2 posts tagged Obooma

This post is a continuation of: it was an obooma-ing week at nology media, part 1. 

Several people at the office decided to meet at a bar after work for a drink or two in advance of the Social Media Club Seattle meeting taking place that night.  After sitting in the bar, ordering a couple drinks, we checked our phones to see there were any retweets from our original message:

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

It had. About a dozen times. A key mention was from popular radio and TV newscaster Linda Thomas, who tweets under @TheNewsChick.

Next, we looked at the site to see if any shirts had sold. They had. In addition, there was a comment on the t-shirt page: “KOMO Radio interested in doing an interview. Pls call…”

Within a matter of minutes, I was on a live radio interview during drive time. The hosts’s first question after introducing the t-shirt?

“So, Leigh, what took you guys so long to come up with this t-shirt?”

After the interview, nearly every local news media outlet covered the story in one way or another. The orders for t-shirts starting coming in at steady clip. The term “Obooma” was now a trending topic on Twitter for the Seattle area. 

Once we determined we had the potential to sell a substantial amount of shirts, we decided there was an opportunity to do some good with the proceeds.We made the decision to give anything we earned to the Moyer Foundation, a Nology Media client, and our favorite local charity. We began sending out reply messages on Twitter stating where the proceeds were going, and that there was an opportunity to help Moyer Foundation by spreading the word.  

This gave shirt sales new momentum, and the retweets began to number in the hundreds.  At approximately 11pm, KIRO Radio requested an interview for the following morning. At this point, Moyer Foundation was now fully engrained as the beneficiary of our efforts, and the re-tweets continued.

Approximately an hour after the radio interview, we received a call from KING5 TV, the local NBC affiliate requesting to send a camera crew to our offices to film a segment about the t-shirt and how the idea came about.  The crew arrived and spent the better part of an hour with us filming. The segment, part of a bigger story on the President’s visit and the pilot flying the small plane, was aired on the 5:30, 6:30 and 11:00pm news that night. 

In all, more than 1,000 tweets mentioned Obooma and the ‘I Felt It’ t-shirts. We completed two radio interviews and a TV interview.  A dozen or so print and online publications covered the t-shirt. And while we’re not planning to release exact numbers, many - many - shirts have sold. We were able to garner support for an organization that deserves the attention and support, as well as raise a nice donation on behalf of the team at Nology Media and the people of Seattle.

We also had the ability to develop a case study on not only the power of social media, but the speed at which social media generates interest in a topic, shapes a conversation, and then vanishes. 

All within 24 hours of an otherwise normal, sunny day in Seattle.  

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.