Washington: When President Barack Obama urged fellow leaders at the United Nations to do more for the world's refugees, his mention of a young boy named Alex could have been just a footnote, unnoticed or quickly forgotten.
The White House had other plans. Its social media specialists sent a video crew to the boy's home in New York. There they recorded an adorable Alex reading aloud a letter he had written asking Obama to bring to his house a 5-year-old bloodied boy the world had seen sitting in an ambulance in Aleppo, Syria. Young Alex promised, "We will give him a family, and he will be our brother."
When the White House posted the video on the president's Facebook page it was watched 27 million times. It also generated a wave of news stories around the country — drawing attention to the boy's compassion and, by association, Obama's desire to persuade the United States and the rest of the world to embrace more Syrian refugees.
The Alex video demonstrates how the Obama administration has increasingly turned to a new menu of options to engage the public.
The first American president of the social media age, Obama has for years been breaking ground on how politicians connect with a digitally savvy electorate.
He has used social media as a tool to educate, to amuse, to spin and, undoubtedly, to shape his legacy.
And judging by his successor's Twitter account, it's one of the few legacies he's leaving that President-elect Donald Trump has embraced.
The year Obama came into office, the White House joined Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Vimeo, iTunes and MySpace.
In 2013, the first lady posted her first photo to Instagram.
In 2015, the president sent his first tweet from @POTUS, an account that now has 11 million followers.
This year, the White House posted its first official story on Snapchat, a promotion of the president's State of the Union address.
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