YouTube e civic commercial engagement. Il caso Obama Girl e Barely Political

Interesting new forms of communication crossed Obama’s political campaign, especially in the Web 2.0 environment. This paper analyzes the phenomenon of Barely Political’s YouTube videos. The main and most famous Barely Political’s character is Obama Girl, who gained a resounding success during all the stages of Obama’s campaign, both on the Web and other traditional media. This paper critically analyzes the communication of Barely Political, assessing its effectiveness and finding out a professional communicative strategy behind what several early observers defined as a Web 2.0 naïve amateur participation. This paper presents the outcomes of a field research on the first two years of Barely Political’s communication: from June 2007 to May 2009. The article takes into consideration all the 264 videos produced by the staff, paying attention not only to the content but also to the metadata (tags) and the paratextual information (views, comments, ratings, etc.). The outcomes lead the author to define Barely Political project as a form of civic commercial engagement, having both civic and commercial strategic goals.