is of course: young voters.

Young voters are viewed as being apathetic and a waste of time by politicians in both America and Canada, Canadian comedian Rick Mercer explains in this video.



This video also proves that if you post something online someone will watch it. Now lets say a celebrity or political support of Obama realizes that there is an amazingly large audience on youtube and produces a video promoting Obama, not only will that video be viewed on the website but the video can also be embedded in blogs or on the wildly popular networking site facebook.

Here is a prime example on the power of viral videos to gather an audience and promote discussion.



This Video produced by musician Will I Am and other celebrities put one of Barack Obama's speeches to music and was viewed in all its forms over 15 million times. Think about this for a second, 15 million views of a 4 minute video uploaded for free online. Can any advertisement offer these sort of numbers?

Ok, I'll admit that maybe viral videos didn't win the election for Obama but it is hard to deny that the internet is riddled with videos in his support and that he controlled the hearts and minds of over two thirds of the 18-24 voters. Sites like youtube are something that needs to be explored by future business communicators because as this election has shown it is a powerful tool to reach a younger demographic and as more and more people join the information age feet first, it will eventually be an important tool to reach all demographics.