Obama's Twitter Town Hall: What Will He Speak About?
President Obama will interacting live with Twitter users Wednesday afternoon in the first-ever White House Twitter town hall.
Starting at 2:00 p.m. ET, Obama will join the cyber-town hall as two gigantic screens inside the east room of the Presidential Office display the conversations in realtime. The event will moderated by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.
During the hour-long event, the president will be fielding questions from followers of the official White House Twitter account. Topics will focus mainly on jobs and the current economy.
The President is known as a pioneer in integrating politics with the ever-expanding social networking trend. The White House has often turned to social networking to reach current and potential party members, including a town hall with the president that was hosted by Facebook earlier this year. Also earlier this month, members of Obama's 2012 campaign team announced that he would be posting his own tweets on the @barackobama Twitter account from time to time.
With more than 8 million followers, Obama's Twitter account is used primarily for his re-election efforts while the @whitehouse account is used for administration news and updates.
Kori Schulman, who is the deputy director of digital content and also the person behind the @whitehouse account, said that their goal is to have more events at the White House so that posters can engage more with senior administration officials and with each other.
To participate in this event Twitter users need to include the hash tag #askObama when posting their question. All questions with this particular hash tag will be included in the selection process. However, for those web users who do not yet have a Twitter account, they can visit http://askobama.twitter.com to sign up and join the discussion.
The event will also be webcast live.