Social Media and Obama's Ghana Speech

In the wake of President Obama's Ghana speech a couple days ago, bloggers/experts like William Easterly and Chris Blattman have weighed in with their grade for the president's words. Although the perspectives vary, their is some consensus excitement around the bottom-up approach to development that much of his tone and content seems to apply will become the norm. One interesting sub-story, however, is how social media became (or tried to become) a part of helping the message reach as many African's as possible.

About a week ago, Ushahidi's Erik Hersman wrote about his conversations with Obama's new media team about how best to get information out. The strategy came down to Radio, SMS, and Facebook. According to Erik, Facebook's 100,000+ Ghanian users made it the social network to focus on, with Twitter as a backup.

It's clear looking at the White House's blog page about the speech that SMS was also prioritized. Throughout the event, the new media team sent out quick clips from the speech, including:

The 21st century will be shaped by what happens not just in Rome or Moscow or Washington, but by what happens in Accra as well.

I will focus on four areas that are critical to the future of Africa and the entire developing world: democracy; opportunity; health; and the peaceful resolution of conflict.

Governments that respect the will of their own people are more prosperous, more stable, and more successful than governments that do not.

With better governance, I have no doubt that Africa holds the promise of a broader base for prosperity.

Yesterday, when I wrote my recap post, I was able to use portals like Global Voices to get a sense of what people on the ground were actually thinking about the speech, from a variety of perspectives.

I can't help but think that this access to information and ability to converse in a global dialogue is one of the best assets that a bottom-up, entrepreneur- and community-driven approach to development has going for it. While there are still major barriers to the cost of many communications technology across sub-Saharan Africa, it's still easier than ever before to find and create new communication opportunities.

I'm excited by the idea that this could fundamentally transform the ability for us to support a vision of the world where, as Obama put it, Africa's future really is up to Africans.