2 MILLION Facebook Views in a Week! How Elizabeth Warren Turns Boilerplate Viral (TIME)

[RiverLover]

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=423362941159538&fref=nf

3/4/15 at 9:22 pm -Shared with Public
2,034,785 Views

Here's the vid at youtube~

How Elizabeth Warren Turns Boilerplate Viral
3/4/15

Last week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren posted a video on Facebook of a recent speech in which she discussed the decline of the middle class and criticized Republicans in Congress...

In one week, the video has gone viral, grabbing more than 2 million views and picking up more than 50,000 shares on Facebook. And it’s not unusual for the Massachusetts Democrat, either. Three of her most-watched speeches on YouTube have more than a million views, while another seven have more than 100,000 views.

So what’s her secret? TIME sat down with some rhetoric professors to take a closer look at her most recent viral hit and figure out why the former Harvard professor who once had trouble just doing a softball interview with The Daily Show has become such a power hitter online.

They argued that the secret sauce in Warren’s videos is a palpable but carefully modulated sense of anger, the very quality that billionaire investor Warren Buffett had criticized her for earlier this week.

The recent video’s headline doesn’t entice—“Watch and share my opening statement from yesterday’s first Middle Class Prosperity Project forum”—or boast an impressive backdrop. ...The first minute and a half of the speech is relatively dull, filled with facts highlighting the decline of the middle class.

Then she slows down.

“In the 32 years from 1980 to 2012, 90% of Americans got zero income growth,” says Warren. “Nothing. All of the income growth in that 32-year period went to those at the top.”

It’s at this point in the speech where she first begins to repeat her points for emphasis—a trick used by “orators since time immemorial,” says Jeffrey Walker, chair of the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin—and let her emotion bubble up.

...Lynn Itagaki, an English professor at Ohio State University, says that Warren is a “great translator” with a “clean-spoken manner” who can help sway the mass public on complicated material, especially through a vehicle—Facebook—that has a built-in audience ready for one of Warren’s favorite topics, tackling student debt.

“With the kind of a precision of a doctor or surgeon, she names it, identifies the political choices that caused it historically and then she proposes a solution,” says Itagaki of middle class economic issues. “She provides a diagnosis of the problem and then provides you a prescription.”...

http://time.com/3732251/elizabeth-warren-viral-videos/