Revolution #207, July 18, 2010
Aiming to Go Viral with the Revolution Talk
Last week's special efforts to promote Bob Avakian's talk, Revolution: Why It's Necessary, Why It's Possible, What It's All About, was a real success. We called for people to be part of getting 1,000 views on a clip from this talk on YouTube, "What to the slave is your Fourth of July? From the past to the present." We aimed to make a voice for real revolution heard as this system celebrated its criminal empire.
We far exceeded our goals and made a big societal impact in the process, including with major national media coverage of the way the real revolutionaries were marking July 4.
As of now, this YouTube clip has been seen about 3,000 times in Spanish and English. Hundreds of people watched it from Facebook and Twitter and at least 60 people (that we can tell) reposted it. Through this, many people were introduced to Bob Avakian for the first time. People reposted it for different reasons and from different perspectives. And this kicked off all kinds of online debates and discussions about the content of this clip, who Bob Avakian is, and why people should seriously engage what he's saying and what he's about.
A feature article in Newsweek online, "The New Revolutionaries" by Ravi Somaiya (Sunday, July 4, http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/04/the-new-revolutionaries.html) on the rise of what it called "anti-government zeal" wrote, "The Tea Party wants to repeat the 1776 revolution, with some selective editing of the founding fathers' aims. The Revolutionary Communist Party is calling for a revolution against the original revolution itself." This included a link to the article at revcom.us about promoting the YouTube clip for July 4 from the Bob Avakian talk. This drove even more people to watch the clip itself, and created a much broader societal awareness of a movement for real revolution.
There's a lot to learn from this effort!
First, we took one of our great strengths—Bob Avakian and the content of his Revolution talk and really built on that in relation to something timely. Second, we consciously gave people a vehicle to be part of this movement for revolution in a concentrated way where all across the country (and actually around the world) people could pull together to accomplish a concrete goal... which is part of a bigger goal in making Bob Avakian a household name... an essential part of really putting revolution on the map... and we made all that known. We reached out to and marshaled something else we have going for us—a base of people in the world and on the net who are broadly following this movement and are part of it from different perspectives and on different levels. We provided a means to act in a very basic but very important—and meaningful—way, including by providing a form where people could voice their radical sentiments and aspirations up against all the patriotic bullshit being pumped out that day, and introduce people to Bob Avakian.
Coming off of this, the Revolution talk national web promotion team has announced a regular Repost/Retweet Wednesday and Invite/Follow Fridays where people can spread the Wednesday clip of the day (with ongoing updates from the Facebook page and Twitter account on how it's going), and on Fridays, people will be asked to invite their friends to become fans of the page themselves, or sign up to follow the Revolution talk twitter feed. They're also planning to make a big deal out of the clip, "Why do people come here from all over the world?" in relation to the planned date for the fascist anti-immigrant law in Arizona to go into effect on July 29. Updates and announcements about this will be coming from the Facebook page so stay tuned in.
These kinds of efforts—in conjunction with all the other parts of this campaign, "The Revolution We Need... The Leadership We Have"—is a big part of how this talk can "go viral." Everyone we meet should be invited into the online and on the ground presence of this talk through follow-up emails, phone calls and in-person discussions about who Bob Avakian is, what difference it makes that people throughout society know who he is, and have some sense of the kind of movement for revolution we are building.
If you like this article, subscribe, donate to and sustain Revolution newspaper.
