Obama, Jack Bauer & NORAD Viral Xmas Hits
Organizing For America, Rebel Virals and NORADsanta.org are this years viral holiday winners. And looking at JibJab’s preliminary numbers on TechCrunch, also Elf Yourself can be added to that list.
Organizing For America: Barack Obama
Organizing For America (OFA), the successor organization to ‘Obama for America’, has created a personalized video card featuring President Barack Obama, as well as ordinary Democrats from around the country, thanking supporters for their dedication.
The video in which the recipient’s name is incorporated in various places of the clip has already been forwarded by at least a million people to their friends, an Organizing for America spokesperson told NewTeeVee. Launched Thursday December 17 the site featuring the video has seen 5 million visitors in the first seven days. Everyone who sends out a card is added to the newsletter list. The names of the receivers aren’t kept.
Rebel Virals
Viral agency Rebel Virals from Bristol have successfully produced and seeded their Christmas card for 2009, entitled “Jack Bauer interrogates Santa”, featuring Santa Claus along with Jack Bauer aka Kiefer Sutherland from the television series 24. Santa’s been apprehended for suspicious behaviour and Jack wants answers.
The video with over 20 duplicates on YouTube and placements on various other video networks, has been viewed over 1 million times and got featured on MSNBC.
NORADsanta.org
NORAD Tracks Santa is a service offered on Christmas Eve by NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, a joint organization of Canada and the United States. Every year on Christmas Eve, “NORAD Tracks Santa” follows Santa Claus, as he leaves the North Pole and delivers presents to children around the world.
This year, the tradition called for a 25-hour operations center where more than 1,200 volunteers from the military and the Colorado Springs community answered more than 74,000 phone calls and 3,500 e-mails from people around the world asking the location of Santa. More than 13 million visitors from 231 countries also tracked Santa on the website at noradsanta.org. The site, which featured both an interactive map and the Google Earth map, offered photos, videos and family-friendly games for visitors throughout the month of December.
The program gained over 27,000 twitter followers in a month’s time and the NORAD Tracks Santa Facebook fan page continues to grow with more than 410,000 fans. On NORADsanta’s YouTube channel several videos uploaded a week ago have been watched between 5,000 and 1 million times.
Source: NewTeeVee, The Inspiration Room, Colorado Connection, Wikipedia
Share your opinion and leave your comment below. Subscribe to our rss feed, connect to Twitter, get and spread our Viral Friday widget or sign up for our monthly e-mail newsletter.
Related Posts
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Hi Paul,
Again a nice post. I am really amazed that the greet of Obama, did this well, because I think the executution wasn’t very good, but it seems that the brand Obama is so strong that the people forward it any way
What do you think about the execution of Xmas cheer of Obama?
@ James
Agree about the execution. But think you are right: the Obama brand seems to be so engaged and so strong, that execution matters less.
Cheers
Igor
@James
Thank you for you kind remark and your comment.
About the execution. OFA has chosen for a simple, heartwarming video message that shows people from across the country and from every background. This (right) and personalized message touches not only many Democrats, but many who voted for Obama. “Thank you” is for having faith, being grateful, keeping hope alive and reminds people back to the milestone choosing Barack Obama and voting for change. And change is happening, see for example the health reform bill.
If it was overly produced/executed, this would have raised questions in time of crisis. They tried to make it a feeling of togetherness (continuation of grassroots idea).
Don’t forget that Obama has build a (very) fertile soil on 15 social networks of which 3 million followers on Twitter, 7 million Facebook fans, 2 million MySpace followers, 1 million sign ups for Obama Mobile and his website BarackObama.com with an estimated 1.3 – 2.6 US million monthly visitors (source: Quantcast)
By giving options to share this message easily via e-mail, Twitter and Facebook makes it fly.
If you look at the RebelVirals Xmas card, you also see the execution could have been better, you can see in various shots obviously they mixed their own shots with 24 episodes. Nevertheless people liked the idea and humor and passed it on.
Jack is the man..lol he will interogate anyone..lol
[...] be seen in NORAD’s YouTube channel and have been seen between 5,000 and 1 million times. Read Paul’s posting for more details about NORAD Tracks [...]