As my colleague Michael Shear reports, video of President Obama tearing up as he thanked his campaign staff on Wednesday in Chicago was quickly viewed more than a million times on YouTube.
A link to the video was sent to Obama supporters by e-mail on Thursday night, one day after a celebratory update on the president's @BarackObama Twitter feed became the most popular tweet in the brief history of the social network.
As election post-mortems roll in, some analysts have described Mr. Obama's re-election as a victory for social networking - both the online variety and an older form, of direct appeals to voters in person and through telephone calls - which proved powerful enough to counteract the hundreds of millions of dollars of negative ads that blanketed the airwaves of traditional broadcast media.
