The sweet smell of success !

Obama's victory - Good news for ePr ? My thoughts - YES. I know you have probably heard this before and you will hear this time and again.But am so compelled to put my thoughts into words, am living in blogosphere these days after all.

" I'm asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington...I'm asking you to believe in yours." Those famous words spoken by 44th president of the United states.Simple words, tremendous impact! What made it even more impact ful is the reach of those words. These words are probably echoed in the soul of every man or woman , old or young in USA who voted for this phenomenon called Obama. What actually made him that? I say , good old Internet. He embraced Internet and made a personal connection with people from all over the world. He is the first digital president ...of the world. Here is why!

Some fascinating facts and figures I stumbled upon and would like to share with everyone who cares.

• He hired Chris Hughes co founder of facebook, to create a social networking site out of www.barackobama.com. (Chris is only 25 and clearly very talented! Can you imagine the pangs of jealousy I keep getting in my stomach but I salute him for recognising the digital power and sharing it with the world.)
• YouTube provided Obama with over 14,548,809 hours of free advertising; equivalent of $46 million.
• He even developed a cool iphone application to encourage people to vote for him and pass the message on, and even advertised on video games to reach the youths.(How very clever!)
  
• Since August there have been 500 million blog post referencing Obama ( And now there is another addition.)
• Obama has a network 844,927 Myspace friends,118,107 Twitter followers and over 2 million Facebook supporters.
• Team Obama managed to compile a mobile phone database of over 3 million phone numbers which acted as a very resourceful and valuable tool.
• There are nearly 2 million links to www.barackobama.com.
• Obama raised $33 million from his online fundraising operations alone.

And the list goes on ....

Obama's victory is being celebrated and I guess will be for a long time in the digital world of social networking sites and blogs. Web 2.0 helped Obama in generating buzz, word of mouth and positive network effects. Isn't that what PR is all about? I say, Yes . But then that leaves me with some other questions.
Is digital media taking over traditional media?
Have we found our Ace card in the PR world?

I guess, the time will answer my questions , if am patient enough . But am not, so I will carry on my pursuit.