What #40 Means to Americans

What #40 Means to Americans

When Congress became deadlocked over the extension of a payroll tax cut, The White House turned to social media to gain public support, asking followers “What does $40 mean to you?”  The level of response was impressive, and a two-month extension was passed shortly after.

The campaign began with a tweet from the @WhiteHouse account on Tuesday, December 20th, which asked “What does #40dollars mean to you?”  The idea was to get the average American talking about what $40 dollars every two weeks means to them, and what they would lose if it was removed from their paychecks.

The campaign “blew up” after it was retweeted by the President’s @BarackObama Twitter account (with nearly 12 million followers), according to MediaBistro.

A blog post on WhiteHouse.gov also explained the campaign, and encouraged the public to submit their responses via the White House website, Twitter, Facebook or YouTube.

The response was so huge that #40dollars was trending on Twitter for a few hours, with about 2,000 messages per hour coming in at its peak. According to an analysis by Crimson Hexagon of 40,000 tweets with the #40dollars hashtag, the majority of responses were fairly positive and supported the campaign.

The #40dollars campaign was successful in producing the type of discussion – and response – that the White House was looking for, with both opponents and supporters speaking out under the hashtag, but overall sentiment leaning strongly towards support of the tax cut extension.

In addition to starting and leading a discussion, the White House took advantage of the emerging platform, Storify, to curate the conversation. Storify allows users to collect the best photos, videos, tweets and more to publish them in a simple story that can be embedded anywhere. While the White House led and curated the conversations, it was the responses that defined the conversation and the participants.

Statistics

- 12/20 – 12/22: Participants took to Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube to express what $40 means to them

- @WhiteHouse initially launched the campaign via Twitter, and it exploded after @BarackObama retweeted

- Both are huge influencers on Twitter, as Barack Obama has a Klout Score of 86 and The White House has a Klout Score of 81 (avg is 20)
- @WhiteHouse has 2,577,694 followers, and @BarackObama has 11,759,240
– At the peak of the #40dollars trend on Twitter, there were about 2000 messages per hour

- An analysis of 40,000 of the #40dollars tweets was done with 47% of the tweets talking about what $40 could buy and 31% about the need for tax cuts; 8% said $40 was not enough; 13% of the responses were negative, generally about Obama himself

- The White House has 1,225,169 “Likes” and 31,634 people “talking about” it this week

- The initial campaign post garnered 786 “Likes” and 1,612 comments

- In total, White House posts referencing the $40 campaign collected 18,308 comments and 10,645 “Likes

- Additionally, Barack Obama has 24,361,285 “Likes” and 307,141 people talked about his page this week

- The “What 40 Dollars Means” YouTube Video has 42,131 views and the White House Channel has 164,704 Subscribers

Kristy Woolbright