Most weeks around the office move pretty fast. We’re a social media agency, after all. We live in 140 characters, Excel cells, thumbnails and avatars. This week was no exception.

On Tuesday, President Obama visited Seattle to attend a short meeting with small business owners and speak at a fundraiser. He was scheduled to speak at the Westin Hotel downtown, just a few block from the Nology Media offices. 

Among most members of our team, screens in offices tend to look like a scaled down version of NORAD - a constant stream of tweets, Facebook posts, viral videos, conversational, social media, and linguistic analysis tools all aggregated into dashboards for us to monitor the social media activities of our clients. This day, the conversation in Seattle was about Obama’s first Seattle visit as president. 

The motorcade had moved him from Pioneer Square to the Westin up Second Avenue. A half an hour passed as people posted pictures of the long stream of black limos, vans and police vehicles passing their vantage point. Then, around 2pm…

Boom. Boom. 

Most people in downtown heard them. Some felt them. As with most other events that generate the question, “What the hell was that?”,  the Twittersphere began to buzz. 

We watched the questions, the comments, the theories. Finally, one Twitter user listening to a police scanner stated they were sonic booms created from the passing of two military jets. A few tweets later: the President is safe, but the secure airspace had been violated. A few tweets after that: the secret services is investigating a small float plane for entering a several mile no-fly-zone around the President. 

 A tweet from one of our team members appeared on my dashboard: “Obooma!”

Then, from another team member: “I want a t-shirt that says, WABoom!” A play on Wa-Mu, the failed savings and loan. 

Obooma - tshirt - Obooma - tshirt

How quickly could we get a t-shirt designed, published, and up for sale? I Google’d custom printing sites, and came across Zazzle, a California company that does ecommerce-based t-shirt printing. Minimum quantity: 1. A few clicks later http://zazzle.com/obooma was up and running, with a simply designed t-shirt that said:

I FELT IT. OBOOMA! Seattle ‘10

At 4:40pm, I published a single tweet: 

Obooma sonic boom shirt has already hit the stands…  http://bit.ly/cgKBZ9 #seattle 

The president’s plane had not yet left Seattle. 

I walked into the offices of two colleagues and asked them to Re-Tweet my last message.  That was it.  From there, we had no idea what to expect.