Last week, The White House announced that President Obama would be participating in his first “Twitter Town Hall” meeting, allowing the world to ask questions directly to the Commander-In-Chief.
That event kicks off at 2 p.m. EDT tomorrow, so you still have time to submit your questions for possible discussion. Interested participants are being asked to use the hashtag #AskObama when they tweet their questions. The focus, according to The White House and Twitter, will be on the economy and more specifically, jobs.
There is an official blog post up about the Town Hall on the Twitter blog. On that post we learn that specific economy-themed questions will be both selected in advance from the thousands of tweets already sent as well as selected live, during the Town Hall.
@TownHall. Here’s the Twitter and @MassRelevance team. Have your question in? http://t.co/iX8ACtN http://t.co/ojO7pO9
Setting up the@townhall. Use #AskObama to ask yours: http://t.co/M9I1j2x
Tomorrow, the President answers your questions live at the White House Twitter@VP will #askobama? How about @SpeakerBoehner? @NancyPelosi? @SenJohnMcCain? http://t.co/wIkjX3j
I wonder what jobs/economy questionFrom the Twitter blog –
• We’ve partnered with Mass Relevance to curate, visualize and integrate conversations for the event.
• Algorithms behind Twitter search will identify the Tweets that are most engaged with via Retweets, Favorites and Replies.
• A team of seasoned Twitter users with experience discussing the economy will help flag questions from their communities through retweets.
Not only can you follow the questions and responses via @townhall, but you can also watch a live stream of the event at askobama.twitter.com.
It looks like Twitter hopes this is just one of many future high-profile partnerships between the government and their service. I’m sure people from every place on the political spectrum can join in a collective “Hooray” for social media engagement.