My review for the President Obama’s Twitter Town Hall

Social media has played an important role in our life. After watching President Obama’s Twitter Town Hall, I feel it is so true! Nowadays, the influence of social media not just affects the way we keep in touch with friends, but also help us to update the President’s leading strategies in the future. The President Obama’s Twitter Town Hall is hold by the White House and there are questions selected from the twitter by 8 curators, showing on the screen. President Obama answers these questions. This is a remarkable event, because this is the first time the President of the United Stated answers questions to the public through social media directly.

From my point of view, generally speaking, President Obama’s Twitter Town Hall is a good public relations strategy from the White House. Here are my thoughts:

1. Good Speaker, genuine listener.

From this video, President Obama listened every question carefully and tried to answer them precisely. At some points, this makes the crowd feel that he would like to understand the questions people have in their lives. He also tried to answer each question very precisely.

2. Provide an up to date and good channel for the public to interact with President Obama.

This event provided a good channel for the public to have a chance to ask the President Obama their questions, which reflect the problems in the current society. According to Social Media Today, there are some demographics showing the age of major users of the Twitter is 18-34. The age represents the young generations who engage in participating with discussing public issue in the society. I think the Obama government chose the twitter to communicate with people maybe they are preparing to win some you generation supporters. With using the hot social media in the United Stated, the Obama government also tries to represent a new image of the government that they are open-mined and up-to-date.

There are some questions of the President Obama’s Twitter Town Hall worth to be considered.

1.Why twitter?

I am just curious why the White House choose the Twitter as the medium to communicate with the public. Although I made a research on line and found out it is the widely used social media in the United State. Would it be an official advertisement for the twitter? Why don’t they choose other social media, like Facebook?

2. How they choose the questions

According to the video the Obama’s Twitter Town Hall, just 17 questions are selected and answers. Although these questions are variety, it seems the curators chose these questions from main big cities in the United Stated. I would suggest they could choose the questions from more different city.

3. Too long to answer each question

Each tweet has 140 words limit, so each questions the President Obama answers need to be narrowed down to 140 words. From the video, I could tell that the President Obama tried to answer every question as detailed as possible. However, if in the case, I would suggest the President Obama answer each question shorter, that’s way, he could answer more questions.

Update 07/20/2011

Some thoughts are added after the class on 07/19