Posts
On July 6, the White House held a town hall with President Obama via Twitter. Obama has often been credited for how he successfully leveraged social networking during his campaign to rally his supporters and to win the White House. Although live Twitter chats are nothing new, this online forum was the first time a U.S. president had live tweeted and marked the continuing ways social media has changed the way we communicate.
Nearly 170,000 tweets were captured during the Twitter town hall and people communicated using the #AskObama hashtag. In addition to the success of this large number of people engaging with the president, I think there were a few notable highlights with the execution of this event.
Twitter's Executive Chairman, Jack Dorsey, noted that the White House partnered with Salesforce-Radian6, a well known social media monitoring agency, to analyze conversations on Twitter in the weeks leading up to the town hall discussion. Just as we begin the first step of any public relations campaign with research, I thought this was a critical first step. Armed with this research about the Twitter landscape and trending topics, Obama’s team was able to gain a better sense of the mood and sentiment about the economy, which helped them prepare the president for wide variety of questions from the audience.
I also think it was a smart move for the town hall to have eight curators that helped to select the tweets that were discussed. From a logistical standpoint, this certainly helped to streamline the process for reviewing the thousands of tweets that poured in over the hour. In terms of equally representing the audience, I think it’s great that the curators participated from around the country.
However, in the spirit of total transparency, I think cumulative information should have been provided about the curators, such as breaking down their geographic location, age and/or political affiliation. While we don’t need to know who each curator was personally, I do think it would have been beneficial to have a general sense of who selected the tweets featured in the town hall.
With regard to the selected tweets, I think President Obama did a great job answering questions that he didn’t know in advance. That said, I think he could have done a better job with responding quickly in order to ensure that more than 18 tweets were addressed during the one-hour session.
Another area that I think worked well during the town hall was that the topic of tweets, ranging from job loss to the debt ceiling, were tracked by percentage of people tweeting about them and also in which areas of the country these topics were trending.
On a final note, I think President Obama and his team did an excellent job hosting this Twitter town hall. Although there are some areas for improvement, I think they were successful overall in providing an open and engaging forum for constituents to address the President.
Don’t just take my word for it. If you didn’t have a chance to participate in the town hall, check out a video recording of the event below!
