CNN and Facebook Inauguration Coverage: A Mashup Made in Social Media Heaven

by Andrew Lennon | Managing Editor | The Daily Anchor

Since the web is in a frenzy over the Inauguration I’ll keep this short and sweet to spare you from another long-winded opinion on how things went down.

In short, kudos to CNN and Facebook for a tight integration and revolutionary live-media experience. They had the Y Generation / Millennials eating from their hand yesterday, and to anyone who knows how hard it is to tap into that market, this was a huge success on so many levels. Now I just want to know how much Starbucks paid for the premium ad spot…

I watched the Presidential Inauguration on CNN.com on my laptop yesterday and it was quite an experience. I hadn’t heard of the plans for CNN to team up with Facebook to stream the event, so I was mightily surprised when I opened the CNN live stream window and the status updates of all my friends appeared beside another tab listing the status updates of every Facebook member on the same CNN live stream.

As viewers watched CNN’s live web cast of the inauguration they were able to provide status updates to their Facebook profiles. And via an integrated Facebook window in the side-bar, visitors were able to see instant updates on what their various friends were saying. In addition, as viewers made comments while watching the inauguration on CNN.com, their profiles on Facebook.com were instantly updated—along with links carrying the phrase “via CNN.com Live”–potentially driving more viewership.

All told, the CNN / Facebook partnership turned into perhaps the largest and most social live event in the history of the internet.

By the numbers:

• 600,000 Facebook status updates had been posted via CNN live by 1:15pm.
• There were an average of 4,000 status updates every minute.
• 8,500 status updates hit at the minute President Obama began his speech.
• CNN generated 136 million pageviews by 3:30pm.
• CNN.com Live served up more than 21.3 million live video streams globally.

My subjective user-experience:

• I had to “wait in line” about 5 minutes to access the stream, which isn’t bad considering the number of people queued up to watch it.
• Once in, I had to upgrade to Flash 10 (thought I already was), and had to restart Firefox after upgrading, but I didn’t have to wait in line again, which was great.
• After upgrading Flash I had to upgrade some additional plugin, I absolutely don’t remember what it was, but it wasn’t any software I’ve ever heard of. Having to install a 2nd plugin was pretty damn annoying, but since the CNN/Facebook mashup was a first and used new technologies, I can get over it.
• I experienced some hiccups and time delays at the moment Obama began his speech, but again, considering CNN says there were 1.3 million concurrent video streams at that exact moment, a few minor hiccups were to be expected, and they were all short-lasting. (note: other people reported being booted out of the live stream altogether)
• Every 2 seconds I saw 3 new status updates appear in the sidebar, or about 180 every minute. That’s only about 5% of all status updates Facebook says were posted each minute, but since status updates were being posted by users at a rate of 67 updates every second I’m glad the stream was broken into digestible bits; I have yet to learn to speed read THAT fast.

KC Estenson, president of CNN.com, said that the idea to blend live online video and social networking in such a fashion was sparked by the way that voters took to the Web on and just after Election Day. “A lot of us were going home after the election and checking our Facebook accounts and updating our statuses, whether we were happy or sad about the results,” he said. “We thought, ‘what if we brought that into real time?’” It’ something we thought would be cool differentiate and unique. It turns out the Facebook group was thinking the same thing.”

Again, kudos.

Here are some screen shots of my CNN/Facebook web stream experience:

I couldn’t resist:

Tagged as: Barack Obama, CNN, Facebook, Millennial generation