As many have said already, there is no question that January 20, 2009 will be remembered as “The Moment.” As I noted in my previous post, say what you will about the political platform and policies that led Barack Obama to his U.S. historic presidential win, you could not help but be moved.

In the hours since, many commentators have noted that his Inaugural speech didn’t leave them with a quotable sound bite … the “we have nothing to fear but fear itself” equivalent … how soon some people seem to forget his A More Perfect Union speech last March. My own take was that it was a deeply passionate and deliberately measured Inaugural address, perhaps in part because of the current economic climate and the fact that he was unofficially on the job weeks before, but also because he knew he had the world’s attention. Themes of inclusiveness were peppered throughout.

I believe that history and hindsight will show that the so-called sound bite won’t necessarily be a carefully crafted phrase, but rather the totality of a successfully-run election campaign and a candidate’s vision and ability to connect and mobilize first-time voters in particular.

Fundamentally, he and his team forever changed the way political campaigns are strategically developed and executed. The perfect case study. Ultimately, his was a campaign steeped in the use of social media that, no question, played an absolutely significant role and just opened everything up. Had they not, I wonder if CNN would have joined up with Facebook or Microsoft with their photosynth technology to enhance their coverage (Mitch Joel is much more eloquent on these elements in a really interesting post).

The statistics* are staggering. In part:

• almost 2,000 official YouTube Videos; 442,000 user-generated YouTube videos
• 5 million ‘friends’ across 15 social networking websites
• 3 million online donors
• 35,000 volunteer groups and their 200,000 offline events
• 3 million people that signed up to a text-messaging program
• a website strategy resulting, in part, with 2 million profiles and 400,000 blog posts

In terms of social media, what lessons can we all learn? Quite a bit. First off, technology is not exclusive to the answer or something to throw money at; but, rather, a tool to realize the larger vision of authentic public engagement.

Edelman’s award-winning Digital Public Affairs group has created a white paper, The Social Pulpit: Barack Obama’s Social Media Toolkit. This is a must-read. But to get you started and hopefully whet your appetite, what are the lessons* learned from Obama’s social media strategy?

• Start early
• Build to scale
• Innovate where necessary; do everything else incrementally better
• Make it easy to find, forward and act
• Pick where you want to play
• Channel online enthusiasm into specific, targeted activities that further the campaign’s goals
• Integrate online advocacy into every element of the campaign

( * © 2009 Digital Public Affairs, Edelman )

Time will tell whether or not Obama’s “bottom-up” strategy of building political capital can help to ensure the changes in government he believes needs to happen.

From a social media perspective, it is encouraging to see that the new Administration seems to be carrying on with their commitment to public engagement, especially via their weekly YouTube video addresses, their Creative Commons license, and the Office of Public Liaison section on the www.WhiteHouse.org web site. But at the risk of downplaying the historical significance of January 20, 2009 (which is not my intent), I believe many will look back at “The Moment” and realize it was, in part, when social media received some serious street cred.