Looking Back - President Obama’s Twitter Town Hall

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!

Maybe Disruption is a Necessary Evil

Social media is disrupting the practice of public relations or corporate communications, but not adversely. I think it's forcing us to reevaluate how we use communication to accomplish business objectives and it also challenges us to truly hold up our end of the bargain in the two-way communication model.

Although our industry is built on the foundation that public relations is about managing relationships between our clients or organizations and their various internal and external audiences; it's often been easy to fall into the trap of assuming that this is mostly achieved through media relations or marketing tactics. I find that social media is another tactic for us to use outside of traditional methods that have become like muscle memory (pitching the media, creating marketing collateral, writing speeches, managing events, etc.), while at the same time, securing feedback from the audiences we're trying to reach.

The challenge is that our jobs already encompass so much. Between planning strategies, executing campaigns and reporting back to our respective clients or department heads –who honestly has time to fit in yet another communication tactic? In this way, social media can feel like a bit of a disruption to our ongoing routine. Now, in addition to coming up with a strategy, objectives, target audience, media list, marketing creative and all the other bells and whistles that come with major campaigns, we have to think holistically about where social media fits into the picture.

Although it may be a challenge to fit one more tactic into our already busy professional lives, it can be seen as a positive change overall. Shaking things up in our industry helps us all to think more creatively, push boundaries, reevaluate the way things have always been done, and best yet – increases our value to customers and companies.

For example, in my previous job working at Ketchum, I worked on one of our biggest clients: FedEx. As the agency of record for this global company, our team handled public relations for many of the FedEx business units, including FedEx Office (formerly known as FedEx Kinko's). As can often be the case with many retailers, most people are familiar with the basic services FedEx Office provides (copying and printing, signs, banners), but awareness was low about a wide range of other services available (design service, mobile printing, direct mail, computer rental and more). After conducting market research and developing a strategic plan, we helped FedEx Office launch a consumer blog in the fall of 2009: Out of Office.

Although we continued to use traditional methods to execute campaigns that promoted FedEx Office, we now had another channel for educating and engaging with customers. Nearly two years later, the blog has a strong following and the team continues to produce fun and creative posts that show customers the myriad ways they can enjoy the company's product and services. Customers also enjoy sharing the projects they’ve created or soliciting feedback when they need more information.

Did the blog create extra work for my former agency team and our clients? Of course! But, it also helped us to reach the company's target audience in an interactive way and gave us new opportunities for spreading the word about FedEx Office.

At the end of the day, social media is one more trick in our toolbox that when used effectively, helps us make a positive impact on the relationship we're responsible for managing in the two-way communication model. It may make our to do lists a little longer, but my hope is that it's worth it for both our industry and the organizations we serve.