A timeline of a VP Announcement that was "supposed" to use social media

Updated as of 11:30 a.m. : I finally received my e-mail from the campaign at 10:19 a.m. while I was eating breakfast at Maxi's (a wonderful local restaurant in Waterbury, VT) and watching CNN Headline News talk about it. Local blogger and newsperson Cathy Resmer has also commented on the a.m. wake-up call from the Obama Campaign over at Blurt, as has my sister in the comments below.

If the goal of the Obama campaign was to whip people into a frenzy via social media, (and in the process get way more email addresses and txt contact to mine for money) they did that. If the goal of the Obama campaign was to actually reach out to people directly to inform them of the VP choice, well in "professorial talk", they failed. They failed big time.

As we all know the frenzy has been building. About two weeks ago, the campaign announced that they would alert people through email and txt messaging so they would be "the first to know" who the VP was. Yesterday speculation was rampant. Traditional media outlets, especially CNN, were conducting interviews and stalking potentials. Everything they reported was echoed in the Twitter-verse where individuals were tweeting all day about waiting for their cell phones to go off.

Anticipation was high.

And then...

Well, here is how it went for me, an individual who signed up for the email, the text and the twitter.

12:55 a.m.: Breaking alert from CNN: CNN confirms Sen. Barack Obama has chosen Delaware Sen. Joe Biden to be his vice-presidential running mate.

3:27 a.m.: Text Alert from Obama 62262: Barack has chosen Senator Joe Biden to be our VP nominee. Watch the first Obama-Biden rally live at 3 p.m. ET on http://www.barackobaman.com/. Spread the word!

5:25 a.m.: Twitter Alert from BarackObama: Announcing Senator Joe Biden as our VP nominee. Watch the first Obama-Biden rally live at 3 p.m. ET on http://barackobaman.com/

I never received an email.

So, after all the hype and all the hoopla, at the end of the day CNN was the winner. The campaign did not reach me first. Media did. The conversation over at the twitter-verse, is as always diverse, interesting, silly and downright um...whatever. Check that out here: http://tinyurl.com/5ucaot.

What was the point anyway? An Agence France-Presse article headline reads: Obama's VP alerts trumped by media leaks. Others are writing about the frenzy and how it captured many news cycles. Regardless I have to admit to being disappointed. While a realist I do still have pockets of idealism hidden away and this one got me. We all know I dig the social media. I really see it as a sea change for how we get our information. So when a presidential candidate "looks" like they are going to side step the mainstream and go directly to the people, I get very excited. Even though, in the back of my marketing mind, I know, deep down inside it's all about hype. It's about data mining. And well, it's politics and the Obama Campaign is clearly a political machine.

The campaign website is updated with a new big donate splash page -- very inspiring picture of Obama and Biden together (got to LOVE Photoshop):

Bypassing the splash screen we now see on the website this banner first (don't they know that red is subconsciously a "stop" color ... a warning...a don't go there. They should pick a different color for their buttons. Seriously ... like green which is go):

However, the Obama store isn't ready yet (smile). No Obama-Biden merchandise...as of the writing of this post.

My final question is with all the hype about change and doing things differently, the only different thing that was done here was the campaign expertly manipulated the media AND the people who "wanted to know first" so they got the maximum news coverage. How is that change? Seems like the same old thing to me.